Unrequited (20 page)

The tendency to see female stalking or aggression as humorous can backfire, keeping men—and even boys—from getting the support they need. Jerry, a former student of mine, told me that he had been cyberstalked throughout high school by a girl he was friends with during his freshman year. His friends made fun of her obsessive Facebook posts about him and her repeated efforts to get
him to chat over IM by changing her user name, which he blocked. “I joined in the laughter,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be awkward. I didn’t want to say I was scared of this girl. Who wouldn’t have laughed at me because of that?”

At one point, he was so alarmed by her behavior that he confessed his fears to a school guidance counselor. She suggested that he give a photo of the girl to school security. Confiding in the guidance counselor made him feel a little better, and the girl never showed up at his school. But looking back from the vantage point of several years, he said the school should have done more. “I was pretty lucky,” he said. “She seemed unhinged. She could have brought a gun to school—and then wouldn’t they [school officials] have felt bad that they didn’t take me more seriously?” If he had been a girl, he said, “everyone would have pounced” on the situation. “Because I’m a boy, I’m supposed to take care of these things. But what if I couldn’t?”

Jerry, in other words, didn’t quite fit what Sinclair and other relationship aggression researchers call the “good victim” prototype. Submissive, frightened women and girls, for instance, are “good victims,” perceived as deserving of support. Men and teenage boys, who are “supposed to take care of these things,” make far less acceptable victims, particularly if they or their peers laugh about their aggressor or act in other ways unfitting to victimhood. Luke, for example, seemed to relish retelling the tantalizing bits of his “porch diver” story—how willing Dara was to bed him right away, and how, the night after the police made her leave his house, she called to ask him to see her again, “just for sex.” He told me he was briefly tempted, then turned her down. “I said to myself, ‘This woman dove into my concrete and tile porch, bloodied her nose, and called the police on me. This is a woman I don’t want in my life.’”

This kind of swagger, says Langhinrichsen-Rohling, may be a consequence of “men’s socialization scripts,” which “promote the notion that
they should be ready to have a sexual experience with any woman, at any time.” Dara’s determined pursuit at once alarmed Luke
and
gave him a pleasurable ego boost—two seemingly irreconcilable states, at least for the good victim. In a kind of macho version of slut-shaming, Luke’s buddies told him that he “let himself in for it” by accepting the opportunity to sleep with Dara only hours after they met. “Any woman who’s going to do that has a screw loose to begin with,” they said.

Male stalking victims are viewed as more responsible for what happened to them than are female victims, according to published studies. The research also shows that
female stalkers are not seen as being as much cause for concern as male stalkers. What the studies’ findings amount to is an attitude akin to “rape culture” misperceptions about women. Sexual assault awareness campaigns have for years worked to debunk the idea that women are “asking” to be raped if they dress provocatively or seem to lead a man on. While these efforts haven’t eliminated these beliefs, they’ve done a lot to raise awareness of them. Yet we haven’t started to confront the ways in which, in the power dynamics of relationship pursuit, we put a similar false onus on men. We buy into the myth that their desire for sex is perpetual and undiscriminating, so there is no such thing as unwanted pursuit.

Under this myth, any refusal of a woman’s advances, then, seems a lie. As writer James Lasdun put it in his memoir,
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
,
rejecting a woman’s love is, in the pagan world, a “sin against nature” that is “inevitably punished.” He points to the story of Hermaphroditus, who rejects the advances of the nymph Salmacis. In revenge, she wraps him in an embrace. Their two bodies merge into one, creating the first
hermaphrodite. Her predatory hug possesses him and emasculates him at once.

Lasdun’s saga of being cyberstalked began in 2005, when a talented former student he calls Nasreen emailed him asking for help with finding an agent for her novel. Her messages were at first professional, then flirtatious, then obsessive and hateful. She contacted his employers to disparage him as a writer and teacher. She excoriated him in the reader-review section for his novels on Amazon and other sites. She submitted racist and sexist essays from his email address to publications. She accused him of affairs with students, plagiarism, and arranging for her own rape. At one point, her cyberstalking escalated to violent threats against him and his family.

