(Editor’s note: graphic descriptions of sexual violence follow.) Sensing an email she received from Labrie was part of the ritual, Prout initially rejected his invitation to climb a hidden staircase on campus leading to a view, in large part due to the fact that her older sister, Lucy, a senior at the school, had dated and broken up with him before Prout arrived. Per custom, each year, senior students, both boys and girls, entered into a competition to “slay” as many underclassmen students as possible before graduation, which, according to court testimonies of the boys who participated, can mean anything from kissing to sex. Paul’s, a prestigious boarding school in Concord, N.H. Prout was sexually assaulted by a popular senior named Owen Labrie as a freshman at St. The memoir was co-written with Jenn Abelson, a journalist for The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team and Pulitzer-Prize finalist her past reporting has exposed sexual abuse at New England prep schools. Prout’s book exposes the impossibility of navigating the culture Wolitzer writes about as a young person, her story’s horror amplified by the fact that it is nonfiction. I recalled this series of events because it shares features with Chessy Prout’s story, which she recounts, in excruciating detail, in her new memoir, I Have the Right To(Simon & Schuster, March 6). I began avoiding them-eating lunch with my teachers, not going to social events where I thought they’d be, blocking them on social media-even though I still saw them at track practice each day, where they’d approach me and ask about him or call out his name when I ran by. Soon after, boys started writing his name underneath photos of me on Facebook. The following week, my younger sister, who was a freshman at our big public high school and must have heard rumors, or was harassed because of them, cried in humiliation, “He was hammered and you were sober!” I had not mentioned anything about Tyler to her. I had probably had a half a beer and I didn’t know how much Tyler had had. Everything with Tyler stayed above the waist I had never done anything else. After a few weeks of his messages, which were sweet and funny, I was at a small gathering at my friend’s house, watching TV next to Tyler, when his friend stood up, leaving us alone. During my senior year, a boy I’ll call Tyler, who was in my group of friends, started flirting with me over Facebook. It brought back a story that I tried not to think about because, as I told myself, it was so minor and inconsequential. Lined up was a group of boys from my high school. As I recently tinkered with my Facebook privacy settings, for example, I found my blocked list. Greer is three years older than I am-by my calculations, she was born in 1988 to my 1991-so Wolitzer’s novel had a way of prompting me to recall the early aughts in America through the age I was during each cultural moment.Īfter hearing the stories of #MeToo, I have what now feels like a whole repertoire of instances that occurred so quickly I could almost convince myself that they didn’t, and I know from personal experience that it is often easier to mask these stories rather than face what happened. It’s a game that resembles today’s popular area-code rating system: a detailed guidebook of the rules resides on Urban Dictionary, but it is a scale in which the first digit is a score of the woman’s face, the second digit-a 0 is no, a 1 is yes, a 2 means “only under the manipulating influence of alcohol”-tells whether you’d have sex with her, and the third digit rates her body. There’s the game a group of high-school boys play called Rate ‘Em, in which they rate their female peers based on their attractiveness. There’s Zee, Greer’s best friend, who, as a 13-year-old in 2001, years before coming out as queer, listens to her peers append gay jokes to karaoke lyrics at her bat mitzvah (remember the “no homo” fad?). There are Darren’s repeat offenses, which are recounted, in detail, as different women compose a whisper network of their stories, much like the publishing industry’s Shitty Media Men list. But over the next couple of weeks, half a dozen other female Ryland students had their own Darren Tinzler encounters.” Already it was so much less important than what was apparently going on right now at other colleges: the rugby-playing roofie-givers, the police reports, the outrage. After Darren Tinzler reaches out and twists Greer’s breast during a conversation at a frat party, Greer recounts: “It wasn’t rape…not even close. In The Female Persuasion (Random House, April 3), Meg Wolitzer writes her protagonist, Greer Kadetsky, into a moment of confusing sexual assault.
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