Without Our Consent

I was too drunk from the drinks he had bought me, an 18-year-old, to say yes or no. A man in his late 40s, maybe his early 50s, he was the team manager of one of my sponsors back when I was surfing on the competitive circuit, modeling, and thinking about taking a year off before college to see if I could make a go of it as a pro.

The surf industry was ultra-male dominated back then, and it was normal to go to a trade show - part of the job as a surfer / model - and see strippers tied by the wrists to their poles behind a peephole in the Black Flies booth. Among other displays of overt misogyny. Even Surfing Magazine veered toward Playboy with mostly naked women prostrate on every other page.

Women surfers were only one peg above chicks on the beach. But you could be taken down anytime they chose, and so there was not even a prospect of recourse in the morning. No chance I could speak up. Because my consent didn’t matter, because in that world women’s consent didn’t matter.

So I said nothing. Didn’t even talk about it until 20 years later. Instead, I went to college and pretty much quit surfing altogether. Such is life, I figured, and left it mostly in the past, naively believing that here, in the world of ultra-progressive politics, that couldn’t happen.

Not that rape couldn’t happen — I know sexual assault is everywhere. I’m not stupid.

The 6’ 5” former Marine oyster farmer seemed like a dream to men who anointed him Maine’s savior from Susan Collins.

Yet for at least 6 of the women he had romantic relationships with, Platner was a nightmare.

As the New York Times reported Lyndsey Fifield alleged that Platner grabbed her by the shoulders regularly, sometimes hard enough to leave marks and that during an argument, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, then held the door closed so she couldn’t get out.

Jane Dickson described their multi-year relationship as wrenching and volatile.

​And Jenny Racicot characterized his past behavior as “reckless” and “unsettling.

Many of us who have experienced domestic violence or sexual assault, or who have stood alongside those who have, warned loudly and clearly: listen to these women. Because, as Tara Palmeri, who has spent a career helping SA survivors tell their stories, recently wrote “The first version of a story is rarely the whole story. Sometimes there is less than initially appears. Sometimes there is far more.”

But Bernie Sanders Sanders told us we were wrong.

David Hogg told us to sit down.

Ruben Gallego told us we were endangering democracy.

These are all men I admire(d) and whose betrayal cut that much deeper for my admiration.

Nor am I without fault. I wanted to be a good soldier, not make a fuss, not torpedo our chances to take back the Senate. And, I wanted to believe that nothing else would surface about Platner’s past, even though I knew damn well it would. So I didn’t speak as loudly or as often as I could have, as I should have.

​I was with my kids at the La Brea Tarpits when the news broke. I tried to put it aside, be present to the experience. It was a big expense for us to go, and it was the last day the Tarpits would be open for two years. I didn’t want to miss that with my sons.

But when we got back home, the implications and ramifications came crashing down. Anger and grief consumed me, consume me as I write this, and I hope that in writing it, I can work through it. Because I can’t stay here, in this place, that I have worked so hard to leave.

I thought I had escaped from it in the progressive political movement. I thought we were building something together on the basis of equality. Based on consent.

But the truth is that when we insisted that these women be believed and were shouted down by the men of the Progressive Movement, we were being told our consent didn’t matter, just like Jenny Racicot’s consent didn’t matter to Platner. Just like mine didn’t matter that night.

It is as simple as that.

America was founded without the consent of women. Its laws were made without our consent until 1920. To this day, our electoral systems that heavily favor male candidates seek to circumvent our consent.

Graham Platner, a serial abuser of women, accused rapist, backed unquestioningly by so-called progressive males, is the continuation and manifestation of this 250-year-long attempt in America to govern women’s bodies without our consent.

Abigail Adams warned in 1776 that without women’s consent, there could be no legitimate government. Two hundred and fifty years later, we are still saying the same thing, and we are still being told to sit down.

There needs to be an acknowledgment by the men in this movement that in silencing the women who spoke the truth about Platner, they actively stripped all women of their ability to participate in a democracy founded on the consent of the governed.

​There needs to be an apology. And there needs to be a plan.

Without this, we cannot truly move forward. Without this, we cannot truly build a democratic movement together.

I am asking you to join us. If not, please, for all of our sakes, get out of the way. We cannot carry you and simultaneously win this war.

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