It probably happened to you too

Complicity as infrastructure. Every woman has a story.

Feb 18, 2026

(content notes: this essay has references to sexual violence against women.)

Imagine you are an 18 year old girl. Now imagine being an 18 year old girl lying sick in a tent, delirious from a UTI that worsens overnight while on a large group camping trip out in the woods in Vermont. Imagine when a friend, who is male, comes into your tent that evening to check in on you because you hadn’t left the tent all day. You are writhing in pain. He lies down next to you, fitting himself gently around your body, still protectively curled in a fetal position, and tries to console you.

You are cold. You can register the heat coming from another warm body, but you are also not fully cognizant of his presence because you are not completely lucid. The infection clouds your head in a fog thick enough to render a fugue-like state, so you are unaware when a seemingly benign and attentive gesture slowly and tentatively begins to test the edges of consent until it violates. Consent that you never gave, but you also don’t remember pushing away the wandering hands. You are still writhing in pain.

Imagine you are a 10 year old girl. Imagine you and your best friend racing to her room as soon as you hear the doorbell ring. Your piano teacher, a Korean 아저씨 (ajhussi) in his mid-to-late thirties, has arrived. The two of you huddle under her locked door and giggle nervously as her mother approaches with audible annoyance in her voice, chastising in Korean as she yanks at the doorknob. Why must you always run and hide every week before your piano lessons? Come out now and greet your teacher!

You are not exactly sure why you hide either, but you know that you dread those lessons each week. You and your friend share behind closed doors that neither of you likes the way the teacher stands behind you. The way he circles his arms around your body to reach the keys, playing the sheet music spread open in front of you. That you don’t like when you feel his body press against your back as he hovers above you close enough to feel his breath on the top of your head.

Imagine you are an 18 year old college student. You call a car service late at night from a payphone to drive you from the East Village all the way home in Queens, to a no-man’s land neighborhood in the city where subways don’t even run. The fare is obscenely expensive, but it is far too late to take an hour and a half train and bus ride home after a late night at school.

Imagine crossing the 59th Street Bridge and driving along a deserted side street in Queens when the car suddenly slows down. He pulls over at a curb on a dark quiet street in a neighborhood you are not familiar. Imagine the driver saying nothing as he gets out of the car. You watch him shut the car door and walk away, up the block, around the corner, and out of sight. You look at your watch. 1:35 AM. You try and quell the panic rising from the pit of your stomach, to your chest, rising higher where it stays lodged in your throat.

Imagine ten minutes passing by. You are still alone in the car and the driver hasn’t come back. What do you do? Do you get out of the car? Do you run and hope to find a benevolent stranger for help? What would you even say? You haven’t seen a single person outside. Your heart beats faster in your chest.

Imagine seeing a figure approach the car after twenty minutes. You instinctively slide down your seat so as not to be seen. You hear the car door open and the driver gets in. He turns the car on and you hear him mumble, “I had to take care of something,” before driving away. Your heart is still pounding. When the dark streets spill out onto a boulevard lined with brightly lit streetlights, you spot a 24 hour bodega and tell the driver that you need to pick something up at the store and can he just let you off at the corner, please. To your relief the car slows down. When it stops, you throw a bunch of cash towards the front of the car and open the door, but not before he whips around from the drivers seat and grabs you by the head and tries to kiss you as you struggle to get out of the car and run into the store.

drawing, white pencil on paper — Drawing as a form of stress release

It takes the shape of a dense, sinister web. It grows like an organism with threadlike tendrils infiltrating nearly every sector of society—from tech, politics, business, academia, media, and more. What is revealed is just how deep the network of predators reach, and how the abuse is enabled by money that flows freely in exchange for favors.

You may be reeling from the revelation of the Epstein files, but it’s heavier than anger or disgust. It’s something far more guttural because you already understand how the patriarchal system that gives men power over women works. You may find a dark cloud creeping into your thoughts as the spectacle of media coverage and court hearings centers the implicated players and those defending them, rather than the survivors.

You watch them sit silenced in that room, shoulder to shoulder, reliving their trauma as they are once again invalidated, this time by a woman in power who refuse to acknowledge them. It may even trigger recollections of events that you’ve shoved deep into your repressed memory because you may not have admitted to yourself until recently that what you experienced years ago was indeed a violation, a question that you’ve wrestled in your mind for years.

While the survivors have endured the most extreme forms of sexual exploitation and abuse imaginable, you share in their grief because the stats tell you that you are alone. In fact, you are part of the majority. Most women have experienced sexual assault or harassment at some point in their lives. You may have carried these experiences quietly with shame because you questioned whether you would be believed or blamed. Maybe you kept silent because you didn’t know who to tell.

Every woman has a story. This has probably happened to you too.

While the details that are revealed in the emails are vile, you may not be completely shocked. You’ve always known that powerful institutions always protect their own power, even if it means looking the other way in the face of abuse. You know that the elite ruling class in those positions of power live by a completely different set of rules. What is particularly chilling to you is the nonchalant tone of the emails, as if the men are exchanging mundane details of a business deal and not trading sordid information on girls.

They are unchecked frat boys, drunk on locker room banter, just “boys being boys.” It is no longer the actions of a single man, but a network built on capitalizing this desire for access into a culture of abuse that makes the unthinkable socially acceptable. An entire world that is built not only to serve them in their depravity, but a system that was built to protect the men who run the world.

Your queasiness quietly becomes rage. But you are hopeful that there’s a crack forming in the system of patriarchal abuse, that what you are starting to witness is a fraying of our social order. That what was once quietly circulating in elite circles under layers of secrecy is now a giant house of cards ready to collapse.

A roundup of links

To read:

Do You Need a Writer’s Room? (The New Yorker)
The myth of the writer’s room. More idyllic than reality?
How a 200-year-old Underground Railroad stop was just discovered in New York City (ABC)
Inside a narrow chest of drawers in the Merchant’s House Museum is a fully intact secret passageway that was just linked to the builder of the house who was an abolitionist. The deep passageway shown in the video is wild.
How New Technologies Are Contesting the Museum Model (Art Review)
About 8 years ago, we visited an immersive exhibit of Gustav Klimt in Paris. These digital experiences have exploded since then, and while I have fairly neutral opinions about the criticism of such exhibits in the art world, you can’t ignore their popularity. Is it art? Is it entertainment? Is it a money grab designed for social engagement? Whatever it is, it’s clear that the traditional museum model is being challenged.
The Strange Hopefulness of Growing a Human While the World Burns (The Conversationalist)
I’ve often wondered if I had to do it again right now, would I bring children into this current world? I appreciated this essay for the hopeful perspective.
The end of Analogue (It’s Nice That)
“If the goal is to prove something wasn’t made by AI, faking ‘realness’ on a computer doesn’t really get us anywhere new.”
A critique on the current fixation of analog aesthetics in the creative industry. But this last line was it for me:
"What matters isn’t how convincingly something performs imperfection, but whether we can create conditions where imperfection still matters."
The sad story of Panchi-Kun goes viral
I don’t know if you saw any of the photos or videos of this adorable abandoned baby monkey at a zoo in Japan that went viral this week, but I could barely hold it in, emotionally. The zoo staff gave Panchi a stuffed orangutan toy for comfort when the other monkeys did not accept him. It pulled at all my heartstrings (I was left by my mother as a baby for a few years when she immigrated to the states first without me). But a happy ending, as Panchