What do creepy old men and the NYPD have in common?

Cn: street harassment, creepy behavior, pedophilia

They’re both useless, unnecessary, and just the worst.

So the playgrounds in NYC are finally reopened. And since I had my nieces and nephews (henceforth referred to as niephlings) for the weekend, I decided to take them and my daughter to the playground.

Now this playground is also a park but the areas are clearly defined. There is a policy in place that adults are not allowed in the playground without children.

My niephlings range from ages 7-3. My daughter is 10. So mami joined us to help out. It was a warm day and the playground was not crowded so it was perfect to keep social distancing protocols. While the smaller children played on the baby slide the two oldest (my daughter TJ and niece V) ran around the playground. I noticed a man who seemed to be by himself staring at the kids, particularly the girls, and smiling. I kept my eye on him.

Eventually TJ and V went to the swings. And the man moved to the seats in front of the swings. After a little while TJ tells mami that they feel uncomfortable because the man kept staring at them and their cousin. I asked V and she also said she felt uneasy. While keeping an eye on the other kids (they were close by to be safe) I went and stood by my girls. Mami stood next to the man.

We both watched him. He kept smiling. If you’re a woman or non-man, you can trust your gut about this sort of thing. It wasn’t just a kindly old man smile. It was creepy.

Finally mami asks him what he was staring at. He says he could stare at whoever he wanted. So mami starts to tear into him. I come along and he asks me, “right? I can stare and smile all I want?”. No, I replied. Especially not at little girls. I was getting shaky and told him I would rearrange his face if he kept it up. He told me to bring it on! The audacity? It only gets worse.

So we’re yelling at each other. He keeps insisting he can stare at whoever he wants. He actually mansplained sight to us! He says the cops would prove him right. Now I’m not a fan of cops, much less the NYPD and this encounter didn’t help. The man calls 911 and the cops eventually show up.

Mami and I explained to them what happened. They went and talked to him. They were with him for about 10 minutes. They come back and say he wasn’t breaking any laws. That since the playground is also a park, they cannot move him. I mean, it’s really convenient, you know? The police sure do know when to use force and when to not. But whatever. This post isn’t about police brutality. Although we DID talk about how useless the police were to us and about the whole organization at large.

They asked him to move and he refused. He said he had a long walk so he was tired and he wasn’t going to move.

So, he has a long walk and rather than sit in the benches at the entrance he walks his ass all the way into the playground. Make it make sense. And to refuse to move when he’s been told he made people, especially children, uncomfortable is just even more audacious.

The cops told us we could stay in the park but not speak to the man or we could move to another area. So this man’s pants feels are more important than my children’s right to safety. One cop told us not to let this man ruin our fun.

We went home. Once home I called the parks department and filed a report. I explained and they told me that the man was NOT supposed to be in playground area, regardless of it also being a park. So, the cops just didn’t want to do their job? I’m shocked. /sarcasm

This is not the first time my daughter has been creeped on and I know it won’t be the last. Creepy, predatory behavior is something my daughter and my nieces will have to endure. What did this teach my nephews? That they, as men, can do and say and sit and stare and make people uncomfortable at the least, but it’s ok? My daughter and nieces are just supposed to deal with it?

This is rape culture. It’s a culture that tells women and non men we just have to take creepy behavior. It’s a culture that doesn’t respect children. It’s a culture that tells you to trust your instincts but then chastises for doing just that.

I spoke to my niephlings, especially V and my daughter and we discussed what happened and how they felt. I told them they did the right thing by saying something.

Oh and by the way, since I was so shaky, the man had the nerve to laugh and tell me not to be nervous. The audacity of this jackass, not to mention the entitlement.

I hope he has a heart attack. We have a term in Puerto Rico for creepy old men, viejo verde. And he’s definitely green as hell.

Creepy old man

What do creepy old men and the NYPD have in common?
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What Are the Chances?

CN: Discussion of Statistics in relations to disability, other social issues, sexual assault, and abuse.

There are times when I am talking to someone about my life- about the fact that I’m scared of new proposed laws making it harder for me to survive in Ontario, or about how I’m one particularly unlucky day away from being homeless – when I get the feeling like the person I’m talking to thinks I’m exaggerating. They get this look on their faces that makes it clear they’re just humoring me by not pointing out how ridiculous I’m being. Meanwhile, I’m already minimizing how severe my situation is out of fear of being accused of exaggerating. Worse still, my circumstances are relatively minor compared to that of many of my friends and readers. 

