By Damieka Thomas
The first time I was catcalled, I was eleven years old.
Since it was laundry day, I was wearing underwear with princesses on them and a yellow shirt that was a little too tight. My hips had spread, taking me from a tall lanky girl whose jeans would not stay up on her waist to this half-woman-half-girl creature. I wished that I’d stayed the same. I was utterly crushed the week before when the scale at my grandma’s house told me that I was 102 pounds. I didn’t eat dinner that night and maybe this was the beginning of a lifelong fucked up relationship to food and my body because what woman doesn’t have a lifelong fucked up relationship to food and her body?
Lately, I’d taken to staring, transfixed, at my hips in the steam of a fogged window after a shower, ever-expanding, littered with bright red stretch marks. I’d begun praying to God that he’d make the growing stop. Those prayers were never answered. Instead, my ass and thighs also expanded. The stretch marks continued to litter my body like soft red lightning bolts. The growing pains continued. My breasts came in, small nubs with puffy brown nipples at first, then expanding rapidly until I could fit them into a B cup bra.
The day that I was catcalled, I was walking home from school. I was carrying a Nancy Drew novel. I’d just moved to a new school and was lonely, having been transported from the redwood beauty of Fort Bragg and my friends there to the ugliness of palm trees and flat orchards of Live Oak. I was obsessed with Nancy Drew at the time. And I mean OG, Mary Sue, perfect, All-American, racist Nancy Drew. I thought she was the baddest bitch around, and I wanted to be just like her. The book was tucked safely under my arm, guarded from the harsh mid-August sun, the roughness of the hard laminated library cover chafing my skin a bit. I was wearing tight blue jeans and my too-small yellow shirt. I could see my breasts moving a little under it, and every once in a while, I looked down at them, transfixed by my own body, the suddenness of its weight on me. It felt like a thing that was not yet mine. I didn’t feel pretty most of the time, but that day I did. I liked the golden brown of my skin in the sunlight, the mole on my left breast catching the light.
A man pulled up in an old blue car next to me and rolled down his window. I thought he might ask for directions or try to talk to me, which men had done before. Last year, in Fort Bragg, our older male neighbor, spoke to me through our fence. He had thin gray hair and beady blue eyes. He reminded me of my grandpa, except he made me feel weird. Not unsafe per se, just weird. He said I could come hang out with him at his house whenever I wanted. I told Mom, and for reasons I didn’t understand, she told me to never talk to him again.
Men liked to talk to me. This was good, I thought. Attention was good, even if it made me uncomfortable. Last year, when I was barely ten, my mom’s male friend asked me, “What do you think sex is?” When I tried to change the subject, he added, “No, really, I want to know what you think it is.” He laughed as I fumbled my way through some response about kissing and rolling around in bed. “That’s what little girls always think,” he said. “You’ll know the truth soon.”
I thought this man might try something similar. I shifted my book. I looked down at my Converse, littered with drawings from my friends in Fort Bragg. I missed home. I hated it here. It was too hot and too dry and Mom slept too much and we only had Top Ramen and the Nutrisystem that Nana had sent us. We didn’t have money in Fort Bragg either, but at least I had my friends.
The man looked at me, his gaze hot as the sun on my face. I expected his voice to come quietly, for him to start a conversation. I didn’t want it, but that’s what I thought would happen. Instead, he yelled, so loud that my eardrums pounded and I jumped a little, then flushed, embarrassed at my own fear.
“Ay, mamacita,” he said. “Nice ass! Can I get your number, baby?”
I looked up. My skin was hot. He looked old enough to be my dad, if not older, considering I had a young dad. The man’s dark eyes had wrinkles around them. His arms were tattooed, gripping his steering wheel. His fingernails were dirty. I felt sick, but I kept walking. Nancy stared at me from under my arm. I wanted to tell him to fuck off. Use the word I’d just learned last year, which still felt so new and powerful on my tongue. But I watched my Converse continue to move across the concrete, soles of my feet slapping the hot pavement. My feet didn’t look like my own. Nothing felt like my own. My breasts, my apparently nice ass, my hips, my stomach, my hair. Nothing. The man’s eyes lingered longer, taking me in, hungry and desperate. I could feel him all over me, touching, prodding like I was a science experiment. Then he sped off, tires squealing, his laugh echoing down the street. Some kids from school, also walking home, looked at me. Some giggled awkwardly. No one said anything.
