When I was 14, I worked at a Donut Shop. A 40-year old police officer had befriended me. Then, he made his move on m
e. And it was far from the romantic notions a young girl has when fantasizing about her first time.
To be clear: I had welcomed his attentions for all the months leading up to that fateful night. I dreamt up all sorts of schoolgirl “boy kisses girl” scenarios; the kinds of sexual scenes I used to read about in romance novels, my favorite being author Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’ “Ashes in the Wind.” This was a story about a young woman on the run who had to disguise herself as a boy to hide from Union soldiers who had wrongly charged her as a Confederate spy. A Yankee surgeon decides to help the boy, unaware she is a beautiful woman, until one night, while inebriated, he accidentally encounters her out of disguise (she pretending to be a prostitute)…which leads him to take her to bed.
It all ends well for the fictional couple. But that’s fiction. And not reality.
Reality is more similar to behavior that Donald Trump graphically spoke to and we all heard through the leaked videotape of his conversation with Billy Bush from Access Hollywood. Trump says that he can do anything he wants to women, even “grab them by the pussy.” He later apologized in his disingenuine way. But the response to his comments and character echoed my own.
