thoughts on entitlement

sparked by Promising Young Woman. CW: sexual harassment

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about entitlement. I just re-watched Promising Young Woman (2020) and afterward I looked up some articles about the movie to get a sense of what the general discourse was. I was so shocked at how many people were upset at the film’s failure to satisfy their desire for a rape-revenge story. While I understand where a desire for that kind of movie might come from, I was disappointed to see very little conversation about what I felt the film was about: the ways male entitlement has built and perpetuated rape culture.

I am so viscerally aware of the way male entitlement has shaped the way my body exists within the world and with itself. Teenage boys, specifically, have a certain entitlement that has always unsettled me. Even now, as a full grown woman, teenage boys make me extremely uncomfortable. Their entitlement taunted me when I was younger (a child, if we want to get specific about it). Of course, the entitlement is even more unsettling when I see it in grown men. It’s that special brand of easiness and indifference; the thought that anything, even someone’s body, is owed to them.

One day, in 7th grade, the boy who sat next to me in science class put his hand between my legs. I remember a lot about that day. I remember I was wearing my favorite dark wash skinny jeans. I remember that after that day I couldn’t wear those jeans without feeling his fingers on the seams. I remember my hair was freshly washed and went past my shoulders; I remember a red bow adorned my curls, because I was obsessed with Hello Kitty. I remember the green notebooks and open textbook on the black top of the lab tables he and were seated at, side by side. Me and this boy.

This boy was always trying to talk to me and I was always trying to listen to the teacher. I was used to spending at least half of the 40-minute class period shushing and/or ignoring him. On that day—it must have been winter, because I was wearing my gray, faux-fur lined, boots—he leaned towards me and whispered something. I ignored him. Then he leaned further and started dancing his fingers around my crotch. I pushed his hand away, and then pushed it away agin, but he kept coming back. I remember he was laughing. I hissed stop and swatted at him, my eyes bouncing between my lap and the teacher lecturing. Eventually, I said [name], fucking stop and he drew his hand back like I had bitten him. Oh, you curse now? I stared at my textbook, trying to find where the spot where the teacher was reading, my cheeks warming. That was the first time I had ever cursed; I was so embarrassed. I was embarrassed that I had said the f-word, I was embarrassed that a boy was paying attention to me, I was angry that he was touching me. He leaned over to me again and my whole body tensed. Bitch.

That happened at 10am. I went through the whole day, his whispers playing over and over in my head. I knew I didn’t like what had happened—I knew it was wrong—but I didn’t know why. Every time he reached his hand toward me, he said the same thing, but I didn’t know what it meant. You want me to touch your pretty pussy.

In 8th grade, we sat in groups of four in Art. I was the only girl at my table. The boy who sat directly across from me was always reaching across the wide, glossy-finished, wood table to touch me any way he could; even just to brush my hand. Contact with my skin, it seemed, was necessary for him to get through class. His eyes were always glued to me, grazing my body, saying anything that he thought would move my gaze from my sketchbook to him. He said things about my body, my lips, my clothes. He said things he swore were compliments, but always left me feeling dirty. That was the boy who sat across from me.

The boy who sat to my right teased me constantly. Anytime my head was turned his hands found his way to some part of my body, usually the back of my neck, to get me to face him. His best friend, the fourth person at our table, egged him on. They taunted me when I flinched at the wandering hands that found me; when I rejected, or tried to ignore, the “compliments” they gave me. I started preparing myself for what had once been my favorite class—at home, I stood in front of the mirror and practiced being un-reactionary. I started wearing my hair down, so my neck would be covered.

In 9th grade, it was a lot of boys, at different times, in different ways. There was the senior in my art class who felt the need to place both his hands on my waist every time he walked past me. And the boy in Earth Science, who sat across the room and amused himself and his friends by making obscene gestures in my direction and texting me crude things. And the junior who sat so close to me on the bus that my body was smushed against the window. And the boy who I had to pass in the hallway anytime I was running late to Spanish—he walked so close behind me that I could feel his breath. He told me I was so sexy and that I had a nice ass and was always trying to hold my hand or throw his arm around my shoulder. Pushing him away or telling him to stop reminded me of how small I was. Sometimes I laughed as I pushed, as if that would make his reaction less volatile. He would slam his hands against the lockers and/or growl bitch as I hurried away.

All those boys, the boys I was afraid of when I walked into school every day, don’t know who they are or what they did. A lot of people would say that my experiences are not that serious. But guess what? My body doesn’t care. It has decided I have to live with it all, and it’s exhausting (for example, if anyone—my husband, my mother, anybody— touches the back of my neck my reflexes go into over-drive and react defensively, usually physically). It’s exhausting, that after all this time—after all the growing I’ve done, all the care I’ve given myself—that my instinct is to protect the men who hurt me. Here I am, concealing their names and identities. Why? I don’t know.

I want to say I could fill a book with all the things that have happened to me, and my body, but I don’t know if that’s true. What’s true is that it has taken me over 10 years to be able to write down only a few of the experiences I had with boys in middle and high school. What’s true is that I don’t want to write more, because I don’t want to have to remember anything else. What’s true is that since 7th grade I have been a bitch. A mean, cold-hearted, insensitive, intimidating bitch. Because men were convinced they were entitled to my body and reacted with violent dismissal when they could not have it.

What woman do you know that has not had to ignore—or defend herself against—a violation to her being? We all have. We have all been resigned to this reality: that a man will walk away satisfied (with a piece of pussy, or a kiss, or the feeling of another person’s skin against his, or even just the knowledge that he can make someone afraid).

I sometimes wonder if men know that while they go through the world, claiming whatever and whoever they want, we—women—are laughing our way out of the harm our bodies hold (as my grandma says, I have to laugh, otherwise I’ll cry). We laugh when we share our stories—the things that happened in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade, and before (and beyond)—or we do not share our stories at all. We laugh when we tell our friends about his grip on our arm; we laugh when we count the number of times we said no; we laugh at the way he never listens. Because what else is there to do?

All my rambling comes down to this: I love the film Promising Young Woman for the way it highlights (and wonderfully exaggerates—even, laughs at) the paths women take to cope with male entitlement and its consequences.

Our bodies (and Promising Young Woman) know, we are not here for the transparency of feeling or intimacy—we are here to be felt. And boys, with all their childish entitlement, get bored so quickly; it’s so easy for us to turn from sex objects to bitches in their minds. We have to laugh. At the simplicity and stupidity of men. And despite it, how firm their grip holds.