Some of the older girls, the ones in eighth or ninth grade, looked at me knowingly. Their apathetic eyes seemed older than they were. Welcome, they seemed to say. Every woman that I knew had something. My great great grandmother had married a man who was twenty-two when she was only fourteen, giving birth to his kids by fifteen. No one in our family talked about the age gap except to say, Things were different back then. Lately, my grandma had taken to talking about how much she truly hated her husband as her mind began to go. Everyone in my family said she was irrationally angry due to Alzheimer’s, but I felt the truth behind her words. Last year, Mom had sat with me on my bed in Fort Bragg and told me about how she was molested by her babysitter’s husband when she was only five. “That’s why I’m so protective of you”, she said, her red-rimmed eyes only half-there. These revelations left me simultaneously attracted to boys while terrified of them. Every woman had something, but I wasn’t ready to confront my somethings yet. I just wanted to be a kid.
When I got home, I took a long shower, scrubbing that man’s gaze off my skin, and when I went to bed that night, I turned my book so I could only see the pale yellow back cover, and I couldn’t feel Nancy’s pale blue gaze judging me.
Later the same year, I got my first period. It was a month before my twelfth birthday. I was at school, forced to go by my mom even though I told her I felt sick. She said that I’d missed too much school already and I could call my great grandma if I was feeling too sick. I left my second period class with stomach pains, thinking that I just had to shit, and I did, but when I went to flush in the bathroom, I saw it. The blood. Running down my inner thighs, dripping into the toilet, staining my underwear. It was everywhere.
I knew what a period was, of course. Mom had given me the talk about them years ago. In Fort Bragg, my friends and I became obsessed with getting ours, desperate for some version of the womanhood that it bestowed upon us. I was one of the last of my friend group to get it, and I was excited for it. But I didn’t expect this. This heaviness in my gut, my breasts, my thighs, my whole being. And I knew that there was blood involved, of course, but this much? It stained my pink underwear, dripping down my thighs onto the tile floor of the bathroom when I stood up to pull up my pants. On top of that, I felt a strange combination of nausea and the pain that comes just before needing to take a shit, a heaviness in my gut that I wanted to purge.
I snuck out of the bathroom, grabbed some free pads from our dispenser, then scurried back to the stall and tucked them into my underwear. I went back to class. My head ached. My stomach burned. Finally, at lunch, I gave in and called my great grandma, who picked me up and drove me to her house just up the street. She gave me ibuprofen and chamomile tea with a smile on her lips, tottering the line between making fun of me and being sympathetic.
“I can’t believe I wanted this,” I groaned, contorting my body into strange shapes that somehow felt good in her bed, feeling like my entire stomach might fall out into my panties. “I hate being a woman.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s no fun.”
I took a nap, traumatized by the whole thing. When I woke up, Mom took me home and showed me how to use a pad and told me how often to change them out. My face burned the whole time. My periods would not get much better in the coming years. Bad periods run in my family. My grandma had fibroids and endometriosis so bad that she had to get a full hysterectomy at twenty-five. When I was twenty-three, I was diagnosed with PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder), a condition of severe PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome) that affects 3-8% of women, although the number could be more because women’s medical conditions are notoriously poorly funded and researched, and doctors tend to have biases against female pain, believing us to be hysterical at worst and over-dramatic at best.
Sometimes, people tell me that I talk about my period too much. Apparently, it’s a sensitive subject. When I moved into my first apartment, a few months into living with him, my male roommate told me, “I’ve never heard a girl talk about her period so much.” He has three sisters. A mother. A girlfriend, whom he plans to marry and have children with someday. Why do we shelter the men in our lives from these truths, all while listening to them make jokes about their dicks as if they’re the funniest things in the world? I’m not interested in playing nice anymore. When has the world ever played nice with women?
I grew older. The catcalling continued, becoming banal, routine. The periods continued, heavier some months, lighter others. Harder some years, easier others. My tits got bigger, then smaller by sheer force, then bigger again. The same happened to my ass. My thighs. Everything shrank for a long time, beaten into submission, then expanded as I slowly began eating again. Maybe my eating disorder was a way of taking my body back, protecting myself. Maybe it was a way of conforming, becoming tiny, pale, white. All I know is that my body has never felt like my own. Always, there is a sense of someone watching, either distantly or up close. The voyeurism of it all is like a softcore porn movie. Even alone in my room, I can feel it. This body is never my own. Margaret Atwood said it best when she wrote, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” And so it continues, on and on.
