The Pull Quote

Back in February I wrote a scathing letter to the editor of North & South magazine in response to an article called "A Roadblock to Happiness."

The writer of the piece took what I saw as a flippant attitude towards groping and uses his own experience as an example of how everyone else (women) should just get over their experiences.

Last night Nick and I were coming back from the pub when we nipped into a local shop to pick up some snacks. I saw that the newest edition of N&S was out so I started to peruse the "Letters" section.

And there it was. My tirade. And what's more, my mean spirited conclusion had been put in a bold pull quote.

I was happy and dismayed and joyous and embarrassed in stages.

I had written the response a month ago and I had forgotten some of the particulars.

When we got home I shut myself up in our room so I could re-read what I wrote and decide if it was well written or not.

I like what I wrote but seeing my anger staring back at me in a large print quotation still gives me a strange mix of emotions.

Here's my letter in case you are curious:

In his essay “A Roadblock to Happiness,” Graham Adams diminishes the role of a sexual harasser in causing trauma by using such labels as “irritating” and “pest.”

He quotes Laura Kipnis who writes that, in her day, “Hooking up with professors was just what you did” and “Sex-even when not so great or someone got their feelings hurt- fell under the category of experience, not trauma.”

Kipnis seems to embrace the rhetoric of rape apologists who claim that women report sexual assault because sex was bad or regrettable.

It appears that both she and Adams need someone to explain the difference between consensual and non consensual sexual contact to them.

Adams’ suggestion that Naomi Wolf is “making mileage out of a grope” is patronizing.

Wolf makes it clear that she followed up with Yale University to protect others from being harassed the way she was. She writes, “After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact.”

Both Adams and Kipnis seem incredulous that unwanted contact from an individual in a position of power might leave someone feeling traumatized. They overlook the further effects of an “atmosphere of collusion” which serves to protect harassers and silence victims.

Kipnis never questions the ethical implications of “advances by a socially clumsy professor” toward a student.

She writes, “Isn’t it possible that the recipients of unwelcome advances wield some power in these situations-the power to humiliate the advancer at the very least?”

Twenty-seven-year-old Mary Spears of Detroit, Michigan was shot in the head and killed by a stranger after politely resisting his sexual advances.

Tugce Albayrak was beaten to death in Germany for telling a group of men to stop harassing two teenage girls.

A man in San Francisco was stabbed in the neck and back when he asked a catcaller to leave his girlfriend alone.

These are but a few examples of retaliatory violence against those who speak up for themselves.

Adams relates a story of being groped once on a crowded bus and says he found it “irksome.” He seems to think everyone else has had an identical experience and should just get over it. It takes a lot of hubris to write something that insufferable.