By Courtney Felle
[Content warning: sexual violence] During my first winter in college, someone I consider a friend is accused of sexual assault. He tells each person I know a different version of the story—some have only one girl involved, some have two twisting around each other, some call them liars, some call them simply confused—and when he tells me, he says, “You know, it’s funny. I don’t even remember their names.” I don’t know. I don’t agree. I quickly come to believe the girls, even without speaking to them, as do my friends. We recall our own experiences: every dinner in which he spoke over us, every secret he told someone after he said he would keep it, every story in which women became bitches and witches and character development for the men. I recall him grabbing my shoulders to get my attention, even after I said I had chronic pain and it hurt, even after I said, “Stop.” I recall how startled I felt, even violated. My friend recalls biphobic comments he made after she stopped dating her ex-girlfriend, despite his own identification with the term “bi.” Another friend recalls discomfort lying next to him on our dorm’s couch, his hips jutting into her, and her own body receding. It seems a logical extension to believe he could commit assault—we just hadn’t recognized it before. We thought we were the only ones; we thought we were exaggerating, making it up. We start holding meetings in our college’s feminist center, confirming our thoughts, learning to believe ourselves. As a simple slogan of support, we say, “I’m hip,” borrowed from mid-Atlantic slang, meaning, “I stand with you,” meaning, “I understand, and I support you, and I believe you, and I believe you.” We end our friendships with him. We move closer to each other as we pass him on the sidewalk, as reassurance, as protective force. I wake at three am with nightmares, ones I never tell anyone else. The main scene, which recurs at least once a week for several months, features a faceless man opening my door while my hallmates sleep and crawling into my bed. He places one hand around my mouth and the other around my hips, pressing so tightly into my skin I can’t scream or fight or feel anything other than pained confinement. Without evidence or explanation, my dream-self knows it’s him, the boy accused. I start locking my door when I’m alone, as early as 8 pm. The nightmares don’t stop. Listless, nervous, awake, I check and double-check the lock. I feel, like Anna Butcher conveys in her poem “(while being sexually harassed) I turned into Joan of Arc,” as if these horrors are occurring “again/ and again/ and again,” so often that I become “used to burning,” the imagined sexual violence ordinary. I don’t know when I stop having the nightmares—they become so ingrained into my daily pattern that, by the end, I barely notice how scared I feel, how routine that fear is. I do know I keep my door locked for the rest of the year, by instinct and muscle memory. When I first set myself the task of announcing our hips-themed contest, I didn’t intend to begin with a personal story. But, before I even thought to search the dictionary definition of hips, to trace cultural invocations, to write what would become the standard description, my own emotions and experiences emerged. That’s the thing about hips as a concept: it’s so personal, inherently so. Though the biological definition of hips involves bones outside our bodies, it also very much connotes what’s between our hips, how we as individuals and as collective units make sense of sex (in every context) and sexual vulnerability, and how we communicate those definitions, implicitly or explicitly. My friends’ choice to use “I’m hip” as a statement of resistance and empowerment, for example, relied on the understanding that “hip” isn’t simply a body part but also a state and an act: to have or show an awareness of something, especially a trend, and to make someone aware, of a secret, perhaps, or a disturbing crime, or a crime so normalized it fails to disturb. I’ve heard the term repeated so many times it blurs in my mind: I am hip, we each were and are hips, in every syntax, angle, and interpretation. “I’m hip” stayed the name of our GroupMe conversation through the summer, none of us registering it as more than a remnant devoid of original meaning, until a nightmare unexpectedly returned and I changed it in the morning, a quick fix no one questioned. It’s almost funny to me, all its uses and misuses, its loss of power throughout time, if not for the horror of its source. Yesterday, almost a year after I first heard versions of the assaults, I tried to write about the time I imagine as the “I’m hip era,” what it meant and still means to me, coming to terms with his mistreatment and its impact on my friend group. I tried to focus into only what I thought was the main story: us recognizing that he had most likely assaulted two girls and the immediate fallout of that recognition, but other moments kept emerging, memories and associations he conjured. Him grabbing my shoulders as an act not simply of male entitlement to female bodies but also of dismissing my chronic pain, refusing to view my invisible illness as something he should accommodate. A poem I wrote when I was seventeen, new to the world of sex and sexuality as a whole, in the beginning stages of coming out and of coming to terms with potential infertility, in which “my stomach feels like a sacrifice in a religion I don’t believe in anymore,” myself perched “on the precipice of my left hip bone… seared into not seeing straight.” The jokes I made to friends about my irregular periods, a method of coping, and him calling me melodramatic for “oversharing,” making a scene of nothing at all. The tattoo I still want with flowers peeking from my left hip bone, snapdragons and lilies (my mother’s favorites), from this poem, proof something can grow, even though my friends called it cliche when I mentioned it. The girl who, upon seeing a picture of my genderqueer significant other, who was using she/her pronouns and “girlfriend” at the time, asked what genitalia they had, and him laughing in condescension when I later told him, saying I was “overreacting.” The only person in my friend group he seemed to respect after we stopped talking to him: a (trans) man, the only man closely involved in the conflict. The nightmares, all the nightmares. The first time I felt such fear: at sixteen, walking back to my car after shopping at a local Target, when a man tried to pull me into his car. The sharp sound of the lock as I narrowly escaped his hand gripping where my shoulders had been only seconds before, him shouting, “You bitch, you bitch.” I couldn’t write the essay draft. I couldn’t write half the essay draft. There were too many scenes, too much stuff. That’s the other thing about hips: it’s not only immensely personal but also blurred, every facet of identity mixed and leading into the next—sex, sexuality, gender, queerness, genderqueerness, illness, infertility, and so much violence, of so many kinds. In her story “To Love a Woman,” Vibhavari Desai describes lesbian sex as “like standing at the edge of the cliff and jumping into the unknown,” not dissimilar to my earlier, imagined “precipice,” the image shifted from illness to sexuality, reconceptualized, the same and yet not the same. Inseparable elements of the same cliff-hips, of hips. For this contest, what I truly want to see are these intersections between identities developed on a vivid, physical, personal plane, as close and vulnerable as hips. I want to see society’s expectations challenged, subverted, upended. In Nawaal K’s “My Short and Indifferent Reflection on You Leaving Me for No Bloody Reason.,” talking to Eve, the speaker cites the fall from Eden as “a revolution in your hips.” I can believe, if the world fell from any person, any body, it fell from one woman’s hips, so readily. “I’m hip,” after all, gave me the words and courage for something much deeper, something still happening. Hips can do that—perhaps only hips can do that. And I want to know about all the hips, the friendships that made them bearable, being hip, hipping, hurting, healing, and every revolution, so many revolutions, always “in your hips.” For more information on our Hips Contest, click here.
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