What Were These Women to Me?

Ruth Madievsky closes the gate on her college rumor mill in a personal essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Ruth MadievskyAugust 17, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

• Gender & Sexuality

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print. And join us to celebrate Gossip’s release at our end-of-summer party on August 22.

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WHAT I REMEMBER MOST about my early college days was a feverish need to desire and to be desired. A few hours into my first social engagement—an event I now think of as my university’s “preeminent retreat for Jews with undiagnosed anxiety disorders”—there were already outsiders. Acne-scarred guys in ill-fitting polos who lurked at the periphery of conversations. Girls who wore their bodies like lumbering animals and dressed as if performing in a middle-school piano recital. Then there were their foils: the hot ones who radiated sexual confidence and exhibited no detectable fear of death. I fell into neither category but was determined to present as the latter.

The retreat culminated in a drunken dance party. Beer pong, “Levels” by Avicii blasting from speakers purchased by someone’s dad. It wasn’t particularly memorable, except when a guy turned to me and said what sounded like, “Bathroom in three?” I froze, horrified. A few beats later, I realized he was not inviting me to join him in the stall; he was joking about women going to the bathroom in groups of three. My dormmates and I lost it. It was the perfect misunderstanding to foment our tentative friendships, which, in time, grew strong on a steady diet of shared secrets and vulgar gossip.

Over late nights in unair-conditioned dorm rooms, we unburdened ourselves to each other. M confided that the first time her boyfriend fingered her, awkwardly parting her legs beneath fluorescent lights, she kept picturing herself as a raw chicken in a supermarket. D shared first his coming-out story and then the story of him sleeping with a woman for the first time after our college’s annual foam party. What a mythical creature this anonymous woman was—rising from a sea of foam to deflower my friend before retreating to the strange land from whence she came. The sex was bad, yet somehow symbolic. Of what, we weren’t sure. We dubbed her Foam Monster.

Graphic sex stories—especially those with a winner and a loser—were friendship superglue. Particularly among my guy friends: I almost pissed myself laughing when T described drunkenly spearing a frosted cupcake with his dick and urging his one-night stand to eat it. The punch line was that T was a messy drunk, yes, but it was also that this rando who’d known him for an hour didn’t hesitate before chowing down. They were all randos to me, even the girls who sat a few rows behind me in biology. When R hooked up with someone he’d been pursuing for months, he confessed that she had an alarmingly large nipple-to-breast ratio. From then on, she was Lightbulb Nips. Every moment of surreptitious eye contact, of shared private laughter at another woman’s expense, fortified my male friendships. I always took their side. These men, after all, were my friends. What were the women to me?

Of course, if I’d heard a man speak this way about one of my friends, he’d be dead to me. But these women didn’t belong to me. In my mind, they didn’t belong to anyone—even when I knew the woman in the story better than I knew the man. When a guy I’d exchanged maybe five sentences with hooked up with a girl from my chemistry lab, he went around telling people he’d accidentally stuck it in her butt, and that she hadn’t noticed the difference. My friends and I laughed about it for weeks. When a friend of a friend took his girlfriend to buy Plan B, she reportedly asked about the ingredients. “What kind of question is that?” my friends and I cackled. “The ingredients are DEAD BABY.”

None of this registered as slut-shaming. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with being promiscuous. My friends and I encouraged random hookups, surreptitiously photographing each other’s dance-floor make-outs so we could laugh at the images over late-night tacos. I thought my guy friends’ sex stories were funny because of their sloppiness. Because of how cartoonish they were compared to my mundane hookups—I couldn’t fathom having anal sex at all, much less having so much of it that I couldn’t tell my ass from my puss. I was terrified of my body. When I used my guy friends’ bathrooms, I angled my pee stream to silently hit the toilet bowl rather than splash into the water—god forbid the living proof that I peed diminish my sexual currency. Yet somehow, I cultivated a reputation as the horniest member of my friend group, though I hooked up among the least.

