brendan halpin

I wrote this nearly nine years ago for my mailing list, and I think it’s one of the best pieces of nonfiction I’ve ever written. I also think it unfortunately remains relevant.

Content warning: depictions of violence, discussion of sexual assault.

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Hi everybody. I started writing this after the Kavanaugh hearings ended, and this is going to involve some thoughts that these inspired. So, you might or might not be up to reading this now, or ever.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the terrible things that boys and men do to women, and occurs to me that they’re probably related to the terrible things boys and men do to other boys and men.

I’m a short man, and I was a short boy. I was also unathletic. As an only child, I had nobody to practice fighting with, so I couldn’t fight. I could flee and cower okay, though!

Boy culture is every bit as violent and fucked up as man culture, and so sometimes I got targeted. Overall, I was lucky; I was never systematically bullied as so many are, and I was never sexually assaulted, but, like a lot of boys, I did live with the threat of violence. The things that women have been saying on social media about checking surroundings, eyeing strangers, looking for escape routes—these things are all familiar to me from childhood.

I walked the same route home, first from school and later from my bus stop, for several years. Once, for a couple of weeks, and older kid Jeff Jones would chase me and my friends and throw things at us (rocks? I never got hit, so I don’t remember) but the great majority of walks home were uneventful.

But once, in third grade I was walking home alone and got punched and thrown into a hedge by a couple of kids from the Catholic school down the road.

Once, when I was about 12, I was walking home alone and a kid sitting at a bus stop threw eggs at me after I walked past. I thought this was Eric Sieber, a kid who had knocked me to the ground once on the 2nd grade playground, but it might have just been a kid who looked like him.

And later, in the summer after 9th grade (I think, though it might have been 8th), a kid chased me down and threatened me after I walked to the mailbox a block from my house. He said, “my friend says you called me a dick.” I’ve told this story to great comic effect many times, and him saying “I’ll put the whammy bammy on your ass” was funny even at the time. The part of the story I usually don’t tell is how scared I was.

I got beaten up at summer camp one time. I remember the kid had me pinned and was punching me (in the torso rather than the face. Good lookin’ out!) and I was thinking I had no way out of this but to just lay there until he got tired of hitting me.

I was attacked by some kids near my friend Robert’s house once, probably in 7th grade—they threw me to the ground and started kicking me. I was wearing a very puffy coat, so their kicks weren’t hurting me, and I was laughing hysterically. Robert stopped them. Good lookin’ out!

And then there was the time in 9th grade when John Zorn had me on the floor of the boys’ locker room after gym class and was trying to stuff his sweaty jockstrap in my mouth. I was, as at summer camp, pinned to the floor, but somehow I was keeping his jock out of my mouth. Maybe he needed one hand free to hold the jockstrap, so he couldn’t pin both of my hands at once? In any case, I was squirming and flailing and doing everything I could to keep his jockstrap out of my mouth. I vividly remember how the look on his face changed from amusement to rage, and how terrifying this was—maybe I had caused him pain with my flailing, or maybe he was just enraged that I didn’t just submit and eat his jockstrap like I was supposed to, but either way, he was seriously angry, and I remember thinking that this encounter was going to end with me in the hospital. It didn’t though. For reasons I no longer remember, he stopped and let me up. (I kept thinking about John Zorn when I saw Brett Kavanaugh’s rage. Just let me do what I want! How dare you resist?)

Now, again, I’m not trying to equate any of this with a sexual assault, though I guess the jockstrap thing was a sexualized humiliation. I really just thought this was a normal part of growing up male, and as fucked up as this is, maybe it was.

The beating at camp followed an argument that escalated, so that one at least made sense to me. The rest of the assaults, though, were unprovoked. These boys just decided to attack me for no other reason than because they could. It was profoundly humiliating to be so powerless—not in charge of my own body.

Of course, this is how men treat women too. And it’s far worse for women. And the fact that the random threats tapered off after adolescence (though they did continue, intermittently, into my college years) suggests to me that bullies were just turning their violent attentions elsewhere.  I can’t help thinking that we, the small and weak boys, provided these guys with dress rehearsals for how they’d later treat women.          I wish I could report that living under the threat of violence made us—the small boys, the socially awkward boys, the physically awkward boys— better, more empathetic people. But I don’t really think that’s true. I’ve written before about being a verbal bully in middle and high school, convinced that every nasty put-down I mustered was justified because I was small.

And, of course, geek culture, where many of the boys who had ownership of their own bodies taken from them fled, is notoriously hostile to women. It’s getting better, but it certainly reads to me like a bunch of boys who got dominated turning around and being nasty, inappropriate, and unwelcoming in order to reassert their dominance in this new space where the athletic boys rarely tread.

All of which is to say only that I recognized the angry, petulant, entitled bully on TV the other day. And I empathize with the rage that people felt watching this guy pretend he was innocent when we all know he’s guilty. And I’m sorry for any time I ever emulated this stupid dominance hierarchy bullshit.

I hope we can all do better.