Fall 2017 began the first waves of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Survivors, mostly female, finding the strength to publically warn the world about the terrible things their attackers had done filled me with such joy and hope.
Yet the uncovering of each new famous sexual predator brought back vivid and terrible memories. Their accounts of the violence they experience set off flashbulb memories in my mind; tiny vivid relapses in which I can feel my brother’s hands again and smell his breath.
It started with an innocent enough question, the answer to which led me into a decade of hell that still affects my daily life: “Do you know where babies come from?” My brother snapped the locks on my dad’s leather briefcase with a long screwdriver and stole a small stash of pornography which he used to lure me into a carefully planned trap. The first stage was looking at the illicit images, the second was discussing and decoding their meaning, and the third was crossing a line from the hypothetical into actual touching.
If the story had ended there I wouldn’t be writing this now, but these events were actually the first campaign in a war on my personhood that was conducted to systematically destroy my sense of self-worth, my autonomy, and my ability to identify abuse for what it was.
After a few weeks, he had eased me into feeling comfortable with touching and being touched. He carefully reassured me every time I said I was scared, warned me that if our mother and father found out they would be very angry with me, and used the words “we” and “us” so that I would feel complicit in all of this.
When those tactics failed to work, my brother employed the tool that he would turn to most often until I became a teenager: sheer brutality. I can’t recall the first time I finally worked up the courage to say “no,” but I remember being beaten as a result. I’m not using that term lightly but rather describing instances where I was pummeled and pounded, choked and dragged, my clothes torn from my small body, which was left covered in cuts and bruises.
I vividly recall one occasion in which my brother chased me around the house with a wicked looking kitchen knife. At the age of eight or nine years old, I kept saying over and over in my mind, “This is it. He’s finally going to kill me. This is the end.” I hyperventilated. My vision grayed at the edges, and bright tiny spots of light popped into view like sparklers from the Fourth of July. My brother stopped chasing me, apparently recalling something he had seen on television, and fished an old brown paper bag from a kitchen drawer. He held it over my nose and mouth so my ragged breaths would inflate and deflate the wrinkled surface that smelled faintly of bananas from lunches past. Once the whistling sound in my lungs died down, and I began to breathe normally, he calmly walked across the room, retrieved his knife, and began to chase me again.
Another night he knocked me to the floor and knelt on my chest. Using his shins to hold me down and his hands to pin my wrists, he battered my face with the tips of his kneecaps. I felt my skull bouncing off the floor over and over again. I passed out repeatedly. When my parents came back from wherever they had been, my dad walked me into the bathroom to wash off my bloody nose, and I looked up at the mirrored cabinets over the sink. My eyes no longer had any white left in them. Both were giant monstrous red stop signs of warning and alarm.
One night while my mom was at work, I finally summoned the courage to use the word I had finally grasped about our relationship. I stood, defiantly, chest puffed out and said, “You’re nothing but a BULLY.” “What did you call me?” he asked, shaking with rage. “A bully,” I said, realizing that there was power in the truth of that word. “You hurt me to scare me and to make me do what you want.” With a strength I didn’t know he even possessed, my brother lifted me by an ankle like Achilles’ mother and carried me dangling to the giant recliner that my dad always sat in. He jammed my foot into the scissor mechanism and slammed it closed. The collapsing metal tore a slice of flesh off the side of my foot that left me immediately soaked through my white t-shirt and underwear in my own blood. Frightened of my screams and the amount of bleeding, he let me drag myself into my parents’ bedroom to wake my father, who groggily pulled me into the bathroom to bandage my bleeding foot and throw away the coagulating shirt. “I have to work in the morning,” my father growled. “I wish you guys wouldn’t misbehave like this.”
Someone reading these accounts who hasn’t been abused will ask the victim-blaming question everyone seems to ask: “Why didn’t you tell someone?” as if the responsibility was on me, as a child from the age before first grade through to my teenage years, to navigate the complexities of the situation and find the solution myself.
While my brother was only four years older, he was a master at manipulating my feelings to make me take responsibility for each incident. Somehow I inspired either his lust or his rage or both simultaneously. Somehow if I had acted or dressed or spoken differently, none of these things would have been done to me. Like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky, his demeanor would change the moment he thought he might be caught. I’ll never forget the day he had me pinned down, pounding my face with a clenched fist, when we heard the crunch of tires on loose stone that indicated my parents were pulling into the driveway.
Instantly he hugged me, begged for forgiveness, and swore that he’d never ever hurt me again. When my dad walked into the house and saw my face, he immediately asked what had happened. Assuming I had some kind of bruise, I explained that I had fallen and hit my face on the wooden part of an armchair in the living room (unknowingly referencing the “doorknob” excuse used by battered wives for decades). My dad dragged me in front of a mirror and gestured to four perfect purple dots that had begun to swell and close my right eye and said with disgust, “Chair arms don’t leave knuckle prints.”
