The Leather Skirt

The leather skirt is sitting in the wash basket. It has no stains, not a mark that you could see. But its dirty. I washed it a few times before but it never really gets clean. I threw it in a bin once. But it came back. And I thought, I’ll give it another chance. I thought about burning it a thousand times, but never got around to it.

It’s in my wash basket, at home, beside the bath, in the bathroom. But for about three years it resided on top of a dusty wardrobe in a small room at my boyfriend’s father’s house. I left it there with my boyfriend, with the other clothes, so that when I come to visit, I always have something to wear. Except in those three years, it remained there atop the cupboard, never to be worn. Occasionally I would take it down and appraise it.

I’d ask, can I wear it yet? Can I? Should I? Should I throw it away? But a leather skirt seems to me an essential part of my wardrobe. I bought it as an expression of one of many aspects of self and I wore it once with pride and joy, and I’d like to do so again. I could replace it with one as yet untouched. I could get a better one. A new skirt for the new me. But I worry, I’d always be thinking of this skirt when I wore my replacement, and all that that entails. So I tell myself I will have to make do. I can hardly afford another anyway. I will have to learn to forget, to make new memories. But for three years every time I look at it, it goes the same way. I want to throw it away. Today, I put it in the basket, again. Maybe it will be ruined in the washing machine and then it will have to go.

But I like the skirt. Or I used to like it. I want to like it. And I don’t think it’s the skirt I hate, but a pernicious memory, or a set of memories, of hands, and other things, that had no business in contact with that leather skirt but touched it all the same.

By now, reader, you may have begun to suspect that this story (a word I’m using for want of one more appropriate), is not about a leather skirt at all.

And you would be right, and wrong, but mostly right.

The leather skirt is always where it begins these days, the tumultuous fall backward into the whirlpool that I’m always only just escaping. Whenever I clamber out, onto some slightly more favourable rock, I am glancing back at Charybdis with Scylla uneasy beneath my feet.  

The leather skirt was new, on that occasion, barely worn, a gift to myself after years of gaslighting and anxiety and wanting to be something I wasn’t for someone who was never what I wanted them to be. It was meant to be another beginning. But I never quite set my foot on that ship. The New Beginning sailed without me, and I fell into the salt sea, drifting, until some rust bucket picked me up. I never asked where it was going, and soon I found myself in the maw of that monster.

I could talk around this all day, but I won’t do that now. Now I have to, for a while, abandon my metaphors, my quaint imagery, to show you a stark truth, one that haunts me, one that society, I think, despite its me too’s and its campaigns, would still rather stayed hidden in the dank dark cave at the bottom of Charybdis’ lair where I found it.

I chose to go on a trip, to the home of a man I’d met once before. I didn’t particularly like him. He bought me things and tried too hard, and my mum thought he was nice. I thought, I was being unfair, shallow, even, in my visceral aversion to his face, his body, his demeanour, in short, everything about him. It took a lot of therapy to be able to say that my gut instinct had always been right on that account. I felt no attraction for him, and his trying only made me shrink further away in disgust. But that is now, this, is about then. And then, I thought, I owed him, if not what he wanted, then at least, honesty, friendship, maybe, some form of comfort for the feelings I knew I had to hurt to be true to myself. So I went. I’d paid in advance anyway, before I had decided all this. The tickets were non-refundable. His parents were kind. He had a dog, but it smelt of rot, like his room, his bedsheets, the whole situation. I told him, when I came, I didn’t think this was going to work out. That though I liked him as a person (I didn’t) that I felt no attraction (true), that I couldn’t give him what he wanted (sex – it was signposted everywhere and the thought made me queasy). He said that was okay, he said, lets just be friends and have fun. But after a dinner he refused to let me pay for, my words had apparently evaporated into a thick and choking smoke.

I told him again, no, but he pressed his wet, snivelling lips down between my legs, and I went limp, played dead, hoped he’d see that he was getting nowhere. He seemed to eventually give up his endeavour. I asked him to sleep in the other room. Which he did. And the next day, when I was finally due to come home I told him more forcefully, through my tears, with a cigarette in my hand and smoke in my lungs, I didn’t want a relationship with him, I didn’t want sex with him, I found him unappealing, and when I caught my train later that day, he’d not see me again. Anger, aggression, anything, might have been better than what came next.

He cried, the slimy, wet, filth cried, and grabbed me, pulled me into a hug that I am convinced tainted me for life and his arms were like locking iron bars. I pressed to hands against his chest and tried to get out and this meant nothing to him. When he was done, I went to his room to collect my things. At the time I thought, he knows now its no good. I can leave, he has accepted my rejection, its over. But it wasn’t over.

What happened next, I really, cannot bring myself to write because I cannot bring myself to recall. I think, reader, you know what happened next. And though I pushed and shoved at him a few times, he finished before he rolled off me and pretended as though the whole thing had somehow been at my request.

And I, having played dead twice too many times, walked to the train station with him in tow, he still playing out his fantasy, still acting the boyfriend despite all my refusals. He waved goodbye as the train left and then, then I cried. But I didn’t know then, not fully, why.

