he was not only my leader/lover but also my temporary prop. I had dreamed of traveling the country, and I knew how impossible it would be to do on my own. I was checking something off a list, and the next item on it would send me to England alone for a year abroad. Carl, however addictive the orgasms, however aesthetic his skills and his sorrows, was my love object but also the means for an American adventure that had to be completed by a deadline.
I had read, by this time, not only On the Road but also Minor Characters, by Joyce Johnson, who’d been Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend during the period when his fame peaked. My dad’s editor had sent me the memoir when he told her how entranced I was by the Beats, and I devoured it. I related to Joyce Johnson mightily, a bookish, middle-class girl called early toward the margins of culture. Starting at the age of thirteen, in 1949, she slipped out of her bourgeois apartment to go down to Greenwich Village in search of Real Life.
“Real life was sexual,” she wrote. “Or rather, it often seemed to take the form of sex. This was the area of ultimate adventure, where you could dare or not dare.”
I admired her. I recognized how much bravery it’d taken to move out of her parent’s house and live alone as a single young woman at a time when few others did. How fashionably prescient she’d been to seek out opaque black tights from a dancer’s supply store when garters, nylons, and white gloves were de rigueur.
I also felt aggrieved on Johnson’s behalf and on behalf of all those with whom I shared a gender. The shame she had to undergo during her risky abortion. The mockery she endured as an ambitious female dreamer. I understood—as likely was my dad’s editor’s intent—that there were reasons beyond the individual why a woman hadn’t written a Beat ode as similarly exuberant as On the Road. Johnson recounts how an English professor at the all-girls college Barnard introduced a course by asking how many of the students wanted to be authors. The class was required of creative writing majors, and, confused by a question whose answer was self-evident, all the young women slowly raised their hands.
The professor said he was sorry to see this. “First of all, if you were going to be writers, you wouldn’t be enrolled in this class. You couldn’t even be enrolled in school. You’d be hopping freight trains, riding through America.”
The thoughts of eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath would seem to corroborate this writerly inclination. In a journal entry from 1951 she tells of her “consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors, and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording . . . to sleep in an open field, to travel West, to walk freely at night.” But she can’t. “I am a girl, a female, always in danger of assault.”
“Received wisdom of 1953,” wrote Johnson of her professor’s remark. Received wisdom, too, of decades before and after. I’d been inoculated with it. The worldview of On the Road, not Minor Characters, remained one of my deepest inspirations even as I studied up on the unique challenges and strengths of women. Mixed with my gratitude toward the editor who’d given me Johnson’s book was a tinge of resentment. Had she thought to take my fantasy away from me? It wasn’t going to work. A tip of my hat to Joyce Johnson, but I was going to do her one better. In her years with Jack, she had never traveled with him. He’d held out promises—meet me here, meet me there—but they always fell through. She never made it on the road. Sylvia never made it, either. But I was headed out in the rough, real world. And if I needed a man in my tool belt as a rape-prevention device, well, I’d found one for whom I also had a ravenous attraction. Didn’t that disprove any accusation that I was either taking advantage of him or caving into gendered norms? I thought what I had with Carl was among the best kinds of male-female partnerships that could be achieved in an unequal world.
RESEARCH SHOWS: NOT JUST GIRLS
My attitudes about rape were based both on my personal experience with sexual assault and on the common assumption that when it came to sex crimes, the word victim was just about synonymous with the word girl or woman. As girls, the risk of sexual violence and violation was given as the reason for so many of the rules we were supposed to follow—how we should dress and act, where we should go and how we should get there, what kinds of jobs and places and people we should avoid and allow ourselves to be protected from. The risk of becoming a victim was one of the defining features that separated our gender from the other, a big part of what made us girls and them boys. In fact, so pervasive was this view that until 2012, many law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, defined for data purposes “forcible rape” as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” There was no way, by some official measures, that men could even be considered rape victims.
But although girls and women are more likely to be victims of sex crimes than boys and men are (and trans people have the highest rates of victimizations) no one is safe because of their gender. Men are of much higher risk than common knowledge supposes.
According to the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, the largest one of its kind, one in six men have experienced abusive sexual experiences before age eighteen.
According to Bureau of Justice statistics, about nine percent of all victims of rape and sexual assault over the age of twelve are male. It’s likely these numbers are very low. For one thing, they were gathered from patients getting physical examinations through an HMO and from household surveys, respectively. Thus they exclude inmates, who are vulnerable to sexual assault while incarcerated, and who are reportedly more likely to have suffered physical and sexual childhood abuse in their past than those in the general population.
In addition, research shows that men and boys may also be less likely than girls and women to recognize themselves as having been sexually abused or assaulted in the first place—reflecting our cultural and in some cases, legal, resistance to seeing males as victims. In one study, fewer than a fifth of men with documented histories of sexual abuse identified themselves as having been abused. In contrast, almost two-thirds of women with similar histories identify themselves that way. Needless to say, people who don’t identify themselves as victims are less likely to get help to understand and ameliorate the consequences.
Even men who acknowledge to themselves that they’ve experienced sexual violence might be reluctant to speak of it to anyone. Our culture assumes male sexual insatiability and sees the ability to protect oneself as a core element of manhood—making men even more likely than women, who also experience reservations about disclosing, to be ashamed by victimhood, or to be fearful they won’t be believed.
In 2014, the National Crime Victimization Survey found that as many as thirty-eight percent of incidents of sexual violence were committed against men. In just under half of these incidents, a woman was the violator.
The impulse many of us have to refuse to let our daughter do something we’d let a son do is not as rational as it may appear. Girls and women are more vulnerable, but not that much more vulnerable. What does it do to our conceptions of ourselves if we absorb that knowledge, and act on it?
In preschool, my best friend was a boy. We devised elaborate SM-themed fantasies involving our teachers, especially the prettiest one—already, I’d intuited that the prettiest one is whom the story will happen to. In our imaginings, we imprisoned, humiliated, and tortured this teacher in every way we could conceive of. Sometimes she played along, sitting on a child-sized chair and pretending to cry while we piled the cardboard bricks around her. We invented this game around the time my own abuse began, during my last year of preschool before kindergarten, but I can’t be sure exactly which game came first—the one Toshi devised or the one I did.
Toshi ran away from our house before he completed high school. Once he left, he never touched me again, but he maintained a role in our family. Upon his capture (if that’s the right word), he stayed at a home for wayward youth on the edge of town until he turned legal age. Then, my dad arranged for Toshi to attend the college where he taught, tuition free, and to live in the dorms. A couple years later, without