I've been having a discussion on my Facebook page about certain things that one of my friends is on the opposite side of the fence about, as he is a Republican and a fundamentalist Christian. I am a Democrat and as Pagan as they come, even though I was raised in the Catholic faith.
The discussion lately has been entirely about North Carolina's Republican governor, who recently signed a bill into law that doesn't allow a transgender person to enter a bathroom that is for the "opposite sex" from what their birth certificate identifies them as. His stance is that this is entirely to protect women and children, my stance is that, unless you have someone standing at the door insisting that they look down your trousers, this "public restroom police" measure protects no one (and there was a video posted recently in which a woman, with shorter hair and looking somewhat masculine, was "escorted" out of the bathroom because she refused to pull out an id to prove her sex even though several friends were shouting "She's a woman" at the male officers who came in to escort her out).
Of course, my stance comes from a relationship that Alanis Morrisette covers in her song "Hands Clean", from which I took my title for today's blog post, and the relationship I had directly after that in which my sexual partner WOULD have claimed to be transgender for the sake of following me into the woman's bathroom so he could keep his eye on me....
This stanza in the Alanis song (which plays over the speakers at my workplace at least twice each shift) reminds me of my first relationship:
"Ooh this could be messy
But you don't seem to mind
Ooh don't go telling everybody
And overlook this supposed crime"
The man this brings to my mind was 19 when we first met and I was 14. I had long greasy hair, acne, and wore glasses that I hated. He was very handsome (and knew it), had family money and, as I learned in later years, he liked virgins, but not to have a relationship with after he got the virginity he so coveted....
He courted me until I was 16 and gave in to his desires, the whole time insisting that we not even tell friends who saw us together that we were "boyfriend and girlfriend". He encouraged me to cut my hair (which also helped clean up my skin) and stop wearing my glasses except to read (which my eye doctor eventually allowed), which made other men start to pay attention, then he dropped me like a hot potato the minute he got what he wanted, only talking to me twice after that: once when I missed my period and he thought he was going to have to come clean and "do right by the baby" (it was a false alarm and he disappeared as soon as that was confirmed) and once after he'd been in a severe accident in California, when he wanted to "apologize for all wrongs" just in case he was about to meet his maker. (He admitted to doing the same thing he did to me to no less than 20 other girls..jerk.)
Needless to say, my "first boyfriend" left me in a mental stew, blaming myself for "leading him on", thinking I was totally evil, and as such, I needed to be punished....
Enter boyfriend #2, who was actually a friend of one of my cousins (or so she said when she introduced us) who was into theater, as I was in those early days of college. He claimed that he wanted to help me to adjust to the college theater, as I entered during the spring semester of 1980 and he had been attending since the fall of 1979. We had one official date during which he got some liquor (we were both under the legal age at the time), we got drunk, and I allowed a sexual encounter...
Looking back even a week later, I was fully aware that I'd made a mistake, because in HIS mind, once we had sex, I belonged to him. He kept insisting that we were going to drop out of college, get married, and move to a place in Oklahoma that his uncle had given him in good ole uncle's will (even though Unk was still alive at the time, so we would be sharing the farm for a time). When I insisted that no, I was going to finish college, and no, I didn't want to move clear across the US and be that far from family and friends, and especially NO, I wasn't going to marry this guy just because we'd done the nasty, he started stalking me everywhere....
I was in an all girls dorm, so men weren't allowed on the upper two floors before 10 a.m., so I would head down to breakfast before my 8 a.m. history class and he would be sitting in the lobby, waiting on me. Despite my objections, he would "escort" me to breakfast, where he insisted that I needed to drink a glass of milk ("because women need calcium to prevent osteoarthritis later in life"), then he'd "escort" me to class, and he'd be waiting when I came out (at which point, I'd be feeling odd, as if I'd eaten something not quite right) to "escort" me back to my room. Often, I would settle down to have a nap until I felt better and awake - sometimes hours later - in HIS dorm room, wondering how I had come to be there, and whenever I tried to go to the ladies bathroom in the next section of dorm rooms, he would force me into the men's room in his section because "you're too drunk to go by yourself", at which time he raped me if I was unable to get the door shut and locked first....
