I woke up one morning to find a letter envelope shoved under my windshield wiper. Inside, between layers of Scotch tape, was a neat little collection of pubic hair. There was also a pair of used panties. The note read, “I know we can’t be together, but now you’ll always remember me.
”
She was right. I had an ex-girlfriend who stalked me for five years. I had a restraining order against her that included my grandparents because she had been harassing them and my parents. I never thought to include my sister since she lived in a different city.
That was a mistake. This woman tracked my sister down at a music festival, wearing one of those hats with fake dreadlocks attached, trying to pretend she was a complete stranger. It would have been hilarious if not for the years of harassment. My sister knew exactly who she was.
The disguise was nothing more than that hat. Every time I moved, she would send something in the mail to let me know she had my address. One time it was a box containing a flannel shirt, a half-empty bottle of cologne, a broken toy ax, a bundle of pubic hair, and an eleven-page letter written entirely in crayon. I was staying at a friend’s house, sleeping in the guest room.
He was at work, and his girlfriend was home. His bedroom had a heavy door that had to be held open or it would slam shut. I slept with it closed. In the morning, I lay in bed for a bit before getting up, the way I always did.
Then I saw the door open. The hallway light spilled in, and I could see someone standing in the doorway. It was his girlfriend. She just stood there, staring at me.
I didn’t move. I wanted to see what she would do. She stood there for at least ten minutes. Didn’t look away.
Didn’t walk around the room. I was lying at an angle where I could see her perfectly, but she couldn’t tell my eyes were half open. I figured she was grabbing something from the closet. Nope.
Ten minutes, completely still. Finally, I flinched and feigned waking up. I heard her run out, and the door slammed shut. When I went to the kitchen, she was as bubbly as could be, acting like nothing had happened.
I fell asleep on the bus ride home from a school field trip in twelfth grade. I woke up to a girl using my hand to touch herself. As I started to regain consciousness, she threw my hand back at me and made a huge scene like I had been the one doing something wrong. I never talked to her about it.
It still bothers me to this day. When I was about twelve, my friend and I were out when a car with three women pulled up. A woman got out, flashing her chest and touching herself, trying to get us to go with them. We both noped out of there fast.
The image of the girl in the backseat still sticks with me. Looking back, it feels a lot more sinister than it did at the time. A car full of predators. I went on two dates with a girl once.
Then her best friend texted me anonymously, claiming we had met in a bar the night before and offering to come over. I worked night shift at the time and rarely went to bars, so I knew she was lying. After some pushing, I got the girl to confess. She said she was just testing to make sure I was trustworthy.
I never saw her again. I met a girl at a bar and we ended up back at her place. She seemed completely normal all night, no red flags. I would have dated her again.
I woke up around five in the morning and started getting dressed to leave for work. She woke up and totally freaked out, screaming, “Ingrid, you can’t leave! ” I explained that I needed to get to my job and that I would call her later. She wasn’t having any of it.
Then she attacked me. I literally had to fight my way out of her apartment, leaving with a few scratches on my arm. I never went back to that bar. A girl broke into my house three times in one week while I was rehearsing.
Each time she left money to repair the window she broke, a large bag of Twizzlers, and two cans of tuna for my cat. That was the entire pattern. We had never been romantically involved, barely even knew each other. I was dancing with a drunk girl who kept trying to pull my junk out, forcefully.
When she finally gave up, she called me a nerd and stormed off. I was about nine, after church service. The new wife of the minister took a liking to me. We were outside waiting for the adults, and she took me to a bench nearby.
She asked me lots of questions, then put my head on her lap and stroked my hair while humming a lullaby. It felt deeply uncomfortable, but I was a shy little boy and didn’t want to offend her. It went on for about thirty minutes but felt like hours. I could see my sister snickering from across the yard.
I couldn’t escape. I met a girl out one night. She seemed nice. When we went back to her place, there were pictures of me all around her mirror.
I signed one for her. I went on a blind date. The talk was okay over dinner, except she kept mentioning her dachshund. She had sweaters for it, a special bag to carry it.
Then she looked at me and said, “I really like my dog. ” I said, “I gathered that. ” She looked at me very starkly and said, “I don’t think you understand. I really like my dog.
” I paid for the food, wished her well, and left. In middle school, there was a girl who would grope my thighs constantly and make unwanted physical contact. The worst part was she made sure to do it in public, and other kids made fun of me for being uncomfortable. People laughed at me, like it was funny when a girl crossed boundaries with a guy.
My ex was at a party and tried making moves on my younger sister, who was only fifteen at the time. My ex was seventeen and touching her without permission. I got angry and told her to stop, and the party ended soon after. A week later, she didn’t apologize.
Instead, she tried to organize a meetup involving me, my sister, and some friends. I told her to stay away from us. She got furious and called me, saying she had a knife and if I kept this up, she would use it. She said she was on her way to my house.
I hoped she was bluffing. Twenty minutes later, she arrived right outside my door. I texted her that I wasn’t letting her in. She kept ringing the doorbell.
I told her I would call the cops if she didn’t leave. That finally worked. I haven’t seen her since. I dumped an ex about nine years ago.
