The attack came from behind—arms pinned suddenly to my sides, my body immobilized. Panic pulsed through my veins and terror gripped my throat then expelled into a yell that thundered up from my belly. Paralysis released. Legs free. Smash down! A full-force foot stomp to shatter the delicate bones of the instep. We crashed to the ground. Jab an elbow into the throat! Must incapacitate to ensure escape. Pivoting into a standing position, I snap-kicked a kneecap, and ran.
Applause erupted in the room. Thirty women cheered and whistled. Our self-defense instructor, who had simulated the scenario, congratulated me with a hug. I trembled with adrenaline but felt euphoric. After ten weeks learning to wield my body as a weapon, I had fought with everything I had.
Prior to that first class thirty years ago, I constricted my petite frame with hunched shoulders and held breath. I too often swallowed words I wanted to say. Transforming fear into fury was far from easy. It went against the grain of deep conditioning: to avoid confrontation and be polite at all costs, even when my inner voice told me otherwise.
During the summer following sixth grade, I went swimming every day. After my ballet lessons I would slip into a bathing suit and head to our condominium pool. One afternoon while I unwound my bun and placed the bobby pins on a patio table, I heard someone say: “You look really sexy with your hair down.”
That’s when I noticed him standing in the shallow end, watching. I knew most of the residents along the tree-lined paths of the suburban townhouses since I took odd jobs washing cars, watering plants, and feeding pets—even putting on the pool cover at night—but I had never seen this straw-haired man before. I was accustomed to adults telling my parents, “You have a beautiful daughter.” No one had ever called me sexy.
“Do you want to play scissors?” he asked when I came up for air. “You go first.”
The pool distorted his sunburnt torso, which seemed to split in two. Thick arms floated on the water’s surface; a blur of milk-white legs parted below. If I darted through but touched them, it would be his turn to pass through mine. I doubted the bulk of him could fit. On the other hand, even if I managed not to brush against his legs, the rules dictated that the passage get narrower and narrower each time. A trap. I shook my head.
“Okay, I’ll go then.” He barely dived down when his head bumped into my crotch.
“I don’t want to play that game,” I said and laughed along with him, a nervous laugh. I tried swimming away, toward the deep end, but he swam alongside me. And back again. He told me he was visiting his sister for a while and gestured a few houses down.
“What kinds of occupations do people have around here?”
“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug.
“I mean, what type of work do people do?”
“My mom’s an English teacher.”
Now he leaned against the side of the pool, close to the steps. Beads of moisture glistened from the hairs on his chest. “Want to know what I do for a living?” he asked with a steady gaze.
I wanted to dive back under the water or get out. My legs were lead weights.
“I’m a male stripper,” he said. “Why don’t you come over here and I’ll show you what I do.”
“No!” I blurted, surprised at the sound of my own assertion.
I had a friend who let me peek at the Playboy magazines her brother hid under his bed. On occasion we gyrated and shimmied, pulling silk scarves across our bare shoulders. But playing striptease with a grown-up felt wrong. I looked at my towel on the lounge chair. If I came too close, he could grab me. So I paddled around some more, making sure to keep my head above water without looking directly at him.
“Well, I have to go now,” I finally announced, trying to sound nonchalant. Mounting the steps, I was determined not to draw more attention to myself. Maybe if I pretended nothing weird happened, I could believe it hadn’t. His eyes bore into me as I toweled dry.
When my mother got home from work that evening, I reluctantly told her about the encounter. I half expected her to march down the lane like the time she bawled out a boy in first grade who repeatedly pulled up my dress at the bus stop to expose my underwear. I was glad to get that kid in trouble, even when I watched his mean babysitter swat him on the behind. Surely my mother would tell this man never to come near her daughter.
“I don’t want you to go into the pool area unless there are people you know,” she said.
“But, Mom…,” I protested.
“Promise me.”
“What if nobody’s there?”
“Well, you may just have to stay away from swimming for a while.”
Her response taught me about the accommodations women make for male misconduct. Quell your objection. Disguise your discomfort. I did not tell her about the neighbor who strutted around outside in his briefs or the one who sometimes exposed himself at his window on my way to school. I did not mention my friend’s uncle who made her massage him whenever she slept over, until it wasn’t his back she was touching anymore. I kept quiet about the baggy- pants man sitting in the lobby of the ballet school who gave children candy so he could caress our chests, shielded from view under a heavy arm.