When I was eighteen, I had my first job at Subway. I had a married co-worker who asked all of the female staff members out on dates. He told me that he liked watching hentai. When he found out that I was a virgin, he said that he could give me good head the first time, if I wanted. When I complained to the managers, they shrugged and told me that he was weird but harmless. All of us laughed at him, called him ugly and annoying behind his back. Laughter is the only remedy when every woman has something.
When I was nineteen, I worked at Round Table. Our boss sexually harassed every girl who worked there. One time, he came up behind me and sniffed my neck. He smiled and said, “You smell really good today. Wear that perfume more often.” He said it like it was a command. I never wore the perfume again. “You’re very exotic looking,” he said one day unprompted, leering at me as I counted out our till. When my little sister, who was thirteen at the time, came into the store, he told me she was “pretty for a little Black girl.” I had to go stand in the walk-in freezer for a few moments, taking deep breaths, and digging my nails into my wrists. Funny, the way that we can stomach these things when they happen to us, but the rage we feel when they happen to those we love.
When a few female servers teamed up to take him down and HR came in to investigate, our co-managers—both women—told us that we had to lie or we would be fired on the spot. I wish I had walked, but when you’re nineteen and broke, minimum wage for thirty hours a week is hard to pass up. So, like all of my other female coworkers, I played the long game and applied to other jobs until I could finally leave. I smiled while my boss called me pretty. I pretended not to see when he came up behind me and blatantly watched my ass while I switched out our salad bar. Was I asking for it, in my black jeans, leaning over to dump cans of garbanzo beans that smelled like farts into small plastic trays?
At the same job, I was asked out repeatedly by a male co-worker. The last time he asked, “I thought you liked me. You don’t even have a boyfriend.” I didn’t tell him that I didn’t need a boyfriend to know that I didn’t want to date his wack ass. I had to start being cold just to get him to leave me alone. A female coworker told me to go easier on him, verifying that he was indeed a nice guy. All of the female servers also repeatedly had our asses pinched by an older male patron. We used to laugh when we saw him enter the store. “Here comes the ass pincher,” we’d say. This is what it is to be a woman, a choice between anger or humor. We chose humor. I wish we would’ve chopped his hand off.
In the winter of the first year of my MFA, my great grandpa died two days before the quarter began. I went home and took care of my grandpa and great grandma. I helped them plan funeral arrangements. I made my grandpa dinner while he sat and watched TV, staring straight ahead without seeing. Grief permeated every corner of the house. It clung to the old, matted couch. Greased my hair. I wanted to go back to Davis, and I felt guilty for wanting to leave. I knew that one day I would also lose him, and I was sick with knowing. Sick with grief, both present and future. I felt more human than ever. My chest ached. I consoled myself by doing homework and reading and writing, and on a less healthy note, swiping through dating apps. That was how I met him.
We went on our first date in Davis, eating at a ramen place that he found mid. He showed me his meme library and we talked about philosophy, literature, and politics. He proudly called himself a feminist. We talked about socialism and Republicans voting against their own interests and anti-blackness in POC communities. I was impressed by his intelligence and the way the conversation flowed easily. I didn’t feel the need to dumb myself down with him like I did with other men. I wasn’t sure how attracted I was to him initially. He had a cute dimpled smile and a round cherubic face and big brown eyes, but he was also short and squat and his hands were too stubby. But after our conversation, I found myself leaning toward him. After dinner, we walked around Davis. We went to a used bookstore and read old erotic novels, turning to page sixty-nine and seeing who could find the steamiest sex scenes until we gave up. Page sixty-nine was too early in the novels for fucking, it was still pining and longing. We went to Sophia’s and drank until they started closing around us, and he walked me to my car.
For our next date, I had car issues, so he drove me to Sac, and we played mini golf. He was funny. He kept up with my sarcasm better than most people. When we got back to my apartment, we sat in the car talking for a little while before he asked if he could kiss me. I said yes, grateful that he asked first. He was a good kisser, and kissing turned to making out, lips on my neck, then back on my mouth, hands bunching at my hips.
This was going well, I thought. We were going to make out for a while, and then I was going to go home and go to bed. Then he put my hand on his dick. I was a little off-put, but I understood that he’d misread the situation. I pulled away. Immediately, he put it back, moved it up and down with his hand, and groaned into my mouth. I left it there, fingers stiff and clammy. He was still kissing me, and the kiss was good, but I didn’t want this and I didn’t know how to stop it without hurting his feelings.
