Trigger Warning: This essay contains mention of sexual assault.
I begin this essay with the acknowledgement that I am learning. I am also growing and developing into the best feminist version of myself I can become. Actress and activist Jameela Jamil often describes herself as a ‘feminist in progress’ – this analogy particularly speaks to me as someone who is completely and admittedly imperfect. I am in fact, in progress - in training to be the best feminist I could be.
The woman whom this essay mostly revolves around shone out bright during orientation at California Institute of the Arts – the college we both attended. She often wore bright colors, painted her lips with glitter and wove her long hair into flower crowns. I’ll call her ‘K’. K and I bonded during the course of the first few weeks over our opposing color palates (as I mostly adorned myself in black clothing) and the subject and movement of feminism. Towards the middle of our first collegiate year, we even started a club; ‘The Anti-Patriarchy Club’ – we called it. During one meeting of the Anti-Patriarchy Club in K’s dorm room, we ganged together with a group of our female peers sipping on boxed wine and decorating a long scroll of tinted paper with the names of boys in our year who had caused pain or discomfort to each of us entitled ‘Black List’. I still recall selecting a light blue felt tip to draw out the name of a guy in my year who accused me of being ‘frigid’ when I wouldn’t sleep with him. K cheered and gripped my left hand as I used my right to scrawl out the name of the accused. We thought we were the best of friends. We thought that this would last forever.
K had gone through a nasty break up at the beginning of our first year at CalArts. Her ex-boyfriend – who I will call ‘D’ – certainly had a name on our ‘Black List’. I stayed strong in defending K throughout her separation from D. At least, I always thought that I did. It wasn’t until a year later that everything changed.
I call the following events: ‘Sisters For Life, Question Mark’, or perhaps a better name for these events would be ‘The Girl Who Cried Feminism’. Through all my times in K’s dorm room plotting future projects for The Anti Patriarchy Club I had never thought an event such as the one I am about to explain would occur.
I had been sexually assaulted my first year of CalArts. During Spring Break, I visited my hometown, London, and had been drinking excessively with a group of friends when I blacked out. I woke up to the realization that someone I had considered to be a friend, having sent the rest of the group home in an uber, had sex with me whilst I was passed out.
I returned to CalArts the day after my assault. Shaken, distraught and traumatized. I turned to K upon my arrival, who gave me sympathy. When I later reported the assault to the police, K was contacted to give a report – as I had confided in her about what had happened. Although I barely was able to make it to the end of my semester, I passed all my classes and was set to move into my second year of art school.
During the first semester of second year, I emotionally spoke out about my assault in a class and was greeted with an abundance of support from my classmates. Someone who happened to be in that classroom was K’s ex boyfriend – D. He didn’t comment much after I spoke, nor come over to me to express any sort of emotion or care. But he was in the classroom, and certainly heard all I had recounted about the assault.
During the same week, CalArts hosted its legendary Halloween Party. Since the trauma of my assault, the idea of partying and especially drinking had seemed daunting and somewhat triggering to me. But even so, I donned a Ramona Flowers costume and swigged a beer at a pregaming party with my roommates and selected guests. We snapped photos of us in our costumes, poured alcohol into mason jars and geared up for the exciting night ahead.
When we approached the entrance to the Halloween party, that took place in CalArts spacious main gallery, we were greeted by the blasting of music and the blare of neon lights. Halloween welcomed us swiftly into its seductive embrace. Various students from the CalArts music school exploded loud beats out of speakers, dancers writhed on stage, contorting their bodies into impossible shapes. I stuck by one of my roommates and a couple close friends as we wove through the deep crowd of bodies moving in a strange unison to the deafening music. I don’t truly remember much of the night before what I am about to recall next.
It was towards the end of the night that D started dancing with me. He put his hands on my hips and stood behind me. All the various types of alcohol I had consumed prior to entering the CalArts main gallery began to catch up with me at this point. I was drunk, and I was drunkenly dancing with K’s ex-boyfriend. Before I knew it, D pulled me out of the gallery and towards his car. I stumbled along, not entirely sure what was happening. But I do remember the sentence D kept speaking into my hair:
‘Let’s have sex.’