A friend from my dorm started to pay better attention than I did to when I would start feeling ill each morning, and a few weeks later, when he insisted that I have a second glass of milk despite having got myself one (which he always went and got when I couldn't watch him), and when he brought the milk back to the table, she "accidentally" bumped him, causing him to dump the entire glass of milk down his front. He went more ballistic than a simple drenching with milk should have caused, so when he got escorted out to go and change his clothes, my friend insisted that we bail - FAST - and then she proceeded to explain to me, as we went toward a friends room in another dorm than where we lived, why she thought he was putting something in my drinks.....
She started us off on an all night party that went from one dorm room to another, re-introduced me at one point in these "knock knock - the party is in YOUR room" proceedings to the man I would eventually marry, and, at some point, convinced me that I needed to get this fellow away from me before he made me overdose on whatever he was feeding me in my drinks.
This all happened the last night before we went away for spring break - at which time, I had a miscarriage of a baby that I never even knew I was carrying, because whatever was being put in my drink had resulted in several unprotected sexual encounters with this man who was so determined he was going to convince me to marry him. Needless to say, the miscarriage gave me the incentive to go to his room as soon as I returned to campus - at which point, there was a masculine voice and a feminine voice whispering in the dorm room, so I went to the local pub to grab a bite to eat and ran into my stalker's roomie - who listened to my tale, turned white as a sheet, and offered to go back with me to face down his roomie. When we got back to the room, it smelled like someone had recently had sex, but was empty, and the roomie opened a drawer in my stalker's desk to pull out several baggies that had the word "roofie" on it. (I had never heard of Rufenal until the roomie explained what this was, and with his help, we gathered up all the little baggies in the drawer and walked down the hall to flush them down the toilet in the men's bathroom - my thought being that we had never been interrupted while he was raping me here, why should anyone come in when the roomie and I were just flushing all the toilets over and over?)
Suffice to say, I was still waiting for him with all his little empty baggies in my pocket when he finally got back to his dorm, insisting that I was "mad about nothing" when I told him about hearing whispers when I first knocked on his door because "my roomie was entertaining someone". (I let him go for a while before informing him that the roomie was at the pub, and helped me come back to dump his stash of "date rape drugs". That was when he finally started to panic, going through several "secret hiding spots" that his roomie and I had already emptied.)
When it finally sunk in that he had no more drugs to feed me, he got an air of superiority, insisting that I was too late. He had already had unprotected sex with me, and had collected some urine from one of those nights when I was too drugged to notice, so he KNEW I was pregnant and would be forced to marry him....
That's when I broke the news about the miscarriage and he made the mistake of slapping me across the face for "ruining everything by having an abortion". I still don't know whether I hit him with just my hand or something I grabbed from nearby, as I was seeing red at the time, but suffice to say that, when I came back to being in charge of my temper, he was sitting on the floor with a broken nose, staring at me like I'd grown another head while I told him that he could STOP bringing me drugged milk at every meal or go to jail, as I was going to turn any further drinks or food he tried to force on me in to the campus police and turned on my heel to walk out.....
Suffice to say, it's been 36 years since that encounter, and I've heard from college friends that he insisted he'd been in a fist fight with a man to end up with his broken nose. I think back and wish I'd had the common sense to bring his baggies of drugs to the police instead of letting his roomie convince me to flush them. And I think about the lack of confidence that made me go out on a date and "give up the goods" that first night, stemming from Mr. Secret Relationship and the way he made me feel totally useless because of how he treated me.
It's taken a lot of time for me to become self-confident in myself and my own worth, and as my friends on Facebook insist that "not having trans-sexuals allowed in public restrooms" is going to "protect our women and children", OBVIOUSLY you didn't have someone rape you in a public bathroom in the 80's. OBVIOUSLY the ones who are going to take advantage of the ability to claim they're trans to get into a ladies room AREN'T going to be hindered by a law, as they already have been breaking the law for decades, as there will ALWAYS be men who think that women are only here for one thing, and that one thing is to make men happy no matter WHAT the man decides is going to make him happy.
Frankly, people, I expect that the same type of men who let me be in a men's bathroom in a college dorm without turning me in to the campus police still exist, and as long as we all bury our heads in the sand and pretend that some words on paper, drafted in some hallowed hall where the truth never comes to light, is going to "protect our women and children", we will NEVER take the steps to make ALL humans equal with equal rights.
