Tag: Ashley

Have you ever actually been grabbed by the pussy? Have you ever felt the pressure of five hungry fingers gripping your body without permission? Has someone ever clutched, squeezed your flesh without warning or consent – someone you know or someone you don’t, a supervisor or a coworker or a client, a smiling face you had wrongly considered a friend? Have you ever been kissed by a mouth that “[didn’t] even wait” for an invitation? Have you found yourself alone with someone who expected you would let them “do anything,” someone who then decided that the most private, sacred parts of you really belonged to them? Has your body ever been the topic of discussion in whispered laughter - your butt, your mouth, your legs, your “big phony tits?” Have you ever listened as a pack of wolves tore that body apart? Did you pause for a moment, trying to decide whether or not you would bear the weight of confrontation once again? And again? And again? And again, did you ask yourself, “Can I just pretend I didn’t hear them this time?”

I am sitting in a concrete classroom. A young professor with thick dark hair and sharply tailored pants stands before the chalkboard. She is smart and beautiful and terrifying. She is everything I hope to be someday, but I am just a bright-eyed freshman, barely eighteen, barely formed. And I am arguing my point. “Never. It should never be legal in any situation.” The room is quiet, and the professor stares at me, eyebrows slightly raised. I have dissented from the crowd, daring to regurgitate that which I’ve been trained to say, things that make sense within my small and simple world. Right now, that world is black and white. I have not yet traveled through the gray.

In a house filled with penises, I am determined to keep my feminist spirit alive. This is not easy. It feels insurmountable some days, especially as my boys age and I find myself shielding my sons’ eyes from all that makes me female while they prance like tiny peacocks on display. These peacocks pee on everything: bathroom walls, linoleum floors, newly laundered beds, porch railings, trees, flowers. These little peacocks mark their territory with sticky urine. And it’s not just them. I let the dog out and watch him lift his leg and spray the earth. He comes back inside, then licks himself loudly, unapologetically.

It all started with Hemingway. Scratch that. It all started 17 years prior with a handful of lies and one night of no after no after no after no into tears into silence. It hadn’t started with Hemingway at all; he just broke it wide open. We left on a Saturday morning with a loose agenda and high hopes. My girlfriends and I stuffed ourselves and our strong feminist leanings into an SUV and headed north. It feels good to head north. We were Hemingway hunting. Michigan natives, we had the good fortune of easy access to the upper reaches of the Lower Peninsula where the rolling hills and pine forests bleed into the cool of a Great Lake, a place that gives space to dreams and fears and harsh realities, a Hemingway haunt.