laugh,” my aunt said.“ That usually sends them running.” Usually. Of course, what feels like a matrilineal curse is not really ours. We don’ t own it; the shame and disgust belong to the perpetrators. At least, that’ s what the books say. But the frequency with which women in my family have been hurt or sexually assaulted starts to feel like a flashing message encoded in our DNA: Hurt. Me. My daughter is five and I want to inoculate her against this. I want Layla to have her father’ s lucky genes – genes that walk into a room and feel entitled to be there. Genes that feel safe. Not my out-ofplace chromosomes that are fight-or-flight ready. This is the one way in which I wish she was not mine. *** For months after the man showed me his penis on the subway platform, my father walked me up the stairs every morning to wait for the train. The booth worker let him through the gate without paying, after my dad explained what had happened. He gave him a bag of cherries from the tree that grew in our yard as a thank you every week. As we were talking on the platform under the sun, I noticed an odd shape under my father’ s jacket. He tried to distract me with a joke, but when I asked him about it a second time, he pulled up his shirt to show me a metal pipe sticking out of the top of his trousers. He assured me that no cop would ever arrest him for beating a man who flashes children. Today he tells me he knew that was a lie, but he brought the pipe with him anyway. On the worst day – a few years later – I didn’ t notice the man at all. The train was crowded; my mind was elsewhere. I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest on my Walkman and thinking about how warm it was. When I stepped out of the subway, the sun hit my face and I was happy to be almost home. But when I started to put my hand in my back pocket, I felt something wet: I had made it the whole ride back without noticing that a man, whose face I would never see, had come on me. I wiped my hand on the lower leg of my jeans and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. I walked the three blocks home with my backpack slung as low as possible, so that no one walking behind me could see what had happened or could think I had peed myself. I peeled the jeans off when I got home and, even though most of the semen had landed on the pocket – giving me two, rather than just one, layers of protection – the skin on my ass was still damp from it. I ran the tub until there were two inches of scalding water along the bottom, squirted in some of my sister’ s Victoria’ s Secret vanilla-scented bath gel, and sat in it quickly, my shirt still on. I wrapped a pink towel around myself when I stepped out of the tub and turned my jeans inside out before putting them in the laundry basket so my mother wouldn’ t find out. I knew she would cry. I piled some sheets on top of the jeans to be safe. Later I would find out that the guy rubbing up on you in the subway isn’ t just an asshole – he has a disorder. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association describes“ frotteurism” as“ recurrent, intense, or arousing sexual urges or fantasies, that involve touching and rubbing against a nonconsenting person”. There are online forums for men
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