When they don’t automatically dismiss what I’m saying as being hyperbole, the people I speak with assume that my case is rare – an exception. A circumstance not worthy of planning against because it’s unlikely to happen again. And yet? Every day I meet someone new in the same type of situation I find myself in. It’s become so textbook, some people look at me as though I’m performing magic when I manage to guess the ridiculous circumstances they find themselves in or repeat almost verbatim what they’ve heard from doctors, therapists, or other people.

It’s a matter of framing, of perspective.

To someone in the mainstream, what is happening to me must be the result of either something I did wrong, or something extremely rare, or impossible. It seems like the probability of all the things going wrong that go wrong happening seem impossible.

What are the chances that every relationship you’ve been in is abusive?

What are the chances that so many of your doctors end up incompetent? That so many doctors end up holding biased opinions?

What are the chances that everyone around you is so terrible? Doesn’t it seem more likely that you are the problem? Statistically speaking that is?

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What Are the Chances?

Life After Domestic Violence

CN: description of r*pe, uncensored use of that word, domestic violence, violations of privacy, coercion, alcohol, emesis

Heed the content notice, while this post ends on a positive note, the bulk of it is tough and potentially triggering. Please take your time and take a break if you need to.

Continue reading “Life After Domestic Violence”

Life After Domestic Violence

Blood and Roses: A Virtual Reality

For as long as people have been talking about social justice online, there have been people, trolls really, who make a point to argue, harass, and otherwise engage in actively hateful and bigoted behaviour. This has been the case in every online community I have been involved with: the feminist community, the atheist community, disability community. There is always someone prepared to defend the vilest behaviour you can think of. If you are a representative of these communities: a Person of Colour, a Trans Woman, a Disabled Person, if you are a member of some minority, the number of people who target you in particular escalates.

The sheer number of people committed to spreading hate has made places like the comment boards on Youtube a place to be avoided. Many magazines and blogsites have closed their comment sections. More than one writer, activist, organizer, and so forth has been forced off the internet as a result of death threats, threats of rape and violence, dealing with a constant barrage of slurs and hatred, and even having their private information released to the public.

Continue reading “Blood and Roses: A Virtual Reality”

Blood and Roses: A Virtual Reality

The Unfunny Incompetence of Social Services in New York

TW: Domestic Violence, Systemic Violence, Bigotry

As some of you may remember, I talked about the possibility of going to New York, to help a single mom friend who had hurt herself. I was doing a fundraiser to be able to afford to go (I could still use some donations to help recover from the financial strain. And also to cover unexpected expenses).

Well, earlier in July, I finally went. Many of you may be wondering why it was so urgent. While it is true that an injured ankle makes things hard to deal with, especially for a single mom with an active kid, but it doesn’t seem like the type of thing to really justify spending so much money to go help out. Heck, taking a cab around would be cheaper.

The truth is that out of concern for privacy and at the request of my friend, I left out a lot of details. While it is true that she did injure herself, and that a portion of my help was to make things easier on her for a few days, the truth of the matter is that I was going there to stand witness and see what I could do to help her with a much more complicated issue.After my visit, my friend gave me permission to release some of the information on my blog.

You see, my friend was a victim of domestic abuse. Severe domestic abuse. Her partner hit her, sexually assaulted her, the details of which are so unbelievably horrible, that the court had a hard time accepting the truth of it. That was six years ago, and this man will likely never see the inside of a cell for what he did. My friend however, has had her life, and that of her child, completely hijacked.

Continue reading “The Unfunny Incompetence of Social Services in New York”

The Unfunny Incompetence of Social Services in New York

Rant: Let’s Talk About the BLACKLIVESMATTER Protest at PRIDE (Part 1)

This past weekend, July 3rd, was the Toronto Pride Parade, one of the biggest if not the biggest pride events in Canada. This year’s parade was a historic one for a variety of reasons. The weekend included the largest trans march in the world and the first time that a sitting Prime Minister joined the parade. Another major historic event was the protest staged by Black Lives Matter.

