Cleveland, TX
When I was eleven years old, I had only had sex ed the year before. During recess, I jumped rope or played foursquare with my friends. After school, I would attend play practice; I was nervous because there was a scene where I had to kiss a seventh-grader in front of everyone. When I was eleven, I began getting dropped off at the mall to window-shop with my friends but my dad still took us to Toys R Us once a month to pick something out. When I was eleven, I spent rainy weekends reading Judy Blume and Lois Lowry at the library and sunny weekends riding my bike to the park. I would watch Green Day and Sheryl Crow videos on MTV at one friend’s house and a VHS of Into the Woods, with Bernadette Peters, at another’s. My school picture that year shows me with bangs, a puffy headband, and a cardigan. My favorite snack was cherry Gushers and S’mores Pop Tarts, washed down with Coca Cola. This is what eleven years old looks like.
When I was eleven years old, adult men could be mild-mannered and cerebral, like my father; they could be affable and goofy, like my cousins; they could be quiet and artistic, like my godfather; they could be patient and intelligent, like my third-grade teacher; they could be clever and insightful, like my fifth-grade teacher; they could be generous and openhearted, like my late grandfather. At age eleven, I might have easily believed that all the boys in my class might grow up to be similarly reliable, trustworthy individuals, for the few examples with whom I had been familiar at that point in my life. This is what an adult male should look like to an eleven-year old girl. This is what an adult male should look like to a five-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, a twenty-ear-old, a 34-year-old, a ninety-year-old—male or female.
I hope people realize that what happened in Texas is not a freak isolated incident, but a symptom of everything rotten in our culture in regards to how we treat and view women. This is the whole of that big, fucking ugly beast called Rape Culture, crystallized in a one town’s incident-turned-media-circus. Something like this can happen everywhere. It’s really a slippery slope from this to that, honestly.
Damn. News like this will really make a girl wanna go all Legs Sadovsky on someone. (Incidentally, I read that book when I was eleven, too.)