In many ways, Lasdun is a “good victim.” He is a married father of two children who were in grade school when the stalking began. Though he confesses in his memoir that he privately had felt some degree of attraction to Nasreen, he clearly and immediately rejected her advances. He took seriously the vengeful response that followed. Pagan dictates aside, he told me he never felt the stalking was “an affront to my masculinity.” He just wanted it to stop. Her relentlessness was taking over his life. “I was obsessed myself,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything else.” He went to the police and gained the support of an NYPD detective familiar with the kind of behavior Nasreen was exhibiting. But there wasn’t much the detective could do beyond calling Nasreen and warning her to stop. She lived in California, and what she had done constituted only a misdemeanor. So Lasdun did what writers do: He wrote about what he was going through.

Lasdun told me that he found sexual politics a “limited” way to understand stalking. “I think, on the whole, it’s more fruitful to look at stalking as a thing people do to other people,” he said. “It’s
a human problem.” Yet a good deal of the critical response to
Give Me Everything You Have
turned out to be what he called a “minefield.” “There’s a double standard,” he said. “The amount of victim blaming surprised me.”

New Yorker
reviewer John Colapinto insisted that Lasdun failed to fully acknowledge his “crush” on Nasreen; rather, he “let his sexual nature get the better of him” to “
accidentally (and dangerously) lead on a paranoid fantasist.” Jessica Freeman-Slade of
The Millions
accused him of sounding “
like Humbert Humbert, more complicit than innocent, more culpable than defensible”—as if, instead of being a stalker’s target, Lasdun was a scheming molester, Nasreen no more powerful than a confused and manipulated tween. Nick Richardson of
The London Review of Books
suggested that the very act of publishing his account made Lasdun the victor against Nasreen’s “digital menace,” which “almost doesn’t qualify as stalking” because there was no physical confrontation: “Lasdun got a book out of Nasreen,
while she remains alone, her novel unpublished, clearly very ill.” Jenny Turner in
The Guardian
charged Lasdun of failing to see the possibility that “Nasreen is in terrible distress”—and of
approaching his story with “an almost total lack of self-irony.”

Irony, it seems, is mandatory for the male target of female stalking—otherwise, we might have to acknowledge that what he’s gone through is real. We’d much rather believe in the stalking woman as a symbol of resistance against the tyranny of the mentor, the indignities of sexual rejection, and the anguish of obsession. If rejecting a woman is a sin against nature, telling the story of her vengeance may not offer much redemption. It may even amplify the transgression. It’s no surprise that many male targets of stalkers choose to keep quiet and try to handle the problem themselves.

MITCH, A MEDICAL
anthropologist, did not dial 911 the day Anne broke in to his living room. She had been stalking him for months. They had dated briefly when they were in their twenties, after he returned home from Vietnam. He remembered her as insecure and belligerent, particularly toward women she perceived as rivals. After they broke up, she “literally vanished.” He didn’t see her again until he was in his fifties, married, and browsing through a sporting-goods store in a shopping mall. “Oh, look who it is,” Anne said. She was a tall woman dressed in a short royal blue dress and high heels. He found her striking.

“I suppose we can pick up where we left off,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and told her he was married.

“That can be changed,” she replied curtly, and left the store.

He spotted her watching him nearly every day after. She drove past, staring right at him, while he was waiting in line to get ice cream for his nieces. She pulled up behind him in the parking lot where he was picking up his teenage son and daughter. “They could have been my kids,” she said, then drove away. At a party, she walked up to him with a friend and introduced him: “This is my ex-lover, soon to be my lover again.” On a beach outing, he caught sight of Anne confronting his wife as he paddled nearby on a kayak. He rushed back to shore. “When she saw me, she said, ‘Oh, shit,’ and drove off on her motorcycle,” he said.

He and his wife went to Ukraine for six weeks. They got home around noon. Within hours, Anne telephoned. “Oh, you’re back now,” she said.

When he ran into her by himself in a grocery store, he asked her, “Are you threatening me?”