He pulled away. My hand was still on his dick.
“Can I come inside?” He asked.
No, I thought. My cells were screaming with anxiety, but maybe I was misunderstanding the situation. Maybe he just wanted to make out. Stupid, so fucking stupid.
“Yeah,” I said.
I fumbled with my keys at the door, and we went up to my room. I took a piss, and when I came back, he was lying on my bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. I settled next to him, and he gripped my face, kissed me, biting my lip so hard it felt like it was drawing blood. I pulled away with a start. He took this as a good sign. He took off his pants, dick pink and erect, staring at me. His shirt was still on. I was fully clothed. I wished he was. I kissed him so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at it. It made me sick, looking at this penis that I didn’t want out in my bed right now.
We kissed for a while, but he kept moving my head toward his crotch, trying to get me to go down on him. I finally jerked him off, hoping it would appease him. It didn’t. I felt bad. I’d done this before with other men. I’d been eager to touch them, have them touch me. Men that I knew about as well as I knew him. And I liked him. He was smart and cute. But I didn’t want this. Maybe eventually, but not tonight. I didn’t want to fuck. I didn’t want to give him head. I didn’t want to see his dick. I just wanted to make out. But I’d invited him in. I’d invited this in. His hands felt good on my skin, and he was a good kisser, but that was all I wanted. How did I say that? What was I thinking, inviting him inside? I was so dumb. He took off my shirt and unclasped my bra. I felt sweaty despite the cold, and I climbed on top of him, put my breasts in his face–the steps to a well-known game. I hoped that it was enough for him. It wasn’t.
I don’t remember how it happened, but finally, after he gestured toward it enough times, I relented and put his dick in my mouth. He grabbed fistfuls of my hair in rough hands and pushed me down. My eyes watered, but I didn’t move away. I’ve blocked a lot of it out, but I remember that it made me feel sick, looking at his dick, that I didn’t enjoy giving him head, that the raw fuckkkk from the back of his throat didn’t sound as sexy. I remember that I wanted to bite. His hands, pushing me down, scared me. The rawness of what we were doing, how much power he had to do whatever he wanted to me at that moment, scared me. Finally, he pulled his hands away, and I came up for air. I looked at him.
His large dark eyes were wide. He asked if I was okay. I lied and said I was. We cuddled for a second, but our limbs were stiff and awkward. We didn’t look at each other. He stood. He dressed quickly, saying he had to work the next day. We awkwardly shook hands at my front door. I’d be lying if I said that I immediately felt victimized, or even thought of the blowjob again for a while. The next morning, I thought of the fun parts of the night. His lips on mine, littering my neck, his hands on my breasts. I didn’t think about the blowjob. I put it out of my mind. I saw him again. We kissed again. Later, it was hard to reconcile the fun parts of the night with the bad parts of it, so I tried my best to forget about the bad parts. I didn’t give up talking to him until he forgot my birthday and I called him on it, ending things.
It wasn’t until I was recounting the night’s events to a friend at a bar. She paused, looking at me over the rim of her beer bottle. “Babe,” she said. “That doesn’t sound completely consensual.” I wanted to justify myself, defend him, as though his actions were a moral failing on my fault. After all, hadn’t I kept talking to him? What did that say about me? Was it really assault? Some would call it “regret sex.” They’d say I was being dramatic since things ended poorly, and that I was playing victim. An Andrew Tate-Joe Rogan-Ben Shapiro mash-up of a man played in my head, some self-important white man puffing a cigar. Women love to play the victim, they said. Maybe they were right. Maybe I was just a woman scorned. But replaying the night’s events, I realized that if a friend told me the same thing, I’d have similar concerns. And I was there. I knew how it felt, being face-fucked by someone whose dick I didn’t want in my mouth. Still, it took until my next therapy session to say it aloud. “I guess it wasn’t consensual.” My mouth caught on the words, heavy and hard in my throat. “But I feel weird saying that. I kept talking to him. Why did I do that?”
“It’s hard to accept,” my therapist said, nodding sympathetically. “Many victims continue to talk to their assaulter. It’s a way of taking back power.”