*stepping down off my soap box so that others can come and make comments, whether they agree with what I've written or want to tell me that I'm nothing more than a sex toy for all the men of the world*
The discussion lately has been entirely about North Carolina's Republican governor, who recently signed a bill into law that doesn't allow a transgender person to enter a bathroom that is for the "opposite sex" from what their birth certificate identifies them as. His stance is that this is entirely to protect women and children, my stance is that, unless you have someone standing at the door insisting that they look down your trousers, this "public restroom police" measure protects no one (and there was a video posted recently in which a woman, with shorter hair and looking somewhat masculine, was "escorted" out of the bathroom because she refused to pull out an id to prove her sex even though several friends were shouting "She's a woman" at the male officers who came in to escort her out).
Of course, my stance comes from a relationship that Alanis Morrisette covers in her song "Hands Clean", from which I took my title for today's blog post, and the relationship I had directly after that in which my sexual partner WOULD have claimed to be transgender for the sake of following me into the woman's bathroom so he could keep his eye on me....
This stanza in the Alanis song (which plays over the speakers at my workplace at least twice each shift) reminds me of my first relationship:
"Ooh this could be messy
But you don't seem to mind
Ooh don't go telling everybody
And overlook this supposed crime"
The man this brings to my mind was 19 when we first met and I was 14. I had long greasy hair, acne, and wore glasses that I hated. He was very handsome (and knew it), had family money and, as I learned in later years, he liked virgins, but not to have a relationship with after he got the virginity he so coveted....
He courted me until I was 16 and gave in to his desires, the whole time insisting that we not even tell friends who saw us together that we were "boyfriend and girlfriend". He encouraged me to cut my hair (which also helped clean up my skin) and stop wearing my glasses except to read (which my eye doctor eventually allowed), which made other men start to pay attention, then he dropped me like a hot potato the minute he got what he wanted, only talking to me twice after that: once when I missed my period and he thought he was going to have to come clean and "do right by the baby" (it was a false alarm and he disappeared as soon as that was confirmed) and once after he'd been in a severe accident in California, when he wanted to "apologize for all wrongs" just in case he was about to meet his maker. (He admitted to doing the same thing he did to me to no less than 20 other girls..jerk.)
Needless to say, my "first boyfriend" left me in a mental stew, blaming myself for "leading him on", thinking I was totally evil, and as such, I needed to be punished....
Enter boyfriend #2, who was actually a friend of one of my cousins (or so she said when she introduced us) who was into theater, as I was in those early days of college. He claimed that he wanted to help me to adjust to the college theater, as I entered during the spring semester of 1980 and he had been attending since the fall of 1979. We had one official date during which he got some liquor (we were both under the legal age at the time), we got drunk, and I allowed a sexual encounter...
Looking back even a week later, I was fully aware that I'd made a mistake, because in HIS mind, once we had sex, I belonged to him. He kept insisting that we were going to drop out of college, get married, and move to a place in Oklahoma that his uncle had given him in good ole uncle's will (even though Unk was still alive at the time, so we would be sharing the farm for a time). When I insisted that no, I was going to finish college, and no, I didn't want to move clear across the US and be that far from family and friends, and especially NO, I wasn't going to marry this guy just because we'd done the nasty, he started stalking me everywhere....
I was in an all girls dorm, so men weren't allowed on the upper two floors before 10 a.m., so I would head down to breakfast before my 8 a.m. history class and he would be sitting in the lobby, waiting on me. Despite my objections, he would "escort" me to breakfast, where he insisted that I needed to drink a glass of milk ("because women need calcium to prevent osteoarthritis later in life"), then he'd "escort" me to class, and he'd be waiting when I came out (at which point, I'd be feeling odd, as if I'd eaten something not quite right) to "escort" me back to my room. Often, I would settle down to have a nap until I felt better and awake - sometimes hours later - in HIS dorm room, wondering how I had come to be there, and whenever I tried to go to the ladies bathroom in the next section of dorm rooms, he would force me into the men's room in his section because "you're too drunk to go by yourself", at which time he raped me if I was unable to get the door shut and locked first....
