When I was in law school, I was obsessed with the simple fact that men are (for the most part) bigger than women. The misunderstood implications of this reality, I felt, were huge. It puts women in a position where, if they are attacked, absent a weapon and some ability to handle it, odds are they will lose. Women know this, intimately and viscerally. We see the actual physical disparity around us. We have been raised in a culture shaped around and by this power difference. Our knowledge of it—not the factual disparity itself so much as the penetrating, all-consuming awareness of it—changes who we are, how we feel, how we act, and how we respond to acts of aggression and threats of aggression.

Resist and risk becoming a victim, another statistic, a person who spends the next 10 years paying $150 to $200 a week to a therapist to parse the moment, relive it, process it, and attempt to understand the heinous ribbon of emotions it unfurled so that she can finally move on. But rationalize away the situation—decide not to say "no" in order to retain some sense of agency in the situation—and she need not become a victim. She gets to maintain her non-victim status in the world.

When I was 16, I followed a boy into the woods at a party and let him push my head down and hold it at his crotch, then pull open his pants and shove my face in. I had on a strapless white dress with ruffle trim at the top. It had yellow, green, and blue flowers the size of pencil tops. I still remember it—the dress I was wearing—because the scene is etched into my memory in a permanent, gag-producing way. Why didn't I fight him? What would it have meant if I fought back, and he didn't stop—that I had been sexually assaulted? Raped? I couldn't imagine being raped, so I wasn't.

I felt smarter than him for figuring this out. I was smarter than him. He had a beer gut at 17 and had hardly passed geometry. I, highest scorer in the school on the national math exam, was going to go on to do great things while he stayed behind, forcing gestures of love.

Later that year, I wore the same dress at a gas station, sitting in the passenger seat of my best friend's teal Honda Civic, yelling at a stranger from the open window. "Hey! Hey, guy! Will you buy us cigarettes?" I waved a 10 at him. He took it and returned with the change and the cigarettes, and when he handed them to me, he grabbed my chest, a handful of it. He kept his eyes on mine while he squeezed, then pulled his hand back casually and walked away, like it was just part of our transaction.

I remember feeling shaken but still whole, as we drove down the street that we had driven down thousands of times before. I never wanted to see that man again. I hated him. But I remained intact, headed to a party where I'm sure there was some boy I was crushing on and did want to see. It was as if, because I hadn't fallen apart, I could decide that nothing had happened, at all.