Victim. The word burned, a searing pain. I had seen friends do the same thing with abusers, keeping them in their lives far beyond their expiration date, but it didn’t feel right for me to fall prey to the same thing. Wasn’t I smarter than that? But every woman has something. We all know that on some level, yet we all think we’re the exception. We believe these things happen to other people, until they don’t. Every time I thought about that night, I turned my mind in another direction. I washed my sheets, and I pretended that he was never in them. I still have a hard time saying the words “sexual assault” in relation to this situation. I still feel sick to my stomach when I think of it. I was hungry when I began writing this section, but my hunger has turned to a stone in my stomach. I don’t want people debating about whether or not this was assault. This is what it is to be a woman, to be confused, to have a body that isn’t completely your own. I want to take back the vestiges of my body that he holds in his thick palms, but I can’t. All I can do is write, typing until it makes sense. It will never make sense.
Every woman I know has something. My mom was repeatedly molested by her babysitter’s husband. When she told my grandpa about the molestation and he pressed charges, the man’s wife protected him, even after his daughters said he’d done the same to them. He spent six months in jail before getting out for good behavior. For a while, he went to church with my great grandmother, who said that he found God.
Every woman I know has something. When I was sixteen, my Nana told me about her brother’s friend sneaking into her room when she was fourteen years old and raping her. “I was watching the blood run down my legs,” she says. “And I couldn’t believe that I lost my virginity that way. I still don’t really believe it.” I tell her that she didn’t lose anything. I tell her that if she wants to believe in virginity, she can also believe that she lost it whenever she wants. She doesn’t understand.
Every woman I know has something. When I was nine, my childhood best friend called me on the phone, crying and screaming. I could hear her stepdad grunting and calling her names in the background, a bed creaking in time to their movements. We never spoke about it. When we were eighteen, my other childhood best friend confessed to me that she was molested repeatedly by her sibling as a child. After eight years of keeping it secret, I was the first person she ever told. It has been nearly fifteen years, and she still has nightmares.
Every woman I know has something. My friend, Ariana, had an older boyfriend freshman year of high school. They got high one night, and they made out. He started to touch her over her panties, which was familiar territory. They’d been doing this most Friday nights for a month now. They’d never gotten further than that before, though. But that night, he took off his underwear, moved her panties to the side, and tried to penetrate her. She said no. He did it anyway, and afterward, he held her and told her how good it was before making her clean the blood-spotted sheets. They dated for a year after that. “I don’t think he raped me, though,” she tells me at a party, sipping vodka and orange juice from a styrofoam cup. “He loved me. We were gonna do it at some point, anyway.” I don’t even know how to begin to tell her that it was rape. Who am I to say that the man she sees as her first love was a rapist?
Every woman I know has something. My friend, Lauren, was raped by her father her whole childhood. Her mom covered for him because he worked at Chico State and paid for their trips to Spain. He was sentenced on child pornography charges. He got out of jail after less than a year and lived only a few miles from her. She had to fight tooth and nail for a restraining order.
Every woman I know has something. My friend, Isabella, was raped by her uncle in a bathroom during her quince. When she told her mom later, they blamed it on the dress she was wearing. “Welcome to womanhood,” she says sardonically when she tells me this, laughing the kind of laugh that suppresses a cry. My friend, Maria, tells me about how her older sister’s first boyfriend, who was twenty at the time, made her give him a handjob when she was thirteen, while her sister slept next to them on the couch. She says it casually, shrugging like it’s unfortunate but can’t be helped. My friend, Juliette, tells me that her pastor took her out to the Oklahoma woods and made her do the same thing, and how her hands were so chapped by the end that they were rubbed raw and red for a whole day. When she told her parents, they asked her what she was wearing and told her to read her Bible and pray to God for forgiveness. “I don’t want forgiveness,” she tells me while we smoke a joint after a party, lips parting with smoke, mingling with the frigid night air. “I want fucking vengeance.”
Damieka Thomas is a mixed-race writer and poet from Northern California. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis. Her work has been published in Brown Hound Press, Boulevard Magazine, HerStry, The New Limestone Review, The Noyo Review, Glassworks Magazine, Poets.org, and more. She was the recipient of the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize in Fiction and the Celeste Turner Wright Prize in Poetry in 2021. She was also the recipient of the 2024 Jack Hicks Award for Literature of California. You can find more of her work and get in contact with her by visiting her website https://www.damiekathomas.com/
Artwork by Dan Cassidy