Long ago, I got into an argument with a man about sexual assault. I was fresh from a local production of The Vagina Monologues and I might have been a little pedantic, perhaps a little hard to reach. In my shock over the production, I repeated the statistic that one in six women will be the victim of rape (attempted or completed) in her lifetime.
This man’s response was immediate: No. No way. Not possible.
Astonished, I chucked back yet more data at him, but he continued to say it wasn’t possible. I decided that he was simply in denial, unwilling to accept what the statistics mean about the men he knew.
In my memory, we were both too determined in our positions, so eventually one of us changed the subject. (Is it necessary to say that this man and I are no longer in contact? Probably not.)
Over the years, I realized that I was the one in denial. Yes, I passionately recited the statistics, but that one was always someone else. That made it easier to accept. As I have gotten to know more women, and, I hope, become a better and more empathetic friend to women than I was during my “I’m not like other girls” phase, I realized that it was happening to my friends, my family members; that it wasn’t just a figure to recite, but happening constantly. (According to another statistic, from RAINN, it is happening once every 68 seconds).
The authenticity of these experience is driven home by Lisa Taddeo’s book Three Women. The book, which is nonfiction, tells the story of three very different women and their relationship to sex and men. In each of these stories, there is inappropriate sexual behavior from men, from a gang rape to one of the woman’s brothers asking her, late at night, if she wants to mess around. There is Sloane, an affluent woman who agrees with her husband’s desires to watch her sleep with other men while she oppresses her own insecurities and instincts. There is Lina, whose middle-aged sexual awakening brings her some of the best sex of her life with the most emotionally-unavailable of men. Maggie’s story, of a sexual relationship with her teacher, when he was thirty and she was seventeen, struck me the hardest.
Statistics are easy to deny if we pretend that they depict an anonymous “other.” Books like Three Women ensure that we can’t deny the humanity behind these facts.
(Avid Reader Press, 2019)