Get Your Boner Off Me

Dear Kate Spencer,

I need to tell you an embarrassing secret: a few days ago a man pressed his boner against me on the subway—and despite having read your awesome and inspiring blog post, I didn’t slap him.

The man was shorter than me so the boner was on my leg, which made the whole thing reminiscent of an erstwhile Bar Mitzvah—the year that all the boys were shorter than me, and everyone was starting to experiment with “grinding.” The only difference was that back then I was happily encouraging boners, bewitched as I was by their apparent existence. This more recent time, on the subway, I was simply standing there, sweaty and claustrophobic, wishing I had more guts (or magical powers, or a giant hamster ball to roll around in).

My lack of response (while embarrassing in the sense of its naiveté and stillness—especially when I consider how I would have responded WITH A ROAR if I had witnessed this boner happening to someone else) is somewhat typical of me; when uncomfortable, I tend to literally sprint away from what’s bothering me—and when trapped on a subway, it makes sense that I would go bug-eyed like a terrified rabbit and hold still, hoping for invisibility.

This survival tactic was surely ingrained in me by something other than my mother, who during my childhood regularly raised her voice to everyone from mean middle school teachers to slow McDonalds employees, and once chased a pedophile out of our yard with a golf club (long story). If my mother had seen this man turn his pelvis toward me, she would have wasted no time asking him to move; she would have torn the boner off.

But I was on the S train during rush hour, and I kept making excuses to myself about the crowded subway car; everyone was squashed shoulder to shoulder, so I tried not to think about it when the guy behind me happened to be pressed lap-first against my hip. One of the adolescent boys to my right was wearing a sling (some people have real problems, right?) and kept yelling at his much taller friend in this shrill and self-conscious way. I focused on that.

“I want you to get hurt—you don’t know what life is until you’re riding a subway with a broken arm.”

“I broke my”—

“That was fifth grade. It doesn’t count.”

When I was their age, a man had come up to me at Blockbuster Video, and while still holding onto his five-year-old son, had pressed his free hand against my butt. I hadn’t done anything then, either—had took too long wondering if it had really happened—but I was old enough now to respond appropriately, right?

Then again, maybe I was jumping to conclusions; maybe this thing behind me was an accidental boner, I reasoned, and maybe now the ordinary-looking owner was simply trying to hide it against my leg? —Because otherwise the adolescent boys would see? It was the lesser of two evils?

In addition, what if it wasn’t even a boner? I found myself trying to remember what an uninvited-boner-through-pants even felt like (like when you’re fifteen and think it will be awesome to sit on some guy’s lap in a crowded carpool and then SURPRISE, YOU’RE STUCK IN THE BONER MOBILE UNTIL ASHLEY’S HOUSE). As much as people like to joke about bananas in pockets, boners are probably a hard thing to misinterpret (is that a dildo in your zipper?) but still…

If I yelled at him at this point, maybe he’d be embarrassed or angry.

But what if he was like…laughing?

And it went on like this for the remaining 6 minutes to Grand Central; I would consider turning to scream at him, and would be held back by the thought of his incredibly normal face folding into a genuinely baffled expression. Was there a way I could put it more politely, I wondered? —“Excuse me, I know it’s very crowded, but I can feel your penis.” I thought maybe I was wrong, and I knew I should be furious but I wanted to be polite—and the dueling notions were so strong and opposite inside me that in the end I stayed put.

“Did you know that in China, it’s like so crowded that it’s like this but there’s like even a person on the subway whose job it is to cram more people in,” peeped the boy with the broken arm.

His friend raised his eyebrows. “Wait, have you been to”—

“Don’t you think you would have noticed if I went to China? —It’s called hearing things, man. In China it’s like this crowded only worse. It’s like unhealthy.”

“Well I guess as long as there’s not too much…dying.”

I hung onto this last remark thinking, “Yes…as long as there’s not too much dying, one boner is not a big deal…some people have real problems…etc.”

My coworker warned me that my boner story would be boring unless I actually liked the boner, or did something about it, like hit the guy. And I guess what I’m wondering, Kate, is if you agree? That women are so often silent during these crimes is certainly not news. And the guilt—the stupid, unwarranted guilt that left me wondering if I was somehow to blame—is also an old story, maddeningly old. But what feels like news to me is that I felt that guilt. Me, the girl in gender studies class who wrote papers on feminism and heteronormativity, and once yelled at a boy over some kind of Foucauldian disagreement, despite having no clue what Foucault had actually meant. Me, a woman who gives money to Planned Parenthood and who has helped more than one friend through sexual assault. What was all that education good for, and what good are my politics, if I can’t take on one puny boner? What good is finding my voice if I haven’t figured out how to use it?

I’m hoping that after enough time in the city I’ll be going ninja on all the perverts—channel my mother a little (for the record, my mother begged me not to publish anything about the boner, lest perverts read it, track me down, and follow me onto the subway in the hopes of a bit of consequence-free boner pressing). But for now, I’m still struck by my silence.

Sincerely,

Kathleen

PS: A hilarious Sheriff’s Deputy has since given me some tips on how to handle myself next time.