When I started writing The Wilderness of Girls—a young adult novel about a pack of feral girls thrust into civilization and the troubled teenager who rescues them—I told myself this book isn’t going to include sexual assault. I knew in my gut, my feral girls wouldn’t have to deal with that. It’s not part of their mystery, even if they were all kidnapped by a man who called himself Mother and may or may not have been a prophet (or a madman). But aside from my knowing, there was also resistance. While this book was written to express some pretty difficult feelings about growing up female in America, I was tired of thinking about sexual assault. After all, I’ve been thinking about sexual trauma in one way or another since I was a teen myself.
I’d also seen SA handled so badly in books. In early 2000s Young Adult fiction, one used to see SA used as a meet-cute fairly frequently…and then never mentioned again for the rest of the book. Additionally, SA is notoriously overused—gratuitously and graphically—in fiction written by men, under the guise of “realism,” or as a trite backstory to explain why a woman is so “badass.” These stories rarely address the long-lasting psychological effects of sexual assault, how SA affects relationships of all different dynamics, or how a victim moves in the world after the fact.
By the time I started writing The Wilderness of Girls I had seen SA done so poorly, so often, I forgot it could be done well. I forgot how important it was to see it done well, especially as a survivor.
But it took a long time for me to accept that SA was a part of the story I was trying to tell,
I started drafting this book in 2015, just after my divorce was finalized–a divorce that happened in no small part because of my ex’s lack of understanding of consent or coercion (not to paint him as a monster—I believe he was genuinely ignorant). Shortly thereafter, I learned that Brock Turner was handed down his wrist-slap of a sentence after witnesses caught him violating an unconscious woman behind a dumpster (a woman named Chanel Miller, who would go on to write Know My Name, a memoir about her experience.)
Then in 2016, I watched with bated breath as the US held a historic presidential election with the first female Democratic presidential nominee against a total buffoon who had just been thoroughly exposed as a proud sexual predator through the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tapes. And then I mourned when that sexual predator won. There was solace in the fact that he did not win the popular vote, but still: over 61,000,000 people looked at an eminently qualified, intelligent, experienced woman, and a reality TV star who does not see women as human, and said, “I choose that guy.”
It was a mass traumatizing event. Every woman I have spoken to about that election night and the days after gets the same bird-bright look in her eyes, haunted and cautious and so very, very angry—a grief so huge, even eight years later, that we are barely, now, finding the words to articulate it. We trusted that our fellow Americans cared enough about women to not elect a known sexual predator to the highest office in the land, and they showed us we were wrong. For four years we had to listen to his word salad and watch his smug face as he blamed everyone but himself for every single problem that occurred under his administration. For many of us, it was impossible to even hear or see him–we had to turn off the TV or radio if he came on. I installed a browser extension that changed his photo to a picture of kittens. I was genuinely triggered by his presence, my body entering a state of fight or flight even at the sight of a political cartoon that too-correctly captured the sneering shape of his mouth.
In the middle of his term in 2018, I watched, numb with rage and disbelief, as the same drama played out once again: Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court even after the clear, sensible testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford. Even after his rage-crying response to her allegations. Once again, American women were shown that the violation of our bodies is not a dealbreaker when it comes to putting and keeping men in power.
I’d started out not wanting to write a book explicitly about sexual assault, and yet, over the years, I realized that my debut novel was inextricably tied to SA. The news and world events repeatedly showed me that our world has not heard enough stories about SA, no matter how tired I was of thinking about it. The society my feral girls are ushered into quickly tries to tame them into “good girls,” setting rules and enforcing expectations that leave the wild girls too confused and exhausted to fight back. Our main character (the non-feral) Rhi becomes keenly aware of what’s happening because she has lived through it herself: the conditioning, taming, shaping, grooming. Seeing it happen to the wild girls, who are old enough to question these things, helps her identify the traumatic experiences in her own life–how Western civilization’s traditional socialization of girls affected her late mother’s choices, her stepmother’s, and her own–all of which shaped Rhi into, essentially, the (almost) perfect victim.
Once I finally accepted the role of SA in this book, Rhi’s character unlocked for me, and the rest of the book flew out of me like a howl I hadn’t known I’d been holding back.
This April, for Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I was asked to participate in a panel called Outspoken: The Importance of Representation of SA in YA, along with fellow YA authors Kim DeRose, Rocky Callen, Hannah Sawyerr, and Annie Cardi, and moderated by Vicky Pietrus of Rise! A Feminist Book Project. We discussed how and why it’s important to have realistic depictions of SA and SA victims in books written for teens, best practices to avoid falling into voyeurism, and self-care practices as authors. And while I was—and am—genuinely tired of talking about sexual assault, it was an honor to share and discuss such a hard subject.
A little over a week after that panel, I learned that Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction was overturned by a New York appeals court because the judge felt there had been too much testimony in regard to sexual assaults Weinstein committed that were not related to the specific sexual assault case he was on trial for. Never mind that sexual assault is notoriously difficult to prove unless it is violent. Never mind that while those character witnesses might not have been plaintiffs, their experiences were relevant to the proceedings. Overturning the conviction was a huge step back for victims of SA. And it was, to put it mildly, disappointing.
Then, in early May, I—along with the rest of the world—heard the testimony from Stormy Daniels against Donald Trump, describing what millions of women have recognized as sexual assault (even if Ms. Daniels did not call it that). The power dynamic, the aggression, the way he blocked the door—so many people saw themselves in her story and knew it for what it was: a man abusing his power, making a woman feel too unsafe to fight back or say no.
And yet many people heard her testimony and said, “she didn’t say ‘no,’ so it’s not rape.”
And this is why we have to keep talking about sexual assault.
We have to keep writing stories that unpack the psychological damage SA causes, the conditions that lead to SA being so prevalent in our culture, the way our educational system fails us in sex ed, how purity culture, patriarchy, and ingrained and institutionalized misogyny continue to fuel an epidemic of sexual assault in homes, on college campuses, in the armed forces, and in every industry where men historically have more power than women. So many people are carrying shame and trauma that was never theirs to hold.
I wanted to write a different essay for this article, about how our culture is ripe for stories about feral girls and monstrous femininity (which is true, and not unrelated). I was determined to write that essay, because I am so tired of talking and thinking about sexual assault. But the Brock Turners and Bret Kavanaughs and Donald Trumps of the world have proven repeatedly: the conversation about sexual assault is far from over.
So I’ll shut up about it when we no longer have anything to discuss.
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