Reacting to Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus’s bestselling novel Lessons in Chemistry is a unique story, sharply written and full of the raging yet inoffensive feminism that dominates contemporary fiction. But there is an early scene I reacted badly to. It’s one that really needs a content warning – and please consider this your content warning for the rest of this post.
No graphic details here but I’m going to talk about my own brushes with sexual assault, feeling triggered and how jaded I got about men.
The rape scene
Early in the novel, there is a flashback to protagonist Elizabeth Zott’s time at university. She was studying a masters in chemistry but never graduated, and this scene reveals why. We witness in painful slo-mo how the protagonist’s supervisor rapes her and she defends herself by stabbing him with a #2 pencil (pictured on the cover). When she reports the crime, the police blame her as the victim and the university expels her.
It’s awful and a stark contrast with the dry and witty tone that dominates the rest of the book.
I found this scene triggering.1 The visceral reaction I had to it surprised me, because in the course of my work in the nonprofit sector, I’ve read a lot about the awful things people do to each other.
I’ve been trying to figure out why this particular fictional depiction of abuse left such an impact on me. What I’ve realised is that of all the cruelties in the world, sexual violence is the one that upsets me the most. Maybe that’s because I can relate to it the most.
Sexual violence is all too prevalent
It’s astonishing that almost 1 in 3 women worldwide have experienced violence because they were women. In Australia, 1 in 5 women have suffered sexual violence.
I’m fortunate to not be among the 30 percent of women worldwide, or the 2.2 million in Australia2 – at least I don’t think I am. But I wanted to share a couple of things that happened to me some years ago, because I suspect they constitute the bare minimum of what women everywhere have experienced. Several people close to me have suffered more than I have.
If you’re female and haven’t had worse things happen to you, I want to know. And regardless of the severity of what you’ve been through, I also suspect that the feelings such incidents evoke will be familiar to you.
It’s the feelings that are the sneakiest, smarmiest bit. The feelings are what rise up in me again when I read about a fictional rape in Lessons in Chemistry.
A little thing that happened in Madrid
Just a few weeks into my semester-long university exchange in Spain, I posted the following Note (a now obsolete function) to Facebook. I’m republishing it here – apologies in advance for 21-year-old me’s cringeworthy tone of voice.
So after taking my siesta (contrary to stereotypes, I actually doubt people actually do this regularly, not in big cities at least) I thought to myself, hey let’s go to the park and do some journaling and look at the timetable and pick uni classes.
Sat down on a semicircular stone bench by a fountain and started writing, switched to Spanish, and it was all going well until, yes, as you can probably guess, a man approaches me. Not the same guy as before – much worse. The character I described in my second update was actually pretty decent, tried English and never touched me, but this dude was old as anything, had hair growing from the top of his nose, not just inside. At first I thought maybe he wants to ask me a question, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Then he’s like come have a drink with me. I’m like no thanks, maybe some other day.
Slightly uncomfortable at that point, but it’s still light, lots of people in the park, including a few people near me so I thought it’d be okay.
… [T]his wasn’t even a club/bar. It’s a family park, man. I shouldn’t have said it was okay for him to sit with me. He started asking all sorts of personal questions, especially about boyfriends (no I don’t have one, no I don’t need to know that you’re still a virgin), then he started TOUCHING me – my hair, my shoulders, my leg, and the small of my back, like reaching for my butt. He tried to KISS me too, two or three times, like on the lips. I’m like dude, GET LOST!! In Australia I could call the police. Plus, I have a cold and hope you catch it.
He kept saying oh you’re really gorgeous, come have a drink with me, let’s go to Toledo tomorrow, see, I can touch you here and it’s no problem. I’m sorry, but do I look like a hooker? Do I even look easy/vulnerable? I thought I made it a point to not appear on either side of the scale. Probably I should’ve thwacked him in the balls, hey? Or at least just got up and left straight away (thankfully he didn’t follow me when I said I’m leaving, bye).
Um, yeah, so I do feel just slightly dirty now. Does that count as being almost molested? It must be normal here, coz there was a couple sitting across from me who didn’t do anything, and another couple with their young daughter walked by just as I was trying to leave.
Please please don’t tell my parents because I’m fine but they’ll freak!!
Processing what happened
I don’t remember how I was finally able to extract myself. I do remember thinking, “Now I know why victims don’t just walk away.” Because I couldn’t. I wasn’t tied up, no-one was blocking my way, and yet I couldn’t remove myself from the situation. For all intents and purposes, I was stuck.
I remember being outraged that the bystanders didn’t intervene. I wish they had. Even today I cannot imagine how I might have called out to them for help.
I remember thinking, “I feel violated but it isn’t like I thought it would be.” It was gross but I didn’t experience a compulsion to cry or have a shower, my heart wasn’t racing in panic or anything. I was just kind of out of my body a bit. I was struggling to process what just happened.
