The Sexual Politics of Being Poor
CW: Mentions of sexual violence. Title IX and other resources are listed at the end of the article.
Courtesy of the author.
One thing that is clear at Swarthmore is how much money the people around you have. Of course, money can be seen through more than just expensive vacations and clothes. Money shows up in the way people carry themselves, how they talk, and, in particular, how they talk about others. It shows in how they treat others and how they expect to be treated. I had been aware of class growing up, but coming to Swarthmore opened my eyes to a very different world, a world complicated and defined by wealth. This became clearer when I was sexually assaulted my freshmen year. My rapist was a student who belonged at Swarthmore, who fit the bill of a wealthy, well-connected person who added more to this institution than I could ever hope to add. When it became clear that I would not be leaving the room untouched, I fixed my eyes over his shoulder onto the standard dorm-issued dresser that matched my own. This was where our similarities ended. Later, I thought about how easy it would be to disappear from Swarthmore, as though I had never stepped foot in this place to begin with. Because in the world of elite academia I had stumbled into, I was nothing.
* * *
My world was very small before Swarthmore. It began and ended in a divot in an Illinois cornfield that someone decided was the best place to build a town. I should say that it’s not a bad place, although I will probably still be sorting through complicated feelings about what it means to call someplace home for a very long time. I grew up not knowing that I was poor or working class or anything much different from my friends. A quick look at Wikipedia will tell you that, according to the 2000 census, the median family income in my hometown of Paxton, IL was about $44,256. Men had a median income of $31,140 versus $23,555 for women. Only 13.4% of residents have a bachelor’s degree, roughly a third of the national average, and 4.4% have a graduate degree. I know that these numbers are from 20 years ago, but I don’t think much has changed. If anything, things have gotten worse, like they have for most rural Midwestern towns and the forgotten people who live in them. While the signs that greet you when you enter the city boast populations of anywhere from 4500 to 4800, the Wikipedia page estimates that in 2019 the population had shrunk to 4,125. Every year the newspaper reports lower and lower enrollment numbers for the elementary schools. I come from a ghost town in the making.
Throughout my time in school, I was able to fall in with the popular kids who sat more comfortably in the middle class bracket, with their larger homes and nicer clothes and newer cars. Even though I knew that there were differences between my friends and me, I was able to work around them. I was well liked and respected in school despite not having an important last name; I compensated for what I lacked by showing off in the classroom and asserting myself as A Smart Girl. I became a people pleaser at any cost. I loved the praise I got from authority figures for following directions, and I knew that being agreeable was the way to make friends. Successful people are respected, and so I got through school by creating a persona of a successful person, of someone who was given respect simply by being in the room, of someone who did not have my insecurities and faults. I imagined that I would be able to do the same thing in college: I would fall in with the right crowd of people; I would learn how to dress and speak all over again based on what my peers did. I would be respected despite where I came from. If the mere existence of this essay does not make this obvious, I will warn you that this is not what happened.
* * *
When I came to Swarthmore, I was suddenly surrounded by more wealth and privilege than I had ever seen before. Just as in high school, I learned what parts of myself to hide and which to project, what to say when and where and to whom. When so-called friends made disparaging remarks about another “poor” student’s background and in the next breath praised me for all the work I did to get in here as a first-generation student, I didn’t bat an eye. I knew enough not to mention how large my financial aid package was or to talk about the time my mother’s car got repossessed. I knew the word poor made people uncomfortable (unless, of course, they were using it to gossip about others; then it rolled off their tongues with easy malice). So I refused to identify with it. I lived to please.
It would be negligent of me to not acknowledge that I am an able-bodied white woman. The kind of camouflage I relied on is in itself a privilege. The world views my whiteness as an indicator of a suburban, upper-middle-class upbringing, and it is only when I talk about myself that this fantasy is unraveled. While I do not benefit from economic privilege, I know I have benefited and continue to benefit from my white privilege in a world that almost always prioritizes whiteness over economic background. According to the 2000 census, the average income for white people was $45,409, about $1,000 higher than the average in my hometown. The national average for Black and Hispanic people, however, was $30,439 and $33,447, respectively. The United States average income in 2000 was $42,148, which is lower than the median income in my hometown due to systemic discrimination against Black and Hispanic communities causing a lower national average. So even though I do not come from economic privilege when compared to white peers, the numbers show a clear disparity based on race. Financial privilege certainly matters in academia, but it’s not the only thing that does. Blending into the world of elite academia is made easier by whiteness, and while class makes it more difficult, I cannot deny that my experiences are far different from the experiences that low-income BIPOC students have at Swarthmore.
* * *
The women I come from are strong. That is undeniable. Their lives have built a foundation for mine, and mine has been a largely privileged life in comparison. My grandmother did not finish high school, never learned how to drive, and raised six children on her own; I go to one of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the country. My mother escaped an emotionally abusive relationship with her first husband and worked two jobs to support herself; I interned at the Smithsonian.
When I think about my assault, I inevitably think about the sacrifices of the women before me. They were able to get me to a place they never dreamed of, but they couldn’t protect me from harm. My assault feels like a caveat to my achievements, a reminder that my intelligence and drive cannot be separated from my gender, from the socioeconomic roots of my family.
My mother seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when I told her I had been assaulted, when I finally shared the secret I had been hoarding for weeks. I will always remember how her face barely changed as she registered my words over a lagging FaceTime call. She was hurting for me, but she was not surprised.