“You’re going to find out,” she said.

One day he and his wife left on a brief errand without locking
their door. When they returned home, Anne was sitting in the living room. Mitch’s three Rottweilers were standing guard around her. “They wouldn’t let me leave,” Anne said.

“What are you doing here?” Mitch asked.

“Snooping,” she said calmly.

“Get out,” he said.

“Don’t give me orders!” she said.

Mitch bristled. “It’s not an order. Just get out,” he said, and she did.

He thought of calling the police to report her, but then told himself that they wouldn’t do anything. After Vietnam, he said, he’d lost his trust in authority and the government. Several days later, he asked a friend in law enforcement what he could do. The friend told Mitch that so far, there were no grounds to do anything. “She broke in to my home,” Mitch protested. His friend explained that because Mitch hadn’t called the police then, he wouldn’t be able to prove anything. Even if he could prove that she’d threatened him, all the police would do was issue an order of protection forbidding her to come within a thousand yards of him. “Those measures are ineffectual,” Mitch said. “I learned in the service how to be effectual. I knew how to take care of my own problems.”

He felt he could defend himself against her, but he worried about his wife and kids. He began to fantasize about blowing up her car with her in it. Then, after Anne had been stalking him for about six months, she pulled her vanishing act again. He hasn’t seen her since.

In the wake of her disappearance, Mitch suffered terrible personal losses. His elderly mother died after a long illness. Eight months later, his wife, who was much younger than he was, died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm. In his grief, he continued to feel
a fierce rage at Anne. “It had an extremely personal impact on my psyche,” he said. “It made me angry that someone could try to control me that way, that someone could make me feel that I was not in total control of myself.”

He told me that she was one of the factors that pushed him “off the deep end” after his wife died. He went into therapy and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which began in his early childhood and was exacerbated by Vietnam. Anne retriggered him, he told me, and he began to realize in therapy that it was okay for him to seek help when he didn’t feel in control—a realization he could not have reached while Anne was actively stalking him.

Mitch had been caught in what Langhinrichsen-Rohling calls a “double jeopardy” for male victims of stalking. If they are reluctant to show or even feel much fear, they are less likely to seek help from friends, professionals, or law enforcement. If they do seek help, they may not get much,
because society doesn’t take female-on-male stalking seriously.

As Mitch recognized, orders of protection have only a limited reach. Studies of orders of protection show that they are associated with a reduced risk of violence toward victims who obtain them. But a study that looked at the efficacy of orders of protection in stalking cases revealed that
more than 81 percent of the orders issued for male victims are violated, along with about 69 percent of the orders issued for female victims. Lasdun found that because his cyberstalker lived in California, he had very little recourse. Orders of protection didn’t apply. Much of what she did was considered aggravated harassment, a mere misdemeanor, not worth the expense of extraditing her to New York. After she threatened murder, investigators told Lasdun that an extradition could move forward. But two of his colleagues had also become targets.
They objected to the extradition after learning that once Nasreen’s hearing in New York was over, she would be set free to do as she wished, in much closer proximity to them.

Lasdun’s experiences reveal the risks of identifying as a victim of stalking—indeed, of any kind of bullying or harassment. You’ll be subject to scrutiny and suspicion, and you might never get the protection you deserve, not to mention the justice. Mitch’s saga, in turn, exposes the possible consequences of refusing the victim label and staying invisible: If you can’t come to terms with your inability to control your attacker, you might implode. The very least we can do for male targets of female stalking, whether they call themselves victims or not, is to let go of our own attachment to the impossibility of their suffering, and refuse to give their pursuers the gender pass.

CLARA STEPPED ONSTAGE, LEADING A
troupe of nine-year-old girls dressed in iridescent purple and green costumes. They danced around the boat where the teenage girl playing Ariel, the Little Mermaid, sat fluttering her eyes and grinning at Prince Eric. “Kiss the girl,” my daughter and her ensemble urged him. His kiss, as the story goes, had the power to restore the Little Mermaid’s melodious voice, which she’d traded in for a pair of legs and the chance to win the prince’s love.