We are damned if we stay silent, and damned if we speak.

When I was nineteen years old, only a year into adulthood, and only hesitantly an adult, a man sexually assaulted me.
We had met in our apartment complex one night, at the community pool. He was good looking, a military man, cocky and confident, and I was going through the end of my first relationship away from my small hometown. I invited him into my home. I kissed him. I let him into my bedroom. That was where my permission ended. When I told him no, he proceeded to try to shove his genitalia up the leg of my shorts, and when I began to cry and told him to stop or I would scream, he told me I was a tease. And I felt guilt. I am going to say that again- I felt GUILT. As a girl, I had been preconditioned to believe that I could feel bad for getting a guy "worked up", and I didn't kick him out. I slept on the floor next to my bed, while he slept in my bed, and I woke to him trying to do the same thing, only to my face. That time, I was done.
Typing these words out makes me feel a multitude of emotions, and none of them are good, and I don't even feel any relief, because by saying them aloud, it means my mother may read them, my father may read them, and someday my own children may read them. Twenty years later, I still feel such shame, I still feel a roiling in my gut like lava, like poison, and I suppose that was the gift he gave to me. I have written stories where the scenario ended differently, ones where I was saved by a hero before I could have these memories, and ones where he succeeded to take the rest of me with him.
I tell this story now, after two decades of telling very few people, because I think the words of so many of us have become lost in a storm of anti-feminism rhetoric, and it is imperative they are retrieved.
If you want to tell me this is political, it may be. But if I have waited all this time to relive something that haunts me, and am only speaking about it, please know that it is only because I now feel I have an obligation to use my words as my tools, even if it means only fixing one mind.
People have wondered aloud why Bill Cosby's, and now Donald Trump's victims have waited this long to come forward, and they have somehow managed to blame the victims- they were porn stars, they deserved it, they were models, they deserved it, it was only a crotch grab, get over it, they are probably lying because they didn't have him arrested (or fucking kill them) at the time. But if you are saying these things, spewing such vitriol, so bravely hunched over your keyboards, then you are disregarding me and my story. And the story of so many women who have hidden in shame, decorated in scars, who stay quiet and alone.
It can be as tiny as an unwanted catcall while you are walking on campus alone, or a touch so light you think you may have imagined it. It can be a sexually aggressive date, a trusted family member, or a stranger outside of a darkened mall. You can be a child, or a grown up. But what you can't be, according to society in the form of social media, is private about your horror. It is only real if you relive it over and over, and tell everyone every tiny detail, the minutiae leading up to the main event, the aftermath in all of its glory, or else... it doesn't exist.
What are we telling the young girls of today when we tell them we don't believe them? What are we telling them when we say that it is worse to use a private email server than to forcibly touch, demean and disrespect a gender that makes up half of our population? What are we telling our sons about how to treat the opposite sex, or how to explore their sexuality in a safe, consensual and loving way, if we are also telling them it is ok to vote for the leader of arguably the most powerful country on the planet even though he has demonstrated countless times that he thinks our sons' moms and sisters are nothing but playthings? And this, by no means, discounts his bigoted comments about blacks, mexicans, and muslims, but those narratives, to be most effective, should be addressed by the people who are being personally attacked, as I am with this subject.
I have seen so many of my acquaintances on social media support this man, and I feel affronted. If you are a female and you support him, you are telling me that I was right to have stayed silent all these years, that my pain is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. That being a woman, in this day and age, after all that we have struggled through and persevered, is in jeopardy, and that you are ok with it.
I will end my diatribe on this note.
If you have been assaulted, if you have feared for your life, or your body, or your spirit, because someone has taken advantage of their physical strength, their power, their celebrity, or your trust, you are not alone. If you choose to stay silent, know that there are millions of women soldiers marching silently along with you. And if you choose to speak, we will take up the war cry with you. Sisters in battle.