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 having graduated, Toshi joined the Army. But even after enlisting, he wasn’t gone for good. When he served in the Philippines, we were sent pictures. When he was stationed in the States, he visited. When he was done with his service, he came back to the college to finish his degree. We were his main family, after all. Or we sort of were.
An older student by the time he returned to re-enroll, Toshi lived in an apartment near campus, but he brought his girlfriend to our house for dinner regularly. She was an artist who’d defected from mainland China, a striking and interesting person. I remember her sitting in the visitor’s spot at our dining room table, her back to the bay window so that from my position across from her she was silhouetted by the black night.
We were glad to have her; she was easier to converse with than Toshi. One evening after the meal, she moved beyond small talk when conversation turned to life in China. Her voice became fierce, almost shrill, as she tried to explain to us what her family had endured during the Cultural Revolution—forced relocation, near-starvation. I could sense the brutal dissonance she was experiencing, her need to emphasize the reality of her past as she found herself in these surreal surroundings, a homey place across the world from the home she might never be able to return to. The crack in her composure only made me admire her more. She brought a breath of the world to our house, an air of significance.
The people who traveled through our dining room because of Toshi tended to do that—suggest something beyond our hectic routine out there in the woods, where we typically cycled through the same faces and places week after week, year after year.
My uncle visited us when Toshi had established himself outside our home, but still in our town. Physically, Morris resembled a shorter and clean-shaven version of my own father, and the familiar aspects of this unfamiliar person created an off-balance curiosity within me, a sense I still associate with extended family. My uncle was a practicing Buddhist, and he had an air of equanimity—in my memories he’s always wearing the same slight smile—but he carried tension with him into the house. Perhaps it came from the pressure of everyone else wearing that same slight smile, too, even if they felt something other than the mild acceptance it suggested. Decades later, my father told me how anxious Toshi became in his father’s presence, but I had intuited that even as a child.
One morning at breakfast my uncle asked me if I’d like to hear some Japanese poetry. I said yes, of course—I don’t recall my exact age, but I was old enough to be polite, probably even old enough to want to broaden my horizons. He took a