My mother was a girl who had never known protection. She learned to bear her stepfather’s infractions, with her own mother complicit in their secret. Nobody held these men accountable for their actions. Nobody provided the precedent to resist.
“You’re holding back your power,” our instructor, Toni, noted when I first struck a padded punch shield in class. Before then I had never hit anything, or anyone. She instructed us to aim each technique through the target—eyes, nose, throat, groin, knees—vulnerable points no matter how big or brawny an assailant. The goal: debilitate, don’t irritate. Make each move count.
“It’s hard for me to imagine actually doing an eye gouge,” admitted one woman during our discussion circle. “I’m afraid of hurting someone.”
“Many people have that initial reaction,” said Toni, a psychotherapist who had been teaching self-defense for more than a decade. She validated each perspective while encouraging us to adopt new parameters: “We must be willing to hurt someone’s feelings or body in order to protect ourselves from harm. Do you value an attacker’s eyesight over your own life?”
Verbal resistance also proved challenging. Some women apologized, unaccustomed to vocalizing boundaries. Others unleashed repressed rage.
“Think of ‘no’ as a complete sentence,” Toni suggested. “You don’t have to rationalize it or make excuses.”
Rather than offer explanations or erratically lash out, we learned to name inappropriate behavior, set limits, and take command. With practice I began to inhabit my body and harness my voice: “Get your hand off my leg. I don’t want that.”
The exercises realigned my relationship with myself, not as acted upon but enacting.
Throughout my adolescence I heeded my mother’s warnings about the voracious appetites of men. The female body was an invitation. I believed that once tempted, male urges could not be contained. If we could not fend them off then it was our fault. High school reinforced this notion of desirability as the cause of unwanted attention. Girls in tight skirts or low-cut shirts were called sluts. Flirting followed by refusal meant playing hard to get, leading someone on, being a tease. She shouldn’t have . . . dressed that way, gotten drunk, gone there with him. Men were entitled to their aggression. It was our job to avoid it.
I spent my first year of college at a small liberal arts school that passed out rape whistles to women during orientation. We were cautioned not to walk unaccompanied around campus or run on the woodsy riverside trail without a friend. Instead, we were told to use the school’s escort system. These safety prescriptions reinforced patronizing dictates (stay away from “dangerous” public spaces!) that placed the onus of prevention on potential victims while restricting our independence. This historical form of social control, guised as protection, did little to thwart assault or address the realities of interpersonal violence—far more likely to manifest in a dormitory or at a party than outside.
When I transferred to the university, self-defense was the most popular elective on campus, with half of registrants turned away every semester. Each of us showed up with specific vulnerabilities informed by our own life experiences, but we all shared one common denominator: a pervasive fear of rape. Self-defense introduced a new discourse, one that challenged the myth of provocation and the concept of muscular strength as a primary measure of power. It dismantled long-held presumptions about male omnipotence. This was not only a matter of personal empowerment. It was a movement. A revolution.
I found no shortage of opportunities to test my newfound skills: the guy who grabbed my arm when I walked past a bar; another who jeered “fucking dykes” at my girlfriend and me, caught in an embrace. For a time I was hyper-alert, hackles raised: Attack if you dare. I’ll kick your ass. In reality, physical defense was taught as a last resort—one I hoped I’d never have to employ.
Once, riding a bus, I felt a caress against my hand that shared a pole. My heart raced in anticipation of my next move. Before I could address the culprit, his hand slipped away. The pause allowed me to doubt: Did I really feel that? Disregarding our instincts, no matter how subtle, is one outcome of collective suppression.
While volunteering weekly at a shelter for battered women and their children, I learned that abusers are primarily driven by a desire for dominance. Typically they use intimidation or humiliation tactics to disrupt the instinctual fight-or- flight mechanisms of their intended targets. The longer the abuse continues— whether executed over hours, or episodically over years—the more invested the perpetrator becomes in maintaining control. As the duration and ferocity of attacks intensify over time, the more difficult—and more dangerous—it is to get out.
I started to reassess the violations inflicted on my body before it marked its passage from girlhood. For years I had dismissed these “little incidents” as minor, even considered myself lucky for emerging somewhat unscathed. After all, I might have been subjected to a far worse fate such as the repeated trauma suffered by my mother or my childhood friend. Measured against the continuous molestation they sustained at the hands of trusted family members, what I endured, I thought, did not really count.