She pulled up outside my back door and held the horn down, blocking the road, for thirty minutes straight. I showered, left through the front door, and went to a friend’s party. She was still honking when I left. I dated a girl and we ended up sharing an apartment.
After a month, I woke up to her staring at me, absolutely livid. I asked what was wrong. She said, “I had a dream that you were messing around with your ex, and I’ve been searching for reasons not to cut your penis off. ” I calmed her down enough for her to go to work.
I never collected my belongings that fast in my life. I never looked back. I met a girl at a party and we ended up back in my bedroom. Heavy makeout.
I suggested hooking up. She declined. Heavier making out, basically everything short of intercourse. I suggested again.
She declined. Fair enough. We agreed to meet up again. When the day came, she stood me up.
She told me she didn’t want to see me again because I wasn’t pushy enough. She said she liked men who weren’t so soft and gentle. She wanted me to push past her no. My one and only Tinder date turned out to have signed her divorce papers that day.
She laid out her one-year plan for us to date and get married. I let her know I wasn’t interested in a second date. She thanked me for my opinion and declined the idea of not having a second date. I was only a junior in high school, and she insisted we’d be married by the end of the year.
Luckily, she wanted to meet at my place first, but I made it a neutral location. I don’t like to think about what would have happened if she knew where I lived. I was about twelve, at a New Year’s party at my grandparents’ house with all their friends. One of their friends, a woman I had known for a while, kept touching and grabbing my waist and thigh region.
She would sneak it in under the table or when walking past me. Then she squeezed my butt with both hands. I had enough and said something. The rest of the night was awkward, but the worst part was my grandmother defending her and downplaying it.
It wasn’t until I told my mom the next day and she lost it on my grandma that anything changed. My grandmother finally admitted she was wrong. I haven’t seen that woman since. Had one partner who would remove the condom halfway through intercourse.
She’d ride and want me to finish inside her. I never did. A year later I found out she was dating a friend of a friend and did the same thing to him. Now he has a son.
Another one broke condoms on purpose, and I suspected she poked holes in them too. Bring your own condoms, guys. My roommate and I woke up one morning to find long dark hair all over the floor. Almost a foot long, black.
The front door was locked. I was single, and his girlfriend had short hair. Apparently some girl came in through the window, cut her hair, scattered it all over the floor, and left. Nothing was stolen.
We never figured out what it was about. Shortly after I turned twenty-one, I was at a bar with friends, shooting pool. A group of rough-looking women in their forties came in and slowly made their way to our side. I was standing at the end of the pool table when I felt a hand slide down the back of my pants and under my boxers, grabbing my butt.
Then she screeched, “Boy, your mama raised you right,” and walked back to her friends, proud. The bartender kicked them out. My buddies didn’t give me crap about it. We were all just stunned.
I’ve never groped a random person like that. I’m sorry to all the women who have been groped. It catches you completely off guard. In high school, during a class, a girl I barely knew asked, “Hey, you want to see my butt?
” I said, “Uh, no. ” She pulled her pants all the way down right in front of thirty students and the teacher. Then pulled them back up and walked away like nothing happened. A coworker sniffed the inside of my jacket that I forgot.
Later she gave me a date with her as a wedding gift, to be used before my wedding, and asked if I was truly happy on my wedding day. I hooked up with a girl in late 2009. She was a little intense for me, so I asked her over to call it off. We ended up hooking up again.
I’m weak, I know. I fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night to her cutting my armpit hair off, trying to put it in a ziplock bag. I have no idea what she planned to do with it. I got rid of her that night for good.
An older woman in her sixties was cutting my hair. I was about twenty-four. She rambled about how she loved bearded men, and said, “I might be old, but I can still look at the menu. ” She told me about going to clubs with her son in his forties because she liked younger men.
All while running her hand down the front of my shirt. I brought it up to other employees later, and they just laughed and said, “Oh yeah, that’s just her. ” Apparently, sexual assault is just part of her personality. I was engaged to a woman in her country.
I didn’t understand the language well, so I couldn’t help much with the wedding prep beyond cutting out invite cards. She was hot-tempered. When I asked what I could do, she refused to involve me and then complained that I wasn’t helping enough. She argued that I didn’t care, despite my efforts.
It was manipulative. Eventually she pulled a knife on me. I slapped it out of her hand, and she stormed off. When she left for work the next day, I packed my bags, took a taxi to the airport, and left.
I was wearing my university sports jacket when I went to grab fast food. Some woman I had never seen shouted and waved at me like we were best friends. I gave an awkward wave back. A couple hours later, I got a friend request from her on Facebook.
She must have seen my jacket, found the roster, figured out my name, and added me. I blocked her immediately. On a first date, a woman asked, “If you were going to kill me, how would you do it? I know how I’d kill you.
” Then she told me her plan to do it and get away with it. Another woman asked if I had feelings for her the day before her wedding, which I was in. After she got married, she insisted we talk and tried to sit on my lap at a party where we were both drunk. I said it could wait until morning.