I walked back to the residencia where I was staying with other female university students. A group of Latin American masters students, several years older than me, happened to be in the communal dining room when I sat down for lunch. I relayed the incident to them and they weren’t surprised. But they were kind, expressed their sympathy – and it helped me to be able to tell them, to be heard.
Lasting effects?
That was many years ago now. It’s not an incident I often think about – not then, not now. But as I reflect on it, I suspect it did leave me with some psychological scars.
That day reinforced a distrust I already felt towards men in general. Even the nice ones, because how could I know the nice ones weren’t secretly brutes? I carried with me the notion that anyone with a penis ultimately wanted to get into my pants and it had nothing to do with how objectively pretty I was, or how (un)sexy my clothing was.
My response, for years afterwards, was to get comfortable with situations like that one in Madrid. To get comfortable and stay in control of myself, always. I needed to feel confident I could go toe-to-toe with men but ensure I had an escape route ready – just like Elizabeth Zott, constantly armed with a #2 pencil.
Being in a public place was no protection at all when I couldn’t count on bystanders to do anything but stand by. A few years later, I faced a similar disappointment in Ecuador, when I was being harangued by a drunk man at a big village party. Several people there knew me, and the foreigner I most expected to come to my aid didn’t. (For the record, in the unlikely event that Rodrigo Martinez Jr is reading this, although I wasn’t in any danger, I will always remember and appreciate that you stepped in to help me that night).
Feeling triggered
In La Paz, Bolivia, I was once slapped on the bum by a random man on the street, as I walked the 50 metres from my apartment to the office. This was outrageous and I had a short rant about it to my friends. But it didn’t affect me the way the incident in Madrid had.
What did start to affect me was reading case files at work about children molested by their fathers, stepfathers, uncles, grandfathers. Months of reading records that were legal in tone yet sordid in nature did something to my spirit. An act of sexual violence against someone I knew left me shaken.
That triggered me. I’m not sure that anyone else noticed a change in me unless they read this short post that until now, I’d forgotten I’d ever written. I started to feel cynical about my male friends, angry at men in general. I felt alone. I felt suddenly less sweet and more bitter.
Thinking about those abused girls (and boys), I imagined how helpless they felt. How awful it was. How the people closest to them, for the longest time, had no idea or were complicit. How impossible it was to extract themselves from the abuse, time and again.
It was easy to imagine because I had experienced those same feelings – just without the same degree of violence and violation. But the feelings were of the same species.
The moral of the story
This weird and not-totally-pleasant trip down memory lane spilled out of Lessons in Chemistry. Is that the power of fiction? Include graphic scenes to make your story unforgettable, right? Sure, I’ll remember the novel for the rest of my life – but not because of anything new or insightful it shared about battling misogyny. I’ll remember that one scene. And then I’ll remember the worst bits about what were overall wonderful years of my life in Spain, Ecuador and Bolivia.
But I won’t stay there. I’ll commit to not being a bystander. The next time I see an old guy or a drunk guy (or any guy) coming a bit too close to a nervous-looking young woman, I’m going to try to give her an escape route because I know how hard it is to get yourself out of those situations.
I’ll call to mind that not all men are brutes – there are nice ones. I’m blessed enough to be friends with many great guys and to have beat all my jadedness to marry the best guy. It is possible to overcome deeply flawed, deeply rooted assumptions.
I’ll remember that I wrote this, because there can be redemption in the very act of talking about hard things. Sometimes it takes another person verbalising similar experiences or feelings for me to understand what I’ve been through, why I felt the way I felt. I hope what I’ve written here might be that for some of you reading this today.
On this topic, I’ve also previously written about healing (sexual and otherwise) and coming to terms with being objectified. Worth a read is Laura Killingbeck’s piece on travelling solo as a woman and some of the dimensions of what is it to be, physically, a woman in the world. When I read the article I felt like she’d put into words some of my own thought patterns that hadn’t quite crystallised.
Footnotes:
- There are other works of fiction whose brutality left a mark on me – Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas and certain scenes in The Vintner’s Luck by Elizabeth Knox come to mind. Those novels were intense, at least in parts, but they didn’t seem senselessly or incongruously graphic like the scene from Lessons In Chemistry.
The other thing I reacted badly to in the novel was how zealous and smug the whole book is in its criticism of religion, especially Christianity. It paints religion as inherently intolerant and intolerable; religious side characters as lazy or unenlightened people, if not downright corrupt. ↩︎ - If you’re thinking 2.2 million doesn’t add up to 1 in 5 women in Australia, here’s the detail from the Australian Bureau of Statistics:
An estimated 2.2 million women aged 18 years and over (22%) have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15, including:
– 20% (2.0 million) who experienced sexual assault
– 5.5% (544,700) who experienced sexual threat ↩︎
