Bad Men

And their insatiable need to control everything

The phone rang at the same time every day. As soon as I’d changed from my pleated, plaid Catholic school jumper into cut-off shorts and a t-shirt, his voice was on the other end.

“Did you touch yourself today?”

I was eight, the quintessential latchkey kid. I held the yellow phone receiver in my hand, wrapped the cord nervously around my fingers.

“This morning? While you were getting ready for school?”

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t hang up, either. I was frozen on the other end, held in the moment with fear and a heavy sense of dread, shame, and embarrassment. At eight years old, I didn’t have the words “fuck off” in my vocabulary (and my mom would be appalled if I did), so I stayed on the phone and listened to him breathe.

“Do you want to touch yourself now?”

Eventually, I hung up, hands shaking, even though it seemed so rude to end a conversation without saying a proper goodbye. My small rebellion.

This was the same year my mom’s underwear went missing. We had gone out—Mom, Carrie, and I—for an evening cook-out with friends, and after we came home, Mom discovered that all her bras and panties were gone. Not her jewelry. Not her record collection. Just her underwear. There were no signs of forced entry, so she assumed it was our new apartment manager—the creepy one with full access to our lives via his master key. Of course, she didn’t discuss this theory with me or my sister, but I was well-versed in the subtle art of spying on conversations with her trusted friends.

Of course, I never told her about my daily phone calls, the grown man’s heavy, ragged breath. I didn’t understand then what was happening on the other end of the phone. I do now.

My somewhat feral childhood was filled with bad men saying and doing things that good men would never consider saying or doing. And some of those bad men were just bad boys, in training to be bad men. They’d flash their small dicks at me, eager for a reaction. They’d pee on my chewing gum; ride their bikes over my shins as I laid prone in the grass, spotting teddy bears and dinosaurs in the clouds; dismantle the “clubhouse” I’d carefully built with old boxes in the field behind our apartment complex; laugh at me for choking on the stolen cigarettes they made me smoke.

Of course, I was at the mercy of so many boys and men because the one man I really wanted in my life had left shortly after I entered this world. Without my dad to help raise and support us, my mom had to work three jobs to keep food on our table and knock-off Zips on my feet. Like so many latchkey kids in the 70s and 80s, my situation left me vulnerable to bad men with bad intentions. I was easy prey, and they were predators.

They knew who I was—a girl who would not tell. A girl who would not rock the boat. A girl who would survive whatever they inflicted upon me.

And so, there were catcalls and phone calls and subtle innuendos from men who should have known better. And two years after the phone calls ended, there was a neighbor who taught me how to give a blowjob described as a “special kiss.”

If you look in the dictionary under the word “acquiesce,” there is a picture of little me. I did not yet understand that I had a voice. That I could say no. That I could run. Instead, I stayed. I obeyed. I did what I thought was expected of me. And I curled up in the safety of my mom’s lap once she was home from work, breathing in the stress of her day and laying all my trauma and fear at her weary feet. Silently.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s meant hiding under our school desks in staged preparation for the big bomb. It meant eating Fruity Pebbles while reading the backs of 2% milk cartons, memorizing the faces of missing children in case we ran into them on the street. I wanted to save those milk carton kids, so I remembered every feature of their small, smiling faces. I wanted to bring them back to the safe arms of their families. I understood too well what waited for them in the dark corners of the world where bad men lurked in the shadows, and sometimes even in broad daylight.

When I was in college, a knife-wielding stranger raped me in my university apartment while framed faces of my friends and family watched from their end tables and bookcases. He told me, casually, that night that he might kill me. So I stayed silent and still. I did not run. I did not fight. I survived instead.

“And remember that I always can,” he said menacingly as he left me there, bloodied and battered on the dirty carpet.

But I already knew that.

I already knew what bad men were capable of.

I don’t tell you these things to garner sympathy or invite pity. They are distant memories now, a part of my past that will always remain. Take these experiences away, and my life becomes a Swiss cheese existence. These are the things that made me. And I like who I’ve become. I tell you these stories because this world is filled with bad men who do bad things, and we must no longer acquiesce.

We currently live in a nation where a woman’s worth is measured not by her intelligence or her ambition or her kind heart or her gentle hands, but by her ability to procreate. Men are in control of our bodies. Men have always been in control of our bodies. Name one law that restricts what a man is able to do with his body.

Just one.

I’ll wait.

You might say that men are not allowed to rape, and technically, that is true. But the punishment for rape in the United States is far more lenient than the punishment for being raped and/or for becoming pregnant. Women are bleeding out in parking lots because they can’t get the healthcare they need. They are dying from being denied basic, lifesaving procedures. Laws are being floated that suggest women should be charged with homicide for obtaining an abortion.

Look at our current administration—chock full of the worst of the manosphere—and how they are tearing our country apart piece by piece. The bad men (and a few bad women—who might even be worse when you consider that special kind of gender treason) are taking away women’s autonomy and bodily rights. They are stealing money from the poorest among us to make themselves richer. They are disappearing human beings—literally kidnapping them off the street—and sending them to gulags in El Salvador. They are attacking our institutions of higher education; denying the contributions of women and minorities to this country; erasing the transgender community; undermining our teachers, our scientists, our doctors; shutting down our museums, our libraries, our safe spaces.

Why? Because an uneducated, disengaged population is easier to control. To pillage. To plunder.

Those without a voice cannot shout their opposition.

Those who are bullied and scared and shoved into silence will not make a fuss.

These bad men take and take and take some more. They are insatiable in their greed and their need to control and dominate. In their power grab. Their evil is empowered, rewarded. They say what they want. Take what they want. And they want everything.

Eight-year-old me understands.

But fifty-five year old me also understands the price we pay for staying quiet and letting ourselves be taken. It makes for smooth sailing in the moment, but when all that trauma eventually surfaces, it can rip your world from end to end.

At some point, the body remembers.

At some point, the brain must reconcile.

Bad men—and the people who enable and empower them—are counting on our silence. They are betting on their ability to bully us into acquiescence. I, for one, have settled my silence dues. They were a far heftier expense than I expected—paid in therapy visits and broken relationships and sleepless nights and bargains made with a god I stopped believing in long ago. Our girls, this country’s women, we deserve better. We deserve more. We deserve to own our voices and our bodies and our gentle hearts and our strong spines.

I didn’t know saying “fuck off” was an option when I was eight, but I am screaming it from the rooftops now. A big, hearty, robust, and passionate FUCK OFF to the bad men who continue to stand on our necks, to claim control of our bodies, to take what is not and never was theirs.

You cannot have me. You cannot have my daughter. You cannot have my sisters, my aunts, my cousins, the memory of my mom, my future granddaughters, my female friends and lovers. We are not yours for the taking. We never were.