The next morning, she revealed she had cut herself after I wouldn’t talk. I told her we couldn’t be friends. She texted me every single day for six months, and I never responded, until I learned how to block her number. A mutual friend told me she asked for my number last summer.
I haven’t spoken to her in ten years. When I was seventeen, I was eating pizza in a shop in New York, facing the window. It was around seven in the evening, getting dark. A woman in her fifties walking by saw me, slowed down, stared straight at me with the most seductive grin, winked, and kept walking.
I had never felt so many emotions at once. I was turned on, weirded out, intrigued, and scared. She had black hair and was attractive. I’ll never forget that day.
I worked overnights at a pharmacy. An older woman in her fifties would pick up prescriptions and flirt with me. The creepiest thing she said was, “I don’t know why women who go for younger men are called cougars. I like to be called a python because I like to ensnare young men.
Do you like pythons? ” A customer interrupted, and I ignored her until she left. A woman pinned me down on the beach on our first date, all seductive, and in a quiet moment she said, unironically, “I want to murder you. ”
I had a girlfriend who was possessive to the point of stalking.
Three months in, she had planned our wedding and named our four children: Max, Harrison, Lily, and Sophia. If I didn’t reply to her texts within five minutes, she’d send seven more and call me several times. She checked my social profiles constantly to see when I was last online to determine whether I should have seen her message. She didn’t believe I could have anything going on that would keep me from video calling her at the start and end of every day.
I dated a woman who was six years older than me when I was twenty-four and in a low mental state from past trauma. She was very predatory. She started talking about shared finances a month in. She encouraged me to keep a journal for my mental recovery, but with a twist: she asked the questions, I wrote the answers, and she read them.
Most of it was extremely personal. She also tried to cut me off from my best friend. It took a few months to see clearly. She must have sensed my resistance, because one day she set the journal aside and started the breakup talk.
I agreed it wasn’t working. It was amicable until I asked for my journal back. She instantly started screaming that it belonged to her. I stayed seated and kept repeating that she hadn’t written a single word in it and that I had purchased it.
She finally tossed it at me, and I left quickly. She sent me an apology years later, while also letting me know she’d be attending kink meetups in my city. An elderly woman loudly told her middle-aged daughter that she wanted to have sex with me in a Trader Joe’s. I went to CVS at nine at night to get my dad’s medication.
While waiting for the cashier, two older women in line started talking to me unprompted and rubbing my shoulders and arms. I said I had a girlfriend, trying to stay polite. Inside, I was extremely creeped out. The cashier returned, I paid, and left.
They squeezed my biceps on the way out. I took a shower when I got home. I was at work late, upgrading computers to Windows 10. I had recently gotten married.
A younger woman cornered me and said, “If you ever need a release from your wife, I’m here and more than happy to, you know, have sex or something. I think you’re super attractive. ” She pushed for a few minutes after I mentioned I was happily married with no intention of cheating, lingered while I kept working, and eventually left. I had a waitress coworker whose husband cheated on her.
She was smart, attractive, and funny. Her husband agreed that she deserved to sleep with me to get even with him. They never considered that I was married and not interested in ruining my relationship. I went on a date with a girl and thought we both understood there was no connection.
It was hard to hold a conversation. I dropped her off, and before she got out of the car, she felt my chest, very weirdly, like she was feeling me up. Then she left. I played an MMO where you could join five guilds.
This lady was in three of them, always nice but very flirty. We used TeamSpeak a lot and became friends, discovering we shared tons of interests even though we lived a few hundred miles and an international border apart. She claimed to be in her twenties. I was over thirty.
We stayed friends, though she made it clear to everyone that she wanted more. She planned to travel near my area around her birthday, so I offered to meet in a public place. That’s when she confessed she wasn’t really in her twenties. She was turning sixteen.
Technically over the age of consent, but still a kid. I wasn’t interested. I explained I was nearly twice her age. She was devastated, crying, telling me I was making a mistake, that she’d be the best girlfriend and future wife possible, that age was just a number.
I finally told her that in two years, when she turned eighteen and had proof, I would consider a single date if she was still serious. But absolutely never under eighteen. She wasn’t happy but accepted it. We stayed in touch after I left the game.
Almost two years later, she had found a boyfriend and contacted me, asking me to travel up there and meet them because she wanted me to know exactly what I missed out on by unfairly turning her down. Age was just a number, and it shouldn’t have gotten in the way. She’s become more normal since. I have never dated her.
I was standing at a bar talking with a friend when I felt something touch the back of my shirt. I turned around and found a woman smelling my armpit. At a rave, a girl walked up to me like the living dead while I was in the middle of a conversation. She stopped dead in front of me, said, “What’s that?
” and grabbed me by the crotch with all the strength a messed-up twenty-year-old could muster. I told her to get her hands off me, and she skittered away like Gollum being separated from his precious. About ten minutes later, a friend tapped my shoulder and pointed behind me. Three cops were standing there with a K9, and that same girl was crying and claiming I had assaulted her.
They were ready to destroy me without a shred of proof. If I hadn’t been surrounded by people all night, most of them young women who backed up my story, I’m pretty sure that nutcase could have ruined my life easily.