Eleven
Boys will be boys...
Is eleven too young to be sexually assaulted for the first time? Is it ok to call it sexual assault? Why does it feel like I’m being overdramatic or exaggerating? Why do I try to minimize the repeated violations of my body throughout the years and try to make my brain accept it as just a normal part of being female?
It’s the dichotomy I’ve spent my life wrestling with as a girl and woman since the age of eleven. Sex is good. Sex is bad. Boys love you, but boys also hate you. Boys can keep you safe, except when they don’t. You should say no, but don’t be surprised if no one listens. Your body belongs to you… but it also belongs to men and boys who want to touch it, or gawk at it, or make comments about it. After all, they can’t control themselves, that’s your job. Make sure they don’t want you, but also make sure they do want you, because you need to get married and have children someday.
That’s what makes what happened at the innocent age of eleven so confusing, even now. I was eleven when my breasts started developing. A part of me was so excited to become a woman and look like the women around me that I admired and respected. It was both terrifying and exciting to shave my legs and wear a real bra for the first time. But it also brought attention to me and my body. Attention I both wanted and didn’t want. Confusion. Shame.
The boys at school thought it was a game. That is how it started. Wrap the girls with the jump ropes they were playing with, push them in the boy’s bathroom, unclasp their bras, touch their breasts and buttocks and leave them crying on the bathroom floor, wet with tears and trying to both unravel the jump ropes that held them hostage as well as the feelings and emotions coursing through their developing minds and bodies. I knew the inside of the boy’s bathroom well. I felt the cold, dirty, green tile against my body, felt the groping hands, smelled the reek of body odor and stale urine. Felt the confusion, the shame, the helplessness, the anger. Once I stood up to one of the boys, he punched me in the face at recess. The playground attendant merely made him apologize. I never accepted his apology, he wasn’t sorry. Another boy lived down the street, he whistled at me when my dad and I were walking the dog. I yelled at him to “shut up”. My dad told me the boy just thought I was cute and made me apologize because I was being rude. I apologized, but this time I wasn’t sorry. Why should I feel sorry? Wasn’t whistling rude? Should I feel flattered when boys whistled at me? I didn’t feel flattered inside, I felt angry and scared.
I was eleven when I had the courage to confess what was happening to my mom. Eleven when the school principal told my mom “Boys will be boys.” I was eleven and filled with anger, anger and fear that made my stomach churn every morning before school. My heart raced walking by the boys at school. I was always scared. I wore pants a lot, skirts were not safe, undoubtedly a group of boys would know the color of your underwear by the end of the day. I spent a lot of time at recess in the girl’s bathroom, locked in a stall, standing on the toilet so no one would know I was there. It was often the only refuge, but only sometimes. The boys were always ready to run into the girls’ bathroom and peak under the stalls when no one was looking. A girl always had to be on guard. There was no safety. Who did my body belong to anyway?
Soon my stomach hurt all the time, and I stopped eating regularly. Maybe I could stop my body from changing, maybe I would become invisible and then no one would want to touch me. Unfortunately, at age eleven I failed to realize I was already invisible, the world already didn’t see me, but at the same time I could never disappear. It’s why age eleven is only the first time I was sexually assaulted, but unfortunately not the last…