This Story Is Not a Warning

by Stephanie Newman

He tried to knock down the door, but I had been waiting for him to do it. The bathroom was tiny. It housed only one sink and one stall with a lockless door. When I entered the bathroom, I was alone. But once I shut the door to the stall—that is, as soon as I shut the door to the stall—I heard the outer bathroom door swing open. I peered through the stall’s peephole, and I saw a man’s torso in front of the sink. He was our waiter. 

I made excuses for him. He has to wash his hands. He’ll leave any second. He doesn’t realize somebody’s using the toilet. I berated my paranoia. I hated myself for having goose bumps. I hated the thoughts entering my head: I was in a remote location in the back corner of the wine cellar of a restaurant whose name I’d already forgotten in Florence. My friends were eating Bolognese one flight of spiral stairs overhead. If I screamed, they wouldn’t hear me. I attended a self-defense workshop twelve years ago, in college. The policeman lectured us to listen to our instincts. My mom also lectured me about the ever-present danger of men. If I had been raised like a normal person, I thought, I wouldn’t have to live inside this armor of fear and distrust and self-defense. But, I also thought, this stall has no lock . . .

I sat down. I started to pee. I pressed both my hands against the inside of that stall door with the modicum of strength I could manage while using the toilet. As the last drip splashed into the bowl, he slammed his body against the door. He might have even kicked it with his heel, because the wood sounded like it was going to crack. The force against the door overwhelmed me, and it started to swing open, but I pushed back, and I yelled as though I’d been expecting him. “STOP!” 

I must have scared him. The force let up, and I heard him retreat. I stayed seated on the toilet. I kept my right hand against the door, and I wiped, and I strategized because I thought there was a good chance he’d be waiting for me in the dark cellar. I should be ready to run, or ready to fight. But when I exited the bathroom, nobody came at me from the shadows. 

I sat down again at our table of ten, a table of high spirits and hot food and cheap wine. My friends were vibrating with laughter, glowing from their second glasses of red. It was very late. I was loath to drop this kind of news on our table. Did the incident even constitute “news”? Or would the guys at our table think I was flaunting my desirability? That in saying a man tried to break down a bathroom door for me, I was spotlighting myself as an irresistible sexual object? That I was bragging? Or would I give them cause to think that my true identity had somehow been revealed by the waiter’s attack, and that, try as I might to lead the life of a human, I would never escape the limitations of being seen as some pretty piece of prey? 

I wanted my friends at the table, men and women alike, to see me as Stephanie: their college study abroad friend, a person who liked to read, liked to write, liked to travel, and ordered apricot croissants at breakfast. I would annihilate the mood by revealing my vulnerability—unless it turned out that nobody cared. If my friends brushed off the incident, then I didn’t matter to them as much as I thought I did. That would be the worst outcome. 

As I described what happened in the three-foot-wide bathroom stall with no lock to the friends at my end of the table, and as they communicated the news to the other end of the table, I felt like my personality was being plucked from me, and that underneath all these feathers was some helpless and vulnerable being, as naked as the breasts of poultry on the table in front of us.

Most of the table sat in silence with nervous expressions. Two of my friends insisted we tell the waitstaff, despite my objections. I didn’t want to attract any more attention, especially from the waiters, and I certainly didn’t want to prolong my experience feeling like a victim. I wanted to walk out of the restaurant and become Stephanie again. “But they might do this to somebody else!” my two friends reasoned, wide-eyed. When we left the table, they confronted the nearby waitstaff. “Downstairs, one of the waiters tried to assault our friend. He tried to break into the bathroom.” The waiters looked at us with uncomprehending eyes. They did not speak English. “THE LOCK,” my friends yelled. “You need a lock on the door!” The waiters raised their eyebrows. They said a few words in Italian, then shrugged.

This story is not a warning. Sometimes I wonder if you would be better off without my story. Some women may read these paragraphs and feel afraid the next time they enter a restaurant bathroom. I don’t want to inspire fear. I don’t want to discourage other young women from traveling, studying abroad, or going to the bathroom alone. But takeaways from stories like mine are too easily cautionary. The implication of sharing them is too often: “This happened to me, and I’m passing my wisdom to you. Now you are responsible for making sure you don’t land in the same situation.”

As a girl, and then as a teenager, and then as an adult, I had to listen to my mother’s retellings of rape stories she heard on the news. They were gruesome enough that I still remember all of them. There was the case of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley, whose attacker used to masturbate from a backyard tree while spying on her as she undressed inside her home. He raped her and beat her to death with a golf club on Halloween. There was the friend of our second cousin, who was raped, killed, and thrown into a dumpster while walking to a birthday party in Washington, D.C. There was the girl at the movies, who followed a fake security guard when he told her she needed to step out of the theater. He raped her in a closet. At the end of each of these stories, there was a directive: You have to keep your blinds shut, Stephanie. You have to walk in well-lit areas at night. Beware of fake security guards in movie theaters. Be smart about these things.