A friend from my dorm started to pay better attention than I did to when I would start feeling ill each morning, and a few weeks later, when he insisted that I have a second glass of milk despite having got myself one (which he always went and got when I couldn't watch him), and when he brought the milk back to the table, she "accidentally" bumped him, causing him to dump the entire glass of milk down his front. He went more ballistic than a simple drenching with milk should have caused, so when he got escorted out to go and change his clothes, my friend insisted that we bail - FAST - and then she proceeded to explain to me, as we went toward a friends room in another dorm than where we lived, why she thought he was putting something in my drinks.....
She started us off on an all night party that went from one dorm room to another, re-introduced me at one point in these "knock knock - the party is in YOUR room" proceedings to the man I would eventually marry, and, at some point, convinced me that I needed to get this fellow away from me before he made me overdose on whatever he was feeding me in my drinks.
This all happened the last night before we went away for spring break - at which time, I had a miscarriage of a baby that I never even knew I was carrying, because whatever was being put in my drink had resulted in several unprotected sexual encounters with this man who was so determined he was going to convince me to marry him. Needless to say, the miscarriage gave me the incentive to go to his room as soon as I returned to campus - at which point, there was a masculine voice and a feminine voice whispering in the dorm room, so I went to the local pub to grab a bite to eat and ran into my stalker's roomie - who listened to my tale, turned white as a sheet, and offered to go back with me to face down his roomie. When we got back to the room, it smelled like someone had recently had sex, but was empty, and the roomie opened a drawer in my stalker's desk to pull out several baggies that had the word "roofie" on it. (I had never heard of Rufenal until the roomie explained what this was, and with his help, we gathered up all the little baggies in the drawer and walked down the hall to flush them down the toilet in the men's bathroom - my thought being that we had never been interrupted while he was raping me here, why should anyone come in when the roomie and I were just flushing all the toilets over and over?)
Suffice to say, I was still waiting for him with all his little empty baggies in my pocket when he finally got back to his dorm, insisting that I was "mad about nothing" when I told him about hearing whispers when I first knocked on his door because "my roomie was entertaining someone". (I let him go for a while before informing him that the roomie was at the pub, and helped me come back to dump his stash of "date rape drugs". That was when he finally started to panic, going through several "secret hiding spots" that his roomie and I had already emptied.)
When it finally sunk in that he had no more drugs to feed me, he got an air of superiority, insisting that I was too late. He had already had unprotected sex with me, and had collected some urine from one of those nights when I was too drugged to notice, so he KNEW I was pregnant and would be forced to marry him....
That's when I broke the news about the miscarriage and he made the mistake of slapping me across the face for "ruining everything by having an abortion". I still don't know whether I hit him with just my hand or something I grabbed from nearby, as I was seeing red at the time, but suffice to say that, when I came back to being in charge of my temper, he was sitting on the floor with a broken nose, staring at me like I'd grown another head while I told him that he could STOP bringing me drugged milk at every meal or go to jail, as I was going to turn any further drinks or food he tried to force on me in to the campus police and turned on my heel to walk out.....
Suffice to say, it's been 36 years since that encounter, and I've heard from college friends that he insisted he'd been in a fist fight with a man to end up with his broken nose. I think back and wish I'd had the common sense to bring his baggies of drugs to the police instead of letting his roomie convince me to flush them. And I think about the lack of confidence that made me go out on a date and "give up the goods" that first night, stemming from Mr. Secret Relationship and the way he made me feel totally useless because of how he treated me.
It's taken a lot of time for me to become self-confident in myself and my own worth, and as my friends on Facebook insist that "not having trans-sexuals allowed in public restrooms" is going to "protect our women and children", OBVIOUSLY you didn't have someone rape you in a public bathroom in the 80's. OBVIOUSLY the ones who are going to take advantage of the ability to claim they're trans to get into a ladies room AREN'T going to be hindered by a law, as they already have been breaking the law for decades, as there will ALWAYS be men who think that women are only here for one thing, and that one thing is to make men happy no matter WHAT the man decides is going to make him happy.
Frankly, people, I expect that the same type of men who let me be in a men's bathroom in a college dorm without turning me in to the campus police still exist, and as long as we all bury our heads in the sand and pretend that some words on paper, drafted in some hallowed hall where the truth never comes to light, is going to "protect our women and children", we will NEVER take the steps to make ALL humans equal with equal rights.
*stepping down off my soap box so that others can come and make comments, whether they agree with what I've written or want to tell me that I'm nothing more than a sex toy for all the men of the world*
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