It was weeks after that that I told my now boyfriend what happened that day, though not, what happened the day before, because that fills me with more rage and disgust than what had followed. Could have, should have, would have, makes no difference now. Would that it could. My therapist tells me, it may well have made things worse, that my reaction, that of a limp corpse, may well have saved my life.

I wish that was where the narrative of the leather skirt ended.

But, almost a year later, something else happened. And until that happened, the skirt, though I had worn it through the most traumatic moments of my life, had been, in my mind, blameless, unstained. It was just a skirt. What had happened would have happened no matter what I had worn, save if it had been, by blessed fortune, a chastity device to which I had thrown away the key.

But one night, sometime later, I went to meet a group of friends, at our favourite haunt. Things got silly as they often do when young adults have access to cheap cocktails and two for one beers. But when a friend, a man, I had known for many years, took it upon himself to stealthily unzip the back of the leather skirt I had unthinkingly worn that night, it was the beginning of my dread for an object that really bore no responsibility for any of all this. I don’t know why he did it. It wasn’t violent in the usual sense of the word, though it certainly was in another sense, violent. It was, in his mind, I think, a playful prank. Though I believe even children know better than to partially undress their peers without their consent whether in public or otherwise. Another friend alerted me to the ‘prank’ that had been played, and I was filled with at first, a cold chill that seemed to fill my entire being, before quickly heating to a burning that made my skin prickle, my lungs fail, my eyes suddenly welling with tears.

It was a joke he said, to get a reaction he said. I was being ridiculous. He became angry, at my tears, my breathless, disbelief at his assault on my person. Another friend came outside with me to smoke and I told him all that had happened to me months before, in that exact skirt and he in turn, pulled our mutual friend aside for a few words – or at least, I think that’s how it happened. I spoke with him about it myself, he apologised, we went back to drinking.

And months after that, I heard tell from his then girlfriend, my then friend, that when alone together he had expressed his utter disbelief of all that I had said. He had said, that if it were true, I’d never have worn that skirt again. That I lied, for attention.

And years later, this makes me boil with rage. I had certainly never asked for his attention. For his utter negation of my bodily autonomy, his disregard for my feelings, his anger at my hurt, my anxiety, as though his unzipping of my skirt without consent was somehow normal, and I was the unreasonable one. But worse than this, his words cut to my core. I had never thought about that skirt as a stained and dirty thing before. As something that had somehow attracted the ‘attention’ I had never wanted. As the leftover relic of my rape, my assault. But now, now it embodies all of that, and that connection will not break try as I might to destroy it. My refusal to rid myself of this gruesome reminder is in part my resistance to him. To this day, I do not wish to let his spiteful words move me. But they already did, already, insidious.

We don’t talk anymore. If I ever were to speak to him it would be to tell him he was wrong, that his words had done as much damage to me as his actions, and the actions of that person who had slithered his way into my core to turn it to a festering mess of nightmares that give no regard to night or day but are instead always in my periphery. 

Reader, I am amazed I have been able to write this. It isn’t the first time I have tried. I am sure, I wanted to say more but I am exhausted, so I will do as best I can now, now that I am fighting the urge to close the laptop and flee I don’t know where.

I will not address the rapist. I cannot. I do not, really, want to address that person who was once a friend, but I think I should. What you did that day, whether you like to acknowledge it or not, was assault. What had happened to me before needn’t have been relayed to you for my feelings of outrage, my sense of having been betrayed by someone I trusted, to be validated, they were and are valid, regardless of the context. I did not consent to be touched, undressed by you there in that pub with strange men I didn’t know eyeing my underwear without my consent. I and I alone have the right to chose who sees my body, who touches it, who removes my clothes. I did not consent. You were wrong. My rape was also not for you to address as you did. How I dealt with its aftermath was not for you to decide and yet you forced on me one more traumatic object, to this day, I know not what to do with it. You were part of the problem. Your attitude was part of the problem. If ever you read this, I hope this is enough for you to see that, I hope that your attitude has changed.

This is my me too. Because though I know friends and relatives who see this will be hurt, uncomfortable, heartbroken, even, I cannot keep this inside anymore. I cannot stay silent with this rage, and disgust and dread inside of me. Rape is not just something that happens in dark alleyways. It is inherently violent whether you know the rapist or not, whether they hold a knife, or manipulate you into a corner it makes no difference. Rape culture is insidious, victim blaming takes many forms, and permissiveness of sexual aggression needs to stop. I am adding my voice to the voices of many, and I am saying to any one else out there who has experienced this same violence, no matter the form it took, don’t hold it inside you anymore, you are not wrong, not to blame, not to be silenced, not to be oppressed. You are stronger than you think, and wherever you are in your recovery, I promise, you will get even stronger, you will overcome this, and you are not alone.

This has been a story about leather skirts, thongs, granny pants, skinny jeans and overalls, hijabs, burkas, sundresses, ballgowns, prom dresses, and every array of clothes under the sun, and their utter blamelessness in the face of rape culture.