In the backseat of his car he put his mouth on mine and unbuckled the lower half of the Halloween costume he was wearing. I started making excuses; ‘I’m not feeling well’ was one of the excuses. But the main one I brought up was regarding my assault, the assault I had spoken about just days earlier in a class I took with D.
‘I’m not good at casual sex.’ I said desperately. ‘You know what I spoke about in class.’
While I do not remember much about that night, I will never forget Ds response when I brought up the trauma that nearly broke me, the trauma I had shared with my classmates days before I found myself in the back of his car.
‘What about it?’ was all he said.
Eventually he stopped. I asked if he could drive me home. He said something along the lines of: ‘Get out of my car’, and then proceeded to bolt out of the vehicle and storm away from me back towards the noise of the party. I shivered in the cold October air, shock rippling through my system. I wrapped my arms around myself and walked very slowly back into the neon lights and smoky air.
For the majority of the next day I sat with my phone in my hand drafting a text message to K, telling her, hopefully before she heard it from anyone else, that D had come onto me. I stated in the text that our friendship meant far more to me than D ever could. I told K how much I cared for and respected her. I felt panicked but hopeful that my friend would believe me, especially after all those dorm room nights and Anti Patriarchy Club meetings. All the times that I comforted her and squeezed her hand when we had to sit through a lecture that D was in attendance of. Most of all, following the sexual assault I had experienced the previous term, I hoped K would show a bit of support to me, as what happened with D was a very triggering event.
K instantly dropped me as a friend. She blocked my number, deleted me off of social media and started telling our peers and shared friends, that I was a traitor. Her main statement I have been told she repeated was ‘once you kiss my ex boyfriend, you’re no longer my friend.’
I spent the majority of my remaining time at CalArts confused and perpetually alone. K made sure I was no longer invited to parties or events. Any time we passed each other on campus she turned her head away from me.
Through all this, K went on exploiting the term ‘feminist’. She still put the phrase ‘feminist’ in her Instagram bio and talked constantly about the feminist values she strictly upheld. When her shaming me without listening to my side of the story shows the opposite of feminist values. I became the art school Hester Prynne. I didn’t need a bright red ‘A’ sewn onto my clothing to show my exiled state, it was well known and distributed throughout the institution.
Furthermore, I noticed something shocking towards the end of my senior year at CalArts. K and D reconciled. During one spring afternoon I walked through the campus coffee shop en route to purchase a chai latte and was stopped in my tracks at the image of them together on a sofa talking and laughing. They didn’t ever get back together, but there they were, the enemies, talking, laughing and communicating as if nothing had ever happened between them. The invisible sign above my head that forever marked me as a ‘traitor slut’ to K shone fluorescently as I saw K and D sit together. They may have been able to get on better terms, but I was still a ‘traitor’.
I write this essay in the middle of another October, in fact, another Halloween is just two weeks away. It’s been five years since D came onto me during that blur of a party. It’s been five years since I lost the majority of my college friends to a rumor. The leaves change color and fall here in New York City where I live now. I often reflect back on the event, on the ideals of feminism and wonder with sadness why my story wasn’t important enough for K to uphold her values, especially after her reconciliation with D. I wonder what stopped her from listening to my side of the story. Perhaps when the subject of controversy is someone whom one is close to the ideals of what is right change. Perhaps when the situation is close to home it makes us question everything. In my own experience of reporting sexual trauma, I have found that lack of belief is incredibly common. But coming from a self-proclaimed feminist such as K, who spoke often in support for survivors and advocated against sexual assault, it makes me consider the concept of performative feminism and wonder if she has given her own journey as a developing feminist a true examination. Because, as I previously stated, we are all learning to be the very best feminist we can be. I hope K can do the same.