I was groped and I'm a man
I was groped and I'm a man. I was sixteen or seventeen, a lone runaway hippie hitching through rural New England in a bad rainstorm. A man in a van picked me up. He seemed nice. As darkness approached, the storm got so bad that the driver had to pull over. He told me that he was going to sleep, and that I was welcome to stay in the van. I stayed and went to sleep a respectable distance from the driver.
I was awakened by his groping and humping. He didn't stop when I screamed for him to stop. I got free after a struggle, grabbed my backpack, and was able escape out of the van's side door. I ran into some woods in the near dark and spent the rainy night crying and shivering in the woods. It was the worst night of my life. When dawn arrived, I got a ride with two college girls who took me far away from that spot.
The van driver was mildly famous in that area of New England. He had a respectable job in the arts. I never told anybody. I never received counseling. The experience did mess me up: I'm still unable to trust men, and I don't really like to be around them. I have a hard time with any relationships.
It's very difficult for me to watch Donald Trump. His supporters don't appear to know what it's like, in my opinion. Mr. Trump just doesn't seem to care.
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I'm so sorry that this happened to you.
As far as Trump's supporters go, I suspect that some fall in the category of groper, some in the group of privileged males who assume it's their right to celebrate their "manhood" in any way they deem, and others from a culture that has shamed victims to the point that they don't speak up. And maybe, like many women in my mom's generation, some carry deeply embedded conditioning as women that their only value is in their sex appeal to men, so they take groping as, if not complementary, reassuring to their value.
As a man you might not understand, but I've got a liberal, moderately feminist mom (she's 80ish), and I can still see those threads from her youth holding her back and coloring her life, even in her senior years.
