Like countless other women, I can say from experience that this kind of assault is deeply harmful. The injury is not just physical. Acts like these rob women of autonomy over their own bodies, an experience that, even when brief, is disorienting and degrading, as I learned in my early 20s when I was sexually assaulted walking home from work in New York City.
I was on a sidewalk next to a small park, and a man — tall, white, with long hair, dressed casually but neatly in jeans and a T-shirt — was walking toward me. Just as we passed each other, he reached out and grabbed both of my breasts, then kept going. It was early evening, around dusk, and none of the other people on the street were close enough to see what happened.
I stood stunned, frozen in place. For a moment, my brain seemed to reject what had just happened, but my next emotion wasn’t what you might expect. It wasn’t fear or despair. It was rage.
The man had run away, and when I turned, I could see him at the end of the block. I had a visceral impulse to chase him and punch him in the face. Even though I am 5-foot-1 and have never punched anyone, in that instant, my rage was so incandescent that had my sense of self-preservation not kicked in, I probably would have attacked him like a feral animal. Instead, I gathered my two still-functioning wits and — disoriented and at a loss for what to do — just went home.
I didn’t report the incident, and when I told this story to friends, I referred to the assailant casually as the “boob grabber,” which was a way of wrapping the experience in a gauze of nonchalance that made it seem less straightforwardly horrible. I played it as minor, maybe even something that could be laughed off. I was raped in college, and I rationalized to myself that the assault by the park was relatively trivial in comparison.