The Learning Strategist

(CW: Sexual Assault) If you think all this sexual assault noise everywhere doesn’t impact women, listen the fuck up. I live in a small town, and often grab a coffee near my work. I’ve gradually come to know an elderly woman who’s sometimes at the cafe, too, while I wait for my takeaway. We chat a few times a week, and sometimes I sit with her for a bit. On Friday she was there again, so I sat down in the sun. She seemed a bit distant, and sad, and I asked if she was okay. She said she felt down due to all the media noise about alleged sexual assaults inside Parliament House. She’d seen some of the reporting in the papers, and it stressed her out. I was thinking: maybe she’s just of a generation which doesn’t like talking of such private things. That makes sense. But suddenly (out of the blue) she was crying, telling me about her own rapes. The first, she said, was as a 15-year-old who went to a large urban park with a new boyfriend, and while walking down a quiet tree-lined lane he pushed her into the bushes and raped her. The second was as a 19-year-old who went with a platonic male friend to a party in an apartment, and was gang-raped in a bedroom by 5 other men. She thinks the friend “sold” her for the night to his mates. In both instances, she said, she never told anyone as she willingly went to where it happened and had been taught (as have all older women) that going somewhere freely with a man means you’re at least partly responsible for what happens when you’re there. As I listened to her, my relaxed work break was suddenly dark, and awful. Because I’d been sitting in the sun with a beautifully dressed, beautifully spoken older widow, who was suddenly spilling her guts about terrible things which happened to her six decades ago yet which she remembers as if they were yesterday. Her carefully applied mascara was now running unheeded down her cheeks. I was crying too. Because she said she felt so tortured and helpless hearing about the attacks happening to other women, knowing intimately how this feels. Knowing how it feels to spend the rest of your life being scared of parks, or apartment buildings, or groups of men, or certain smells, sounds or tastes, or of inadvertently being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Again. Most of all, scared to tell anyone, because you know you’ll be ostracised and doubted and hated and denied even your own story, just for doing what everyone’s taught to do from the time they’re toddlers: tell the truth. Unless it’s the truth about rape. Because it isn’t true, is it, that the truth sets us free? Far too often, for women, the truth just fucks us up. There’s no real reason for this tale except to say: you can befriend a lovely frail old lady and have no idea what’s under the surface. You don’t know what she’s been through, or what she’s hiding, or her still-raw pain. This is true for a lot of women of all ages, of course, but somehow it’s more shocking coming from someone who was a young adult at a time we were taught was a more chivalrous, decent, gentle era. Well, no it fucking wasn’t. It’s just that all those polite, thoroughly decent old women never told, and virtually nobody would’ve believed them if they did. They (and nearly all of us as women) carry those scars around so men don’t have to. So men can continue the sweet delusion that everything was better when men were men and women didn’t carry on with this ridiculous #MeToo bullshit. So people (mostly men) can say on the internet that when the women of Australia aren’t safe in our own workplaces, we should just shut the fuck up. Suck it up, princesses. Well, not on our fucking watch. Our mothers and grandmothers are watching what we do now, and we won’t fail them as they were so often failed. Thanks for trusting me with your story, dear D. I hope I was able to comfort you a little. You’ve motivated me to keep going with this fight, and hopefully I can motivate others to go on, too. #ToYourBrooms