Originally, I was going to write another piece about Trump, but with how my night went yesterday, I felt the need to tell a personal story. Last month I turned twenty one. Like most young people, I spent all of my adolescence waiting to be twenty one because I believed, mistakenly, that being twenty one is the beginning of adulthood. Drinking, getting drunk, partying, having fun, having a man buy me a drink, or buying myself a drink legally, all of this shone in my head as some special privilege of age that, once acquired, would change me into who I was born to be. Once I hit twenty one, I would be a mini-goddess, ready to tramp across the earth and leave my mark. So far, it's been mostly uneventful. I went to a club last night with my best friend to celebrate her completion of the LSATs, and, after with getting drunk, dancing, and being complimented by most of the girls in the club, I left with my friend and her boyfriend, and went to a Dunkin Donuts. Outside, while smoking a cigarette, a girl approached us. She had seen me dancing at the club and after a brief conversation, kissed me on the lips and ran off to catch a train. I was shocked. My friend's boyfriend laughed, and together we joked about the way my boyfriend would react. He'd probably find it funny or hot, we thought, and the reality of what had happened didn't hit until I got back to my dorm and told him, who was also drunk, about the club and the shots I took and the men I waved away and, of course, the girl whose lips were soft and uninvited. He wasn't angry at me, but confused as to why I wasn't angry with the girl. Had a man kissed you like that, he pointed out, you would not have stood there shocked, or cracked jokes afterwards. He was right. I would've felt violated. I would've scrubbed my mouth clean.
Up until then, I had seen myself as a feminist true to my principles. After her kiss, I still felt that way, but in the light of my boyfriend's remarks, I needed to rethink things. Was there some latent sexism at work in the way I processed her touch? Undeniably. I had been thinking about the matter in gendered terms. She was a girl. She wasn't threatening, and she couldn't possibly hurt me the way a man could. Maybe it was my drunkenness, but her kiss was almost sweet, almost like the compliments of the women who liked my dancing earlier that night. She was a girl, not a stranger who had invaded my space and taken something from me without my permission. She didn't matter the way a man did. But even knowing that I am operating under a bias, I can't make myself look back on the moment differently. Her kiss, while good for a story and food for thought, doesn't actually mean much, if anything, to me.