After we left the restaurant, I called home. I don’t remember much of the ensuing conversation, except that I was standing in a piazza behind a statue of a horseman, and that at some point my mom yelled, “You need to bring a friend with you next time! You can’t go down to the bathroom alone!” I wanted to convince her that I had been smart. I’d defended myself. I’d heeded her hundreds of warnings, internalized her pleas and directives, and “saved” myself from a predator. Wasn’t she proud of me? She was relieved, but no, she didn’t see anything to be proud of.

In that Florentine piazza, I recognized that I had been caught in a double bind. I could have followed every instruction, been as careful as possible, adhered to every rule in the world’s book for women, and still have been assaulted. Had I brought a friend with me, as my mom suggested, he could have hurt her, instead—or harmed both of us. Had I followed the same course of action, but on a different night, or against a different man, who knows what the result might have been. The causal relationship I had been taught—that self-defense and street smarts protect against attackers—now felt like an illusion.

The real threat is choosing to believe in the distinction between a guarded life and a violated one. There is risk in not recognizing this twisted rationale of safety for what it really is: a form of oppression. It is a sick, sad manifestation of sexism and fear. It is rape culture. 

Rape culture is the Italian waiter who followed me into the bathroom and faced no consequence. Rape culture is my confused pride when I prevented my attacker from touching me. Rape culture is the well-intentioned mother training her daughter to live in a mode of self-defense, to avoid the quiet streets, to dress modestly, to learn karate, to take a friend with her to the bathroom for protection. Rape culture is being congratulated on your street smarts when you tell your story of assault, being made to feel like you deserve to be spared because of your savvy. Rape culture is my therapist asking me, “Are you sure he wasn’t just trying to use the restroom?” 

The mechanics of rape culture depend on hypocrisy, on women’s freedoms being curtailed beyond what most men can imagine, certainly beyond what most men would be willing to tolerate. Concerned parties tell women not to go out after dark, rather than tell men to stay in, or they advise us to avoid an ever-changing list of potentially provocative clothes, rather than instructing men to close their eyes if they can’t handle seeing human bodies. We convince ourselves that we cannot control the actions of rapists, and so we must influence the actions of women to avoid the outcome that breeds such fear. The behavior of the violator falling on the violated is its own form of oppression. 

Though it’s painful for me to acknowledge, all the warnings and admonitions of my childhood informed my actions that night in the bathroom. I was raised to expect tragedy, and so in that bathroom stall, I acted as though tragedy were imminent. My awareness of danger, my readiness to push back on the door, and my decision to yell were choices that helped me ward off what could have been a much more gruesome, more violating, more life-altering sexual assault. I am not sure what to do with this paradox, beyond acknowledging that my experience was the exception, not the rule. 

Attacks against women can become less frequent only by acknowledging and addressing sexual violence as the result of men’s choices. This in itself is a disempowering realization, but also a relief, placing blame on the right party. An acidic conclusion, one that wouldn’t make a great headline in Vogue or The Atlantic, and maybe that’s what stops us from framing the conversation this way. 

After that night in Italy in 2010, I was assaulted four more times. Men I do not know—literal strangers—have kicked me down subway stairs in broad daylight; pinned me up against the brick wall of my neighborhood grocery store in order to forcibly “hug” me; surrounded me in group formation on the street to bequeath on me a rose; and attempted to grab onto my arm and drag me away. Other men have forgone physical contact but inflicted immense psychological harm—most recently, a Lyft driver who refused to unlock his doors and let me out of his vehicle while driving me away from (not toward) my listed destination. These experiences haunt me. Yet, if I tried to avoid them, I would need to stop riding the subway, using ride-sharing apps, going grocery shopping, going to the bathroom, and walking on my street from morning until night. The “be smart” philosophy of self-defense does not eliminate danger. It just confines potential victims.

I move through the world differently now. I sometimes carry a pocket-sized alarm whose high-decibel noise is meant to catch attackers off guard. My fear and its manifestation: this talisman-meets-tool. I’m embarrassed that I share my location with loved ones when I’m in a cab, and that I pause at the top of cellar stairs leading to restaurant bathrooms. The shame of being attacked doesn’t subside; it just redirects, pointing not to the events of the past, but toward the parts of my personality that emerged from them. The feeling is reminiscent of taking that final step back up from the cellar in Florence. I turned from the stairwell scared, drained, but back on solid ground.

Published August 8th, 2021