What I Need Defending From

"The most dangerous people can be the ones we sleep beside."

One executive order, called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” instructs the federal government to remove “all radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms.

"As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” the president said during his inaugural address."
Guardian article, January 20, 2025

What do I need defending from, as a woman? I'm so glad you asked. Allow me to pull up alongside you with a lifetime of anecdotes (which are never taken as proof, as you know). I hope you've got a few days to listen.

It is men who have framed my life with fear, with constriction, with their own ideas for what joy means, for their evasion and denial of the potential for joy. For their every critique of my human body.

Let’s start in a chilly fall Arlington, Va., suburb, while I was in fifth grade, wearing my orange belt and standing at alert on School Safety Patrol. This was the early 80s, Reagan-era. I started as a crossing guard. Then in sixth grade, I moved up to become an Indoor Patrol, a highly coveted position because you did not have to stand outside in the cold, yet you still got hot chocolate. I was then miraculously promoted to Front Door Patrol: when students lined up to enter the building, it was my job to make sure they behaved. I was drunk with power. It was glorious.

Then one day I found myself demoted to an empty stairwell. Christy Jordan made a point of swishing by and explaining in her taunting voice that our patrol captain, Paul Crunmi, had asked her to “go with” him. She had declined his romantic overture but accepted his offer to make her Front Door Patrol.

One of those lavish blondes at age 12, Christy was a siren, and I was, I dunno, just a skinny girl-person with brown hair. I'd had a hard crush on Paul Crunmi, despite the fact he was a foot shorter than me. And so I got my first taste of being pitted against another woman and felt my sense of merit warp like a plastic Tupperware container accidentally left to melt atop a toaster oven.

Back then, I was skinny in a not-chic way. Jagged and elbowy. And it was a complicated time for teenage hair styles; our hair rituals required waking at dawn to shower and wash our hair, blow-dry it, and then tame it into submission with hairspray and curling irons. I would get perms for my already wavy hair and wonder what miracle it would take for me to look like the woman on the cover of Seventeen magazine. It felt like every attempt at becoming “pretty” only made me more hideous.

Fun! I was a cishet white girl coming of age in the 1980s. Cue Huey Lewis. Cue clueless. The first boy I ever kissed, while drunk in a suburban treehouse at the age of 15, said he didn’t remember what happened that night because he was so drunk. It was horrific and embarrassing, to say the least. I knew deep down that he was lying. He remembered. But he was too embarrassed, feared his reputation might be smeared, to kiss anyone as ugly as me.

Then I finally got some boobs. Out of the blue, guys started coming around.

I was sixteen and so excited to even HAVE a boyfriend! Howard brought me to his home some afternoons. We would make out in his basement bedroom. I adored his acerbic humor, the bite-marks of cancer treatment on the pale chest he'd pumped up through lifting weights. I believed there was, beneath his surly facade, a wondrous, delicate, and knowable person.

Howard was a swaggering, smart-ass kind of guy who drove a beat-up BMW. Past me. As I walked down the road, in plain sight, making my way to the school bus stop. And this was while I was under the impression we were dating.

He developed a routine.He’d ask me to lie on my stomach. He’d turn on that little black-and-white t.v. It had no reception, and his basement room was dark. How weird is it to think now that I once lay there, entirely still, my eyes trained on that fuzzy screen? The first time, I didn’t know what was going to happen. Howard would then progress, I kid you not, after pulling down my pants, to lick my asshole.

Let’s leave my asshole out of this. This is where and when I first began to desert my body.

I was 16 and a virgin. I can't say I found it unpleasant, but it certainly did not feel like what I expected from intimacy then and now, which would be, I venture, a sense of connection.

This is all neither here nor there because, as Howard explained, when reaching out through Facebook decades later, he'd been going through some difficult family stuff at the time. #metoo

It was during college when studying abroad that a boyfriend first hit me. We had a fight, I cried, and this annoyed him, so he took my head in his hands and banged it against a wall. I cried harder, so he slapped my face repeatedly. This boyfriend was a talented painter. He still is.

I keep him on the other side of the world. I was, at one time, in love with him, saw his face across a classroom, his long eyelashes practically brushing the lenses of his wire-rims. The first time he talked to me was at a party in my English professor’s home. I was so nervous I spilled a glass of red wine on his rug.

And I should have been nervous. A year later, as we rode a train to a concert, he talked about how a few years earlier he got a woman pregnant with whom he'd had a one-night stand, how she'd met up with him to tell him she was having the baby, how he never wanted to see her again and had absolutely no interest in meeting the child. He called her ugly. As the train moved across the Scottish countryside, it dawned on me that he might very well be the cruelest person I had yet to meet in my young life.

I have a lot of love in me, always have, and I've often given it to the wrong people. Most of whom were cis het white men.

I am a certified cis het White female who has always liked men. Men were the focus of much of my early adult life. I wanted them to think I was beautiful, to look into my eyes and be transfixed, to think there was no one else but me who could make them ejaculate. I wanted mastery over their minds and bodies. I used to think I wanted control. Now I realize I wanted to be seen. What does that even mean? It’s simple. I was looking to be respected as a human being. I was looking for equity within these romantic relationships with men.

And, yet, when I lock my doors, I lock them against men.

I've been married three times. Each time, just after that marriage license was signed, sealed, and slipped into a stamped envelope and then dropped into the mailbox, I've heard the audible slide of the lock fall into place.

I had been told I am "fat" and "insecure" and "bad in bed" by these supposed life companions, who appear to only wish me injury once our marriage has been entered into the books.

I have been swindled, have given over lump sums from my retirement to satisfy the wrath of a "husband" who, despite the fact I supported him and his two teenage children for several years, got a 50% cut from “our shared assets" after being married to me for a mere four years, later insisting he deserved more.

I have been pushed out of my own bed in the middle of the night while I was asleep, my elbows sliced by dresser drawers, tailbone blue and sore from where it landed on the hardwood floor. Floors are hard. Land on one, especially hardwoods, and you'll know.

I had slipped beneath the covers to lie beside my sleeping husband. I closed my eyes in the dark room. But he wasn’t asleep, it turned out.

He waited until my breathing eased and I was drifting toward dream to shove me with a force and speed I still can’t fathom.

The morning after he’d pushed me out of our bed, I was at work. I spoke with my husband on the phone, and he said he remembered nothing. It hurt for me to sit down because I was sitting on a bruise. He didn't mean it, he said. He was sorry.

I am not sorry. I could tell you literally hundreds of stories, but the fact is women's stories are so common we've got ourselves a sea of stories. There is not a single woman you could meet who would deny this.

Laws have betrayed me. Laws that are supposed to be on my side aren’t.

One morning, years ago, I was going to drive to work but ended up at the police station instead. I wised up and got a restraining order.

It was the first time I ever actually said anything out loud about what I had been through; I did not recognize the words as they met the air. My ex-husband pushed me out of the bed. It doesn’t sound very violent, does it?

My story is awash with all the other stories.

Women are used to this. Violence against us is commonplace. We are OVER IT. We can fry it up and eat it for breakfast.

Give us something new.

Not this sad-ass assumption that women are in danger because a trans person might enter into a "women's bathroom." I have to believe that everyone knows that bathroom stall "locks," along with the design of bathroom "stalls," will not "protect" women from the true risks they face.

The most dangerous people can be the ones we sleep beside.

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IMAGE(S) CREDIT: Paintings/Drawing all by artist Susan Rothenberg (1945-2020)