For those who haven’t heard, during the pride parade, after a moment of silence for the victims of the Orlando Shooting at Pulse Club, Black Lives Matter Toronto staged a sit in halting the parade. Their protest had the following list of demands:

Continue reading “Rant: Let’s Talk About the BLACKLIVESMATTER Protest at PRIDE (Part 1)”

Rant: Let’s Talk About the BLACKLIVESMATTER Protest at PRIDE (Part 1)

It Was Assault and It Wasn’t the First Time

CN/TW: Descriptions of Assault and Rape

I was at a party the other weekend, when the subject of my book came up.

I decided to tell the anecdote of the faith healer, the punch line of which was the description of his hand on my crotch and ass stroking back and forth, while I tried not to laugh in his face or look at my mother who was also struggling. I played it like I always do; for laughs at the absolute ridiculousness of the situation. But this time something was different. Maybe it was the look on the face of the person I was speaking to. Maybe it was the fact that I was already thinking about something related to assault. Whatever it was, even as I was laughing, I was suddenly face with the fact that what I was describing was sexual assault.

A man was touching my body in intimate places, in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. He was stroking my crotch because he knew he could get away with it. Despite the fact that my mother was sitting right there. I was in a position where I couldn’t object, and I couldn’t really refuse. Not without possible consequences.

It’s not as if the realization changed much. I was already an assault victim, having come to terms with what had happened to me at 18 years old with a doctor.

But the realization that I had been telling the story of my assault as a humorous story made me stop and think.

Continue reading “It Was Assault and It Wasn’t the First Time”

It Was Assault and It Wasn’t the First Time

Sexual Assault By a Medical Provider Is Not a Big Deal… Until It Is

When I was 18, I was assaulted by a doctor at the university clinic.

 

I had gone in to get tested for bacterial vaginosis. I was in love and wanted to make sure that I didn’t smell strange if the chance to have sex ever came up. The first doctor at the clinic was very kind. She opted not to use a speculum since I was a virgin, just like every other doctor I had seen for a vaginal issue until that point. I got a call a few weeks later to come in to get my results. The doctor who saw me then was someone I had not seen before. Before she even got to the test results, she began laying into me about my weight. She told me I was morbidly obese, that diabetes must be causing the smell. I was maybe 40 lbs. heavier than my optimal weight for my height. I didn’t know what fat shaming was then, but I tried standing up for myself, letting her know that my cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels were all perfect.

The facts didn’t matter to her. She had decided that I didn’t meet her standards of fitness and that the best way to deal with it was to make me feel horrible about myself. Finally, we got to the results: I did not have BV. She asked me why I had come in to check on it, and so I told her. Unexpectedly, she offered to take a look. I was shocked, but I accepted her offer. I was worried and she was a doctor. She had to be professional, right?

As I sat on the table, getting ready for the exam, I looked over at her and asked her not to use the speculum. I was a virgin, I told her, and the other doctor said it wasn’t necessary. Then, I lay down on the cold table. There is vulnerability in that statement. Everything about the doctor’s office is about power. You sit, while the doctor stands above you. You are naked, while they are dressed. You are in pain, afraid, vulnerable, and they hold the answers. Everything about the doctor-patient relationship reinforces that power dynamic. I was vulnerable on that table, exposing my private parts to a doctor who had already wounded me. She had already established her power over me, so I knew that my request was a supplication. It was her power to grant it.

But she didn’t.

 

As I lay there exposed on the cold table, worried about whether or not I was normal, the doctor violated my request. She shoved an unlubricated speculum inside me and opened it to its widest setting. I can’t even remember what came next. I do remember the pain. I don’t remember walking out of the clinic. I do remember trying to rush back to my dorm; I didn’t want to cry in public. I looked for the room of the person I trusted most on campus but he wasn’t home. In my search for him, I ended up in a room with some people I vaguely knew. I broke down crying. I told them what had happened. I was bleeding, I was sure of it. I felt torn. But I was crying about the fat shaming, had every instance of it having happened flying through my brain.

I was lucky in some ways. The people I barely knew, who comforted me as I cried, said all the right things. They told me what happened wasn’t my fault. That what she had done was wrong and that I was right to be upset. Not everyone is so lucky. But I didn’t want to listen. I wasn’t prepared to face that what happened to me was assault, so instead, I concentrated on the fat shaming. I convinced myself that the assault was no big deal.