With a shift in perspective, the position of the candy man at ballet and the perp in the pool became clear. These weren’t simply creepy guys. They were sex offenders who preyed on children. Their behavior exemplified the stages of “grooming” that most pedophiles employ: identify someone vulnerable to victimize; play games or offer treats or gifts to establish trust; isolate for better access; desensitize contact—the “accidental” bump—to break down inhibitions before initiating sexualized touch. Their methods might vary, but they relied on two things: compliance and not getting caught.
Viewed properly on a spectrum of violence, every attempt contained an inherent threat, likely to manifest if undetected or ignored. These men could have spent years in state prison for their crimes1. It was unlikely they had only exploited me. Normalizing their conduct simply increased the likelihood they’d get away with it. The repercussions of silence are cumulative.
After graduation, I lived in San Francisco. A man in his thirties, impeccably dressed, moved in across the hall. If I ran into him in the lobby, I took the stairs instead of the rickety elevator to the sixth floor. His icy, blue-eyed stare unnerved me.
I had just begun a weekly instructor training program with Toni when, one weekend, while studying alone, the doorbell rang. Somehow I knew it was him. I gripped my pen. Indeed, it was his face peering through the peephole. I did not consider whether it was prudent to answer. This was shortly after a major earthquake, and he claimed that a beam had fallen in his apartment. He just wanted to take a look around. What he said made little sense, but at his insistence I let him in. Still, I kept the door open, an escape hatch. As if in a trance, I watched myself follow until he stopped at my closed bedroom. He must have known it was mine; our adjacent rooms shared a wall and a fire escape, reached through tall windows.
“It’s locked,” he said, rattling the knob.
“No, it isn’t,” I replied.
“Try it.”
A vision flashed before me: him pushing, trapping me, forcing himself in. My internal alarm blared.
“You need to leave,” I said firmly. “Now!”
I never reported it. Who would believe me? I had no proof of his intent. Later I berated myself for my hesitation. What if he had hurt me? Would people hold me responsible?
“It’s common to suggest what a person should have done differently,” said Toni when I co-taught a class with her the following week, “but we each use whatever strategies are available to us at the time. Self-defense means ‘anything that works’—yelling, running away, even cooperating while we wait for an opening. Trust that your will to survive is greater than someone’s will to hurt you.”
The discussion reframed my perception of the experience. Instead of blaming myself, I felt brave for being bold. Still, I wondered how far a situation might escalate before I felt justified to act. Never again, I vowed, would I give someone the benefit of the doubt if I sensed danger. From then on, I would stand my ground.
A few years later, while teaching self-defense in the city, I witnessed a man screaming at a woman on the sidewalk. I watched a mob hurry away from the commotion. Some people glanced back, but no one intervened. Moving against the crowd, I crossed the street and approached the woman.
“Do you need help?” I asked.
“Yes!” she said. “That guy has been following me for blocks. He keeps saying he’s going to rape me.”
I turned toward the man. He loomed over us and glowered. My sudden appearance disrupted his plan.
“Well, what are you gonna do about it?” he challenged me.
“I’m going to make sure she’s safe.”
Blood pounded like a drum in my ears as I readied my body into position—feet rooted, knees slightly bent, hands low at my hips.
“Leave us alone!” said the woman by my side, emboldened by my stance.
Several seconds passed, suspended in a face-off. Finally, he stomped away, cursing.
I felt shaken yet strong. I had stepped into the line of fire to protect, or empower, another. Together we stood up to a predator and triumphed. Being called a bitch was a small price to pay.
Note: Penal Code 288 PC is the California statute that defines “lewd and lascivious acts with a minor child” through manipulation or coercion but without the use of force. A defendant can be charged with a felony offense even if the touching was not on a sexual organ, or done over the child’s clothes (rather than on the bare skin).
Note: This essay’s title is adapted from Audre Lorde’s “Your Silence Will Not Protect You.” Lorde’s treatise was delivered at the Modern Language Association’s Lesbian and Literature Panel in Chicago (1977) and first published in Sinister Wisdom (1978).
Nicole R. Zimmerman holds an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. She is a 2019 recipient of the Discovered Awards for Emerging Literary Artists, produced by Creative Sonoma and funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work, including a Pushcart nomination from the South Loop Review, appears in literary journals such as Halfway Down the Stairs, Cagibi, Toho, Ruminate, Origins, and Creative Nonfiction. She lives with her wife in Northern California where she hosts writing sessions and leads workshops.