What none of my friends knew was that I’d been assaulted as a child. I was irrationally afraid that I had undiagnosed HIV. That the trauma had left me incapable of love. That, 20 years into marriage with a man, I’d realize I was a lesbian, and my husband and children would hate me for tearing our family apart. All of my anxieties were this specific. My friends didn’t know about any of them. I wanted to be touched, to be loved, but feared I was too damaged. I couldn’t fathom my body as a site of both pain and pleasure. At 18, I thought it had to be one or the other—and that, for me, the choice had perhaps already been made.

I lived vicariously through my friends’ stories, at once relieved that it wasn’t me who had experienced them and angsty because I had nothing comparable to share. I compensated with self-deprecating anecdotes that were more about sexual frustration than sex. I recounted the elementary-school friend I used to play graphic rounds of “Doctor” with, my obsessive countdown to my first period, my homoerotic friendships in high school. Eventually, I shared my adolescent fear of HIV, but not the origin of the fear. “Only you could concoct a scenario where you got HIV from a waiter coming in your pasta on a day you had an open mouth sore,” D said. We made fun of everyone, and we made fun of ourselves. Our days were a menagerie of ridiculous men and ridiculous women. But mostly ridiculous women.

I’m not sure when my loyalties decisively shifted toward the women from my friends’ stories. It could have been the year after I graduated, when I began writing about my assault. It could have been at a pool party a couple of years later when D said, “Do you remember how we used to call that girl I lost my virginity to Foam Monster? Whenever I think about that, I want to die.” The transformation was definitely complete by the time of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. I’d taken to wearing an “I Believe Christine Blasey Ford” button when I took the train to work, and each time, I got this suffocating feeling that was equal parts anxiety and rage, daring someone to fucking say something to me.

The simplest explanation for the shift is that I grew up. I recognized my actions for what they were: internalized misogyny driven by fear of what my own female body harbored. As I began to process the trauma I’d spent the last 15 years repressing, my friends were unanimously supportive. I realized that my fears weren’t uncommon, and that fixating on others’ unruly bodies was a way of diverting attention from my own. The accidental anal story in particular haunts me. Having since, uh, experienced more of life myself, I now find it unbelievable that this encounter went down the way we were told. Was it truly an accident? Either way, I no longer find the story funny.

Writing this piece raised a memory I’d neglected for years. My junior year, a rumor went around that this awkward guy a couple of years younger than me had fingered an unconscious girl in front of his floormates. Supposedly, she’d passed out drunk in their dorm’s common area, and he’d stuck his hand up her dress. I don’t remember who I heard this from. Did he really do it—because he was unpopular and had something to prove—or did my peers spread a vicious lie about him because, in their eyes, no conscious girl would have ever hooked up with him? I want to believe that if we’d seen a friend, or even just some girl who lived on our floor, being digitally penetrated while passed out in front of us, we wouldn’t ignore or encourage it. I want to believe we meant more to each other than that.

Looking back, the most absurd elements of my friends’ hookup stories were not the sex acts themselves. Harpooning a cupcake on a dick is chaotic, but wilder still is the idea that these women had trusted these men. Being that vulnerable with a man who hadn’t devoted several months to proving he wouldn’t hurt me—that’s what I found the most unbelievable.

I wish I could tell my younger self that my value as a person wasn’t tied to my sexual currency. That thinking critically about my assault, about what I wanted from my body and my sexuality, wouldn’t ruin me. That making my love interests all but submit to a background check wouldn’t save me. That there are better ways to organize your life than according to whatever metrics will result in the least suffering. That I was surrounded by much scarier and more insidious shit than the fears I had about myself.

The awkward guy rumored to have assaulted his unconscious classmate has a public Facebook profile. I scrolled through his page the other day, going back several years. He posted a lot about feminism, systemic racism, income inequality. During the Trump era, he aired his disgust with the president’s racism and misogyny. Was this evidence he didn’t assault his classmate, the mark of a guilty conscience, or neither? I’ll never know. “Don’t do it,” I told myself, hovering at the edge of his fall 2018 posts. But I couldn’t stop myself. And there it was. He urged us not to believe Kavanaugh’s lies. He urged us to #believewomen.

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Featured image: Edvard Munch. Two Women on the Shore, 1898. Clarence Buckingham Collection, Art Institute of Chicago (1963.293). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed August 16, 2024. Image has been cropped.