Years later, when I lost my virginity, I postponed getting a pap smear for two years. Normally, you are expected and encouraged to get one within a year of becoming sexually active, but I didn’t want to be in that vulnerable position again. Moreover, I became more sensitive to fat shaming. I lost my temper more quickly whenever my weight was mentioned. It tinged all my interactions with doctors. If they brought up my weight, I found it more difficult to trust them or found myself reacting negatively to the rest of the appointment. Every time a doctor failed to listen to me, it felt like another betrayal.

Everything came to a head when my GI made the decision to send me to the weight management clinic. The morning of the appointment, I woke up in a panic. My heart was beating like crazy. I was sweating. I couldn’t focus my mind. I found myself sitting in a corner, rocking back and forth and crying. I couldn’t understand why.

All I could think about was that doctor, her cold hands, the pain of the rough plastic edges as the speculum entered me, the stretching-tearing feeling of it being opened. I couldn’t get the feeling of betrayal, of being violated, out of my mind. Superimposed over those feelings was every instance when a doctor refused to listen to me, all the times when I’d had to be vulnerable with a doctor and had that vulnerability rewarded with pain and betrayal.

When I realized what was going on — a panic attack — I took some anxiety medication and tried to calm myself down. I spent my day curled around myself, trying to hold myself together, as I watched the clock tick down to my appointment. I was terrified. I didn’t know what would happen when I went into the clinic.

Throughout my struggle, I realized that what I had thought was no big deal had actually been affecting my interaction with doctors for years. Suddenly, I was facing the truth: What had happened to me was a big fucking deal. I had been assaulted. By a doctor. By a member of society that I was supposed to be able to trust implicitly. By a person that everyone expected me to trust. Not only had my body been violated, so had my ability to trust that doctors had my best interest at heart. What’s more, the violation brought on the realization that I was very much a member of a vulnerable population: people with disabilities are among some of the most at risk for sexual assault.

Sexual assault is about power. It is about the perpetrator feeling like they have power over the victim. It is not about sex. The inclusion of my genitals in this assault was incidental. The doctor in question wasn’t trying to get any kind of sexual thrill or fulfill a sexual desire. Who I was didn’t matter. She just needed to assert her own power over someone else, and I was the lucky victim.

If you asked her, she probably would have no idea that what she did to me was assault. She might make excuses about how she thought that the use of a speculum was necessary. She might say that she is a doctor and I am not, and that she knew better than I did. It doesn’t matter what she would say. The simple truth is that I made my boundaries clear and she violated them. The fact that she did so without even the courtesy of using lubrication (standard in those types of medical procedures) is just icing on the cake. To her, it didn’t matter if I felt pain. I wasn’t a human being in that moment. I was at her mercy. She was the one in charge and she could do whatever she wanted to me without fear of consequences. To her, what I wanted didn’t matter. And that is what makes it assault.

Assaults by doctors, unless sensationalized and existing on a large scale, rarely get talked about — and are sometimes even trivialized. We as a society put great faith in doctors. We don’t want to face that the people responsible for our health and well-being might be as human as the rest of us. We don’t want to address the fact that power dynamics that are enforced as severely as those between patients and doctors puts everyone at risk of abuse. We especially don’t want to talk about doctor abuse, because in doing so, we risk being lumped in with conspiracy theorists that take things too far and condemn the medical profession altogether. As an advocate of evidence-based medicine, it’s difficult to draw attention to abuses perpetuated by doctors and still defend medicine as a profession.

And yet, drawing attention to this abuse is very important. When someone is hurt so personally by a doctor, it can be easy to lose faith in the entire industry. Being violated by a doctor does more than affect you psychologically, it can also put your health at risk. It can make you afraid to be vulnerable with doctors again. It might mean that you try to protect yourself by keeping things to yourself that the doctor should know about. But more importantly, talking about doctor abuse is essential to help victims know that they didn’t do anything wrong and that they are not alone.

Whenever I discuss what happened to me, someone always feels the need to mention that the doctor might not have been thinking about consent but might have simply decided that using a speculum was necessary. Who was I, as an untrained patient, to decide what equipment the doctor needed or didn’t need, they ask? I have questions of my own. If doctors know better, does that mean they have the right to ignore the boundaries I set for myself? Does that mean that I have no say in what happens to my body? And if so, is my body really mine? What about your body? And where do we draw the line?

Sexual Assault By a Medical Provider Is Not a Big Deal… Until It Is