Publisher’s note (from Cass): This essay is part of my new section called Ghost Writers, where I publish essays, short stories and creative works for other writers who wish to remain anonymous. I thoroughly relate to much of this writer’s experience that she describes here, and I believe many other women will, too. If you’ve been sitting on a piece of writing that you want to publish but don’t want to under your own name, feel free to send it to me at ghostwriters-submission@proton.me and I’ll post it on Ghost Writers. It’s entirely free and I don’t benefit financially from it — this is just an offering to the writing community because it feels needed.
My mother sometimes said that beauty is a curse. When I was young I rolled my eyes. Why would it be? All that attention. The glittering lives of celebrities. Free drinks, upgrades to first class, secret notes left where they might be discovered. Such serendipity and joy. Somehow the thought that what the males were seeing was my intrinsic worth. Then the inevitable comedown as I learned I was wrong again.
When I was 15 years old, I met a 27 year-old man who was working on summer roofing jobs together with my two older brothers. Mike was a Vietnam vet who had been injured and had PTSD, though back then in the mid-1970s nobody talked about that. Mike was also a student of my parents at a local university and I knew they liked him a lot and thought he was very talented. Mike was married. But that didn’t stop Mike from paying attention to a 15 year-old girl. One summer night at a party I’d gone to with my brothers, I lost my virginity to Mike. He had a bullet hole in his lower back.
Writing those words is painful, even 50 years on. I have a lot of shame around that experience and it’s only very recently that I have been able to see Mike clearly as what he was—a pedophile. I have no idea whether this was a pattern with Mike but I do know that men like him often take pains to frame the relationship as “special” and that girls and young women are very ready to believe that there is something particular about them that is more than just being young and pretty and willing. But there’s not.
That same year I had met the writer Edward Abbey when he was invited to speak at the university where my parents taught in the English department. Abbey was from the same tiny town where I lived; in fact, his nephew was in my grade at school. He asked if he could write to me (a la “Jerry” and Joyce Maynard). So we started a correspondence and for part of that time I was in France with my parents during their sabbatical. I don’t know what I did with those letters and sometimes I wonder what became of them. I probably destroyed them. In any case when I was 16 I dropped out of high school and went away to university. Abbey visited me at my small liberal arts college. I still remember him sitting on the bed in his dark hotel room while I stood there. I looked at this man who was even older than my father and my stomach began to tighten and sour. He took me back to my dorm and I never responded to his letters again. I wish I could say that nothing physical came from that encounter because I had somehow developed good sense. But in truth I think it was just disgust that saved me from him.
When I was 16 a man in the small French town where we were staying invited me aboard his fishing boat. When we got into the cabin he grabbed me and sat astride me. I reached behind him and grabbed a fire extinguisher and hit him in the head with it. He let me go. I never told my parents or anyone else what had happened.
There were so many of these incidents: the French rugby team at our hotel in Carcasonne. One of the men, his face beaten to a pulp, found his way to my room. The Senegalese man on the train who offered to buy me from my parents. A fraternity party at my brother’s college. And somehow I bounced between feeling flattered and feeling ashamed. I craved love. I still don’t completely understand the origins of my desperate need. Probably it had something to do with my father. He was volatile and violent and often I hated him. But I loved him too, of course. When he was dying he was so sad and I stayed with him, my heart scraped raw. I asked my oldest brother to come but he wouldn’t. I asked him to do a video call with Dad but he wouldn’t do that either. I didn’t insist or get outraged; I simply accepted his demurral. It was his challenge to wrestle with, not mine.
Somehow I ended up with a good husband. Truthfully I never really expected to. I figured I would be one of those women who would be divorced several times and whose kids would hate her. As it turned out, I never had kids. The thought of having to witness their pain as they made their way in the world filled me with fear. I knew I would unearth all the anger I had swallowed during my own childhood and youth and it would incinerate their persecutors, as the vengeful goddess Kali did to all who deserved it. In the end I wouldn’t be able to help them, only spread destruction. Plus, mothers bored the shit out of me, I have to say. Their IQs seemed to drop during pregnancy, certainly after they gave birth. The myopia of regarding their brats as special and talking endlessly about their children’s milestones in development, which were completely uninteresting and predictable. Plus the noise that toddlers and young children made set my teeth on edge. I couldn’t handle all the yelling and screaming. It was impossible to have a conversation with a mom even if you managed to land on an interesting topic. Now I have certain regrets because first, I’m afraid to die alone, and second, my husband would have made a great father. Oh well!
I wish I could say that having a good husband inspired some faith in men. But it has not. Look around! In the USA we have a president who is absolutely one of the worst people ever. Somehow he made it to the top, leaving in his wake countless women victims. He is surrounded by other shitty men who are willing to do whatever it takes to increase their power and influence and grift as much as they can. All of them devoid of any kind of moral compass. And what of the women who raised them? They have a lot to answer for.
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Thank you, Cass, for spearheading this effort and creating a space where writing like this can be shared.
What this experience brought home to me is how attention can feel like care when we are young. I think many of us learn to tell the difference far too late.
It also left me wondering what it would take to give young people a stronger sense of worth before the world starts assigning value to their beauty, desirability, or usefulness to others. Not by promoting a culture of image, status, gratification, and attention, but by helping them become rooted in something deeper.
This essay is a reminder that adults shape the moral atmosphere young people grow up in. We owe them more honesty, more protection, and better examples of what care actually looks like.
To the anonymous writer: thank you for being so honest. I hope that sharing these experiences helps you feel heard, valued, and met with the genuine care of those reading.
More women need to expose how our culture had aided and abetted the sexual exploitation and abuse of females starting in our childhood. Mine began at age 4.