On particularly hard days, I lay in bed and think about how unfair it is. I think about how my life was not supposed to be like this. Sometimes I think about how my perpetrator should apologize not to me, but to my mother and grandmother for getting in the way of their plans of a different life for me. Other days, I am filled with a shame so all-consuming that I think about how I am the cause and culprit of my experience, that I am the one who let down the ones who built me. It comes in waves.
But I do know that survival is the best way to honor them.
* * *
For my final history course at Swarthmore, I wrote about rape revenge films from the 1970s and 80s. I spent months reading film theory and watching violent depictions of rape until my eyes burned. These films, connected by themes of violence and misogyny, also focus on a particular kind of victim: nearly all of them are respectable middle-class women. Only one focuses on a woman from a less desirable background. The 1988 film The Accused follows Sarah, a poor woman from a small town, as she tries to get justice after being gang raped in a room full of witnesses. Her lawyer Kathryn, who later becomes her staunch ally, tells Sarah that she shouldn’t take the stand because she makes a bad witness; her poverty, trashy reputation, and drug-related record make her unreliable. Because of this, and because her rapists have the resources to hire good lawyers, the rapists get a plea deal of only six months in jail.
While in the end Sarah and Kathryn are able to get the witnesses to her rape punished, this is only through a legal loophole, not through any easy means that real-life rape victims could rely on. In fact, the real case the film is based on did not have the same ending. Cheryl Araujo, the woman Sarah is based on, experienced victim blaming from members of her community and the media. Although she won her case, she was ostracized by her community and was forced to move. Workingclass and poor women are told their bodies are not sacred or private or their own. They are worth nothing, and they must be to blame for what happened to them, especially because they do not have middle-class respectability to hide behind. The film shows that society does not believe poor women have inherent worth. It must be proven, and there is no room for slip-ups.
This is an aspect of my assault that I’ve struggled to explain for nearly three years because it doesn’t seem tangible. My perpetrator didn’t know anything about me, let alone my financial aid status. But I knew from the mug in his room that he went to a prestigious boarding school. I knew because I trained myself to note things like that, to collect information in order to protect myself.
I do not believe my assault was intentional. I believe that my assault lives in the grey area of sex and consent, an area that women are told not to be bothered by and men are told doesn’t exist. My assault was not physically forceful. My perpetrator was persistent and coercive—he argued and pestered until I had no choice but to give in. I was a people pleaser and, I’m assuming, he had never known a world in which he didn’t get what he wanted. If this were a scene in a novel at a Swarthmore English class, we would wax poetic for a whole class period about how the class differences between the two characters obviously created unequal power dynamics.
* * *
Image of the author the night she was raped.
In the fall semester after my assault, I went to a boy’s room after a party, and he spent twenty minutes discussing all of his achievements, that he was a legacy student from upstate New York and had gone to Good Schools. When I told him I was a first-gen student from rural Illinois, he asked me if they’d taught me how to read there. I hadn’t yet learned how not to be shocked by these kinds of comments, so I stuttered and stammered and laughed. I always settle for laughter. I don’t remember exactly what I said, something to the effect of “No, that’s why I’m an English major.” Later, in the mirror or in the long minutes before falling asleep, I replayed the conversation in my head, this time asking him why he thought that was an okay thing to ask. It’s not a complicated question.
I did not have sex that night, but that was because of the lack of a condom. The lack of respect became a joke, a story to pull out at parties to show how unbothered and cool I was.
The first time I did have sex after my assault, I went home with a random boy from a party. We made small talk, during which I said that I was a first-gen student. He said that was really cool and impressive. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Comments like that have always made me feel like I’m under a microscope, as though now I have to show that I really am impressive in order to prove that I deserve to be at Swarthmore.
After we had sex, during which I spent the majority of my time staring at the ceiling and wondering when it would end, he made a joke about paying me. I laughed and shrugged it off because that was what I was supposed to do. That was what I was trained to do by virtue of moving through the world with very little. I went back to my room and cried shameful tears. Shameful, hot, angry tears for the world I chose to enter that would never truly accept me. A world that never failed to remind me of my place and my worth. I took multiple showers and stayed in bed for the whole day afterwards. But once I had gotten the majority of the self-loathing out of my system, I added the experience to my repertoire of funny stories about men at Swarthmore. I pushed it away, made jokes about it, and tried to convince myself that I did deserve to be treated better than that.
* * *
This is an ongoing story with no resolution. Perhaps it is a shout into the void about how tired I am. During my years at Swarthmore, I have become louder and angrier. When someone makes a classist post in the Facebook group, I text my friends my thoughts in paragraphs. One day I might even have the confidence to air my thoughts publicly. I roll my eyes at the way students here boast about reading theory while disparaging the lived experiences of poor students on campus, or refuse to acknowledge the economic privilege so many of them come from. I use the word poor to make people uncomfortable.
I think about my worth a lot. Maybe violence and humiliation is the price of my first-rate education, the one I thought was being paid for through generous financial aid. Maybe that is too cynical. I am trying to become less cynical about this place, to focus on the love and kindness I have found here. But I am not fond of forgiveness, or forgetting, even when one day the woman I become is unrecognizable to the scared nineteen year old I was. Forgetting or forgiving would be such a waste of the excellent education I have received on the college’s dime.
Resources
Swarthmore Title IX Office — 610-690-3720 | titleix@swarthmore.edu
RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) — 1-800-656-4673