My situation is not the only example of the dark tread that criss-crosses between adolescence and adulthood, but it's not that uncommon either. Too many people believe that girls should be nice to look at when you have to pay attention to them, and small enough to ignore when you don't. I learned early on that girlhood (which I already understood to be an inferior state of being) was made even more shameful for those of us unable to fulfil even the most basic of obligations that require us to be pretty, deferential and thin. I was lucky that day – and let's be clear that when the benchmark for luck is not being raped, you're dealing with extremely questionable parameters – but I shouldn't have been in that situation at all. He wasn't going to force me – but that doesn't make what happened OK. My absence of self worth (perhaps coupled with the fact my family was due to return to Australia, making me a problem that would also be easily removed) made me susceptible to Roger's crude charms. But the terror of intimacy overcame my determination to prove my fearlessness. The more I think about that period of time, the angrier I become.
It was years before I realised that what happened (or didn't happen) wasn't my fault, and stopped describing Roger as this cool, older guy who'd been the best boss I'd ever had. I was a little, foolish girl playing at being an adult and I felt like I had let both of us down.
I wasn't brave enough to go through with what had been implicitly building between us. I felt ashamed, because I knew he was right.
I had done everything I could to make my body desirably small, and now it was sitting alone and vulnerable in a house drinking hard liquor with an adult man who was telling me I was "all talk" and betting me I wouldn't be brave enough to cross the floor to "give him a hug". I was a young girl with poor self esteem and the fervent belief that my worth and value was tied up in how attractive I appeared to other people. Up to now, Roger had been very careful to make me believe I was his equal and I had responded enthusiastically.īut alone in his house, the power imbalance that had always existed between us revealed itself. The summer season was drawing to a close and long, grey shadows were beginning to wrap themselves around his living room. It was late afternoon when Roger invited me upstairs to try the Pernod. To be trusted with such adult secrets, to be looked at with such adult eyes. It felt good to be treated like an adult. He told me about the sex workers he visited instead, and I listened sympathetically. She had just had their second baby and was, according to Roger, no longer interested in sleeping with him. It was definitely before he took me to the pub and plied me with snakebites (an odious mixture of lager, cider and grenadine that was favoured by the teenagers freely allowed to drink at seaside pubs in early '90s England), my tongue slowly turning bright red as Roger talked to me about his "frigid" wife. This was shortly before he tiptoed his fingers up the back of my leg one day while I slapped his hand away in peals of laughter, my insides burning with the warm glow of approval. It was common knowledge that only the best girls worked at Roger's* shop – he had even confirmed this, telling me how jealous his friends were that he got to work with so many "pretty young things". I worked for this man in the shop he ran below the apartment, and I had agreed to go upstairs with him after weeks of what can only have been careful grooming on his part, following a sustained effort on my part to achieve what I thought was the ideal body size. I actually felt flattered and grateful that he thought I was attractive. When I was 13, a man took me up to his apartment while his wife was out, gave me Pernod to drink and tried to manipulate me into giving him physical affection.
Let me tell you an everyday story about one of the many things that can happen when girls are taught to hate themselves. Writer Clementine Ford: "How many girls are preyed on by older men because those men correctly identify how desperate they are to feel like they matter?"