It took me a long time to get up the courage to recount this and submit this.
When I was a first-year graduate student, five or so years ago, I went to a large party hosted at a house where a few male graduate students lived together. Toward the end of the evening, I went to get my coat in one of the bedrooms in the house. As I was reaching to get my coat off the floor, one of these grad students came up behind me and grabbed my breasts. In shock, I didn’t move, I didn’t breathe. This person proceeded to grope me for a couple more seconds before I turned around and pushed him away and bolted out of the room.
Since then, I’ve spent years trying to make sense of the incident. For many years I internalized it as something I had no right to resent. (And I’m a feminist who knows better!) Only now that I’m older and am no longer intimidated by older graduate students can I see that what happened was *not ok*, and that it *hurt me*.
Since then, he’s landed a world-class tenure track position.
