“It was a game that everyone but me seemed to love. I was a girl who mostly hung around boys because I hadn’t yet learned that female friendships, though infinitely more confusing, were also infinitely more rewarding. I was the self-professed type who loudly preferred spending time with men over spending time with women because they were less dramatic and complicated. And so I surrounded myself with boys who found it funny to grab my body when I least expected it, and were spurred by my discomfort to push me further and more painfully.
The game ended the night that Tom*, the one who always grabbed me, did it to me again while we were walking up a flight of stairs. Familiarly, everyone laughed and I tried to join them, desperate to appear easygoing and in on the joke despite being the literal and figurative butt of it. But suddenly, the effort of it all—the smiling, nervous chuckling, and eye rolls that I had allowed myself over the past several months—sickened me. It felt like I was choking on my own vomit of anger and humiliation. To save myself, I’d have to spew my own bile. And so I turned and punched Tom directly in the groin.
The satisfaction of the moment blazed and died quickly. He collapsed to the ground, gripping himself, hissing, “You are a fucking bitch. You are a fucking bitch,” over and over again. I laughed an awkward bark of a laugh, but no one joined in this time. No one said anything at all until minutes later when we were walking—them in a pack, and me trailing behind—to our local video store. Michael, my best male friend, hung back to keep me company.
“I get that you’re mad and don’t like it when Tom grabs you like that,” he said and I exhaled a sigh of gratitude. “But what you did…” I sucked my breath in again, “…You just don’t do that to a guy. Ever.”
It’s a small relief that I didn’t feel ashamed of myself. Instead I felt disappointed in Michael, in Tom, in every other boy that now, on our walk, avoided me because I had crossed a line and hit back.”
Have you ever kept on ‘horsing around’ after someone said “no” or displayed signs of discomfort. Well, stop it. Don’t be like Tom, he’s a boundary ignoring asshole.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
1 comment
January 16, 2017 at 9:43 am
Meg
Good for her for punching him in the balls. Ironically I have a male family member who has and would again punch another guy in the balls during a fight. He also knows how to squeeze another man’s balls and simultaneously jab his fingers up in the perineum for double the effect. Whenever other men start in on him, even jokingly, he’ll tell them straight up exactly what he’ll do to them if they fuck with him. He’s not making idle threats either, he’s deadly serious. He has no problem sterilizing another man or crippling him with pain to resolve a physical threat. It’s true that he’s less of a misogynist than other men and does his part to encourage women to stop believing men’s dicks are somehow sacred. He thinks men who view the area as off limits as prissy bastards who don’t know how to fight. He also thinks men who play by fighting rules must be suicidal since he knows violent men can kill with their bare hands.
On the other hand, I have never agreed with women who think being friends with a man is somehow easier than being friends with other women. The idea that women are more complicated is bullshit. American men tend toward the egotistical and are a lot more mentally unstable when things don’t go their way, hence all the mass shootings that keep happening. There are enough men who resemble this statement to constitute a trend and a problem. By definition American men are drama kings whenever they go on the attack rather than behave like civilized people when women ask them to stop being violent sexists. Drama, drama, drama, when will it ever end? It’s repulsive.
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