Going back to find THE LINE again

I’m somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean trying to sleep, but my mind is racing. After flying through deadlines to finish THE LINE and launch this blog (!), here I am on Continental flight #687, headed to the International Women’s Film Festival of Israel, but for now alone with my thoughts.

I am going back.

It was exactly this time ten years ago that I moved to Jerusalem. With a duffel bag and a video camera I showed up leaving my American post-college, broken-up heart scattered like glass all over Brooklyn. In Jerusalem I found something of a home, exotic but eventually familiar. I experimented with covering my body (shoulders, elbows and knees mostly), and tried on religious sexual codes for some long and lonely months. Beyond clothing, young religious women in Jerusalem waited for marriage before having sex, and beyond chastity, they were forbidden to touch men at all. Touching was sacred, your body a gift, and this present was to be revealed to the man of your dreams, aka your “soul mate” on your wedding night.  Eroticized and heightened to such a degree, eye contact on a bus, or hands brushing at the cash register could be truly electrifying.

This new paradigm made my body felt calloused, desensitized and worn, but by wrapping myself in layers of baggy cotton, I was disguised. The not-sexual-me, in a body of indistinguishable proportions. My secret female powers stashed away, sometimes I felt safe, powerful and in control. Choosing to cover helped me fit in and left me free from blame. Divorcing my power from my sexuality released me from old patterns, and gave me agency to choose between guarding it or giving it away. However, the idea that “innocence trumps experience” left little room for those of us women who had already fallen. Dressing up started to feel like a charade, and I craved the sexual me and my tight jeans again.

My yearlong adventure ended abruptly (with a sexual assault, detailed in full in my film). Back in New York, I didn’t know how to measure what had changed. How could I compare myself now to the person I was before?

Making THE LINE, was a process of looking back and deciphering what happened, weighing, judging, sifting through the material to try and make a whole. How do I talk about that experience? Can I continue to explore my sexuality? What does consent really mean? I came to understand the line more clearly after my sexual assault. Not through therapy, but through sex. With each new lover, I relearned what I wanted, when I was being listened to, what I could ask for and what I wanted to share. Each time a partner asked my permission, I was reminded that the line is something to explore, to discover and to navigate — and most importantly, to respect.

And just like that, it’s over. In that far away screening room, at my first festival, men and women came forward one by one, to take my hand and thank me for sharing this story with them. No indictment for accusing an Israeli man of rape, and no judgment of my American self. Simply, compassion, understanding and appreciation.

Now it’s time to look forward, too, to future conversations, in classrooms, screening rooms, living rooms and right here. I think of a young man I met at Rutgers recently who said to me, “Watching this film makes me ask myself if I’ve ever crossed the line…”

Now it’s time to hear from you.

Tags: college, consent, international, men, pleasure, rape, women