Despite my brother twisting my love and fear of him to ensure my silence, all the signs were there, if my parents had just been willing to see. And yet they didn’t, and still don’t, want to see him for what he is: a person capable of using cunning and brutality to victimize a child.
As we grew older the sexual component diminished gradually, and the violence increased. Eventually bloody noses and black eyes were my biggest daily concern. The day of school pictures when I was sixteen years old, I sat in the hallway while a girl from my class used her own makeup to cover the black eye he had given me that morning. He was in college at that point and had beaten me because I refused to make his lunch before he drove me to school.
Later that summer I began to lift weights. I bulked up enough that I became physically imposing. He came after me, and I planted a kick squarely on the nerve ganglia near his knee, dropping him to the floor howling in pain. With that single kick, I closed the chapter on a decade of sexual and physical terrorism.
All of these memories are with me in my daily life, accompanied by feelings of guilt and fear and anxiety that have never left. This year I will turn 40, but somewhere inside me is a broken six-year-old boy in torn underwear with a bleeding nose.
The reason I’m writing today is because I feel the need to do my part in this movement, to join my voice in that chorus of courageous women who have found the heart to face the skepticism and blame that society heaps on victims who come forward. Women who are told by a world that loves the abusers (often men of great talent and charisma) that if they had only walked away, worn different clothes, fought back, carried a gun, or just plain not been there in the first place, they might never have been abused by the men who victimized them.
And when the world isn’t blaming these victims, it is discrediting them for not having spoken up sooner. “Why did they wait so long to say something?” is a question that fills social media with each new accusation that comes to light.
My brother played in the church worship team for years. He taught Spanish at my school and went on missionary trips paid for by the entire congregation. There wasn’t a single teacher who didn’t at some point ask me why I couldn’t be more like my brother. The same teachers saw me come to school with bruises, black eyes, and torn clothes but knew deep down that I was responsible for these things. Given a choice between my quietly killing myself or facing the truth that my brother was a violent sex offender, I had no doubts that every adult in my life would prefer the former, and so I never spoke up either.
What most people don’t understand about sexual abuse is that even when the abuser’s hands are no longer on you, their work continues. They return to rape you again and again in your dreams. In some dreams, you are powerless to stop them, and they laugh as you punch them ineffectively or run like your legs are submerged in molasses. In other dreams you turn the tables and exact brutal and visceral revenge. Sometimes those nightmares are worse, because you awaken in the terror of having become the monster, bathed in the blood and gore of your victimizer without remorse.
When I go out into the world there is a muted neon sign above my head: “Former Victim Here.” Sometimes it attracts people who want to protect and nurture me, like my wife; other times new predators are drawn to that flickering light like mayflies at a gas station. I can never tell which type of person I am dealing with because I can’t trust anyone. Brutality has always called itself love, and I will never know if I am doomed until it’s too late. The best I can often hope for is that the person victimizing me just wants my money, my time, or my resources, and will only leave me feeling gullible, not physically violated.
But there is an essential truth that the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are missing. The voices raised in righteous outrage cannot only be those of women. As long as heterosexual, cis-gendered men sit by the sidelines letting women expose themselves to ridicule for calling out sexual predators, the world will continue to believe that victimization can somehow be avoided. The narrative will continue that women are assaulted and raped because they are weaker, more naïve, needy of attention, or that the sheer quality of being feminine somehow makes one a victim.
The statistics might seem to support this idea, because while roughly one in seven women will report having been sexually assaulted, men report assault at nearly one in twenty-five. But, given my experience in life, I wonder if that means that men are genuinely assaulted less often, or are we more afraid to face the stigma of weakness and victim blaming (a stigma we often perpetuate for our own gain and are therefore well acquainted with), and so we say nothing. In order to change the perception of abuse victims as somehow “asking for it,” more men are going to have to find the courage to face the firing squad of social disapproval and stand shoulder to shoulder with our sisters-in-arms. We are going to have to admit that we were assaulted not because we were weak, wore the wrong clothes, or said the wrong things but rather because the monsters who victimize other human beings for personal pleasure don’t actually care what we say, do, or wear.
We have to dispel the myth that human beings should somehow be on guard every minute of every day or that vulnerability is the same as weakness. Because all of us, whether due to youth, old age, illness, or inexperience will at some point be vulnerable, and I would rather live in a society that protects the vulnerable and safeguards them from harm than a society that blames them for the predations of others.
And so here I am, stepping into the line of fire, lifting my voice with hundreds and thousands of those women who have ruined their careers and been ridiculed for speaking truth in the face of social and legal retribution. I am shining a light on the darkest corners of my childhood, bearing literal scars and wounds for the world to see. I am saying that sexual abuse happens to #MenToo. I am saying to Brian Roma, who victimized me for a decade of my life, “Your #TimesUp.”