Recently, while driving my son and a few of his friends to soccer practice, one of them used the word “chopped” to describe a girl from their class.
“Don’t say that,” I said, knowing full well it was Gen Alpha slang for unattractive.
The boy shrugged. “Everyone says it.”
Later, on the drive home, careful to avoid direct eye contact in the rearview mirror, I brought it up again.
“Mom, it’s just a word,” my son said, clearly annoyed.
“You cannot talk about people that way, especially girls,” I said. I wasn’t sure of the point I was trying to make, but I noticed the swell rising in my chest, flooding my nervous system.
“Fine,” he said. I could tell it wasn’t. He thought I was overreacting. I felt like I wasn’t reacting enough.
***
The Cornell Seven story hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still in the news. Being discussed at length on social media and Substack. Fed back to me again and again through my algorithm, each new, repugnant detail arriving before I’ve had the chance to fully absorb the last.
At the same time, a movement has begun: survivors of sexual assault are coming forward, sharing their personal stories. As a writer who focuses on women’s health issues, and a mother with two young sons, I’ve decided to share my own.
In high school, I was sexually assaulted at a house party. Nearly three decades later, I can still recall the metallic taste of the two-and-a-half Coors Lights I had on the way to the “rager” at somebody’s friend’s parents’ empty lake house. How immediately after we arrived, my boyfriend helped me find an upstairs bedroom where I could lie down and let the nausea pass. How he stayed with me for a while, rubbing my back until I fell asleep.
I woke up alone to the smell of cigarette smoke. The sound of a belt buckle hitting the floor. A stranger’s body sliding under the covers next to me, pressing down on me. Then, a stretch of time passed. It felt like hours but was probably only a matter of minutes. Everything slowed down; I tried to push the boy off me but he was too big. I went completely limp, the way animals do when resistance feels futile. I didn’t fight, flee, or freeze. I rolled over and played dead.
When it was over, he got dressed and left without saying a word. The smell of smoke lingered on the pillow, my skin, my hair. I wanted to run downstairs but I didn’t know where he’d gone, so I stayed perfectly still. Everything was sharp and in focus: the sound of laughter drifting up from the kitchen, the throbbing between my legs as if there was something still inside me.
In the months that followed, during algebra class, at soccer practice, lying awake beneath the oversized round window in my rural Vermont bedroom, the night came back to me in fragments, as singular moments, like pages of a flipbook. In my dreams, it came back with cinematic detail: the buckle, the smell of smoke, the repulsive softness of his body. I could feel myself disappearing beneath him, unable to scream, as if I were drowning.
I spent the rest of high school daydreaming through class. I was aloof in a way that read as cool—that teenage miracle where dissociation passes for confidence. Inside, I remained vigilant. I couldn’t risk closeness, so I attempted to bury his body under other bodies, but I couldn’t get out from under him. He was always there, pressing down, a weight I carried through every touch, every momentary closeness. Eventually, deeming intimacy a risk, I reached instead for longing, allowing myself to feel deeply without being seen or touched at all. My relationships became containers, holding all the feelings I couldn’t metabolize: fear, shame, sorrow, loss, disgust, loathing, anger. Does he love me? Will he choose me? Are we meant to be? Those questions were easier to wrestle with than the one I couldn’t voice: Would anyone love me if they knew the truth?
Trauma doesn’t just live in memory; it reorganizes the nervous system. It teaches the body what to expect and how to prepare for it. Mine taught me that desire was dangerous, that being wanted and being irreparably harmed could occupy the same house. So I split down the middle. I perfected the art of appearing present while quietly disappearing.
A few years ago, I found myself poring over an old high school photo album. In every photograph, my eyes looked empty and hollow, rimmed with heavy, black liner. My dirty-blonde hair was long, tangled, and unkempt. I looked like the corpse from Mary Jane’s Last Dance—the one where Tom Petty brings home a corpse and treats her as if she were alive.
In the back of the album, I found my family’s 1996 Christmas card tucked inside a cracked plastic sleeve. That was the year I stopped smiling, stopped showering, stopped leaving the house. I locked myself in my room, listening to Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes on repeat until it felt like a diagnosis. In the shot, I’m staring past the camera lens.
In another photo, I’m carrying an enormous hockey bag, big enough to stash a body, posing in front of a skating rink. That was the winter I joined the ice hockey team and my heart nearly gave out after I downed half a bottle of No-Doz on the way to practice. I pulled over to the side of the road, fell out of the car, and began vomiting in a ditch. My best friend had to drive the two of us back home and call poison control. She thought I wanted to die, but it was more complicated than that. I didn’t want to be inside myself anymore because he lived under my skin.
***
Years later, when I met my husband, Alex, in my late 20s, he was entirely unlike anyone I’d dated before. Alex is gentle and sensitive. He didn’t attend a single frat party in college. As a parent, he makes an effort to instill in our two boys the understanding that the work of a family—domestic, professional, logistical, and emotional—is shared.
Even so, as my son started middle school this fall, I’ve noticed a marked change. A certain bravado showing up in group chats and around friends. A shared misogynistic language entering the lexicon. I know that rape culture is built, in part, through the consistent dehumanization of girls and women, who are reduced to bodies, punchlines, stories told for someone else’s approval rating.
Until recently, I never told anyone about my sexual assault, not even my therapists. For a long time, I experienced what happened to me as something private and singular. Now I understand the opposite is true: my story is painfully ordinary. According to a survey from 2015, 1 in 5 women will experience completed or attempted rape in their lifetime.
Statistics like that are why I want my sons to know what I experienced. They need to understand that rape doesn’t happen only in dark parking garages—it happens everywhere, and sometimes between people who know each other. It happens at schools and summer camps, in the places you’d least expect it. It happens to people you know, people you love. It happened to me.
I cannot guarantee that my children will always be brave or kind, that they will always be empathetic. I know too much about the chaos of adolescence—shifting hormones, relentless peer pressure—to believe good parenting produces morally perfect children. I know how powerful the desire to belong can be. There were times in my life when I wanted that desperately. To tie a ribbon in my hair and send a signal that I was just like everybody else. That kind of longing made me quiet when I should have spoken up. It made me tolerate people I should have left behind. I try to hold empathy for my children’s lived experience. When they say “It’s just a joke. Everyone says it,” I know that what they really mean is: I want to be liked. I’m trying to fit in. But we have to start the conversation, or nothing will ever change.
I want my children to understand the consequences: what happens after the bad thing. I want them to understand that what you say and do to another person follows them out of the room, into their relationships, choices, and who they become in the world. Even after years of therapy, healthy partnership, achieving various metrics of success, I sometimes still feel broken. After that house party, I spent decades mistaking numbness for resilience, endurance for healing, absence for safety. A lot was taken from me that night, but in the end the greatest theft was time.
One day, these boundaries I’ve set for my children will become fault lines. And when the ground shifts beneath them, I want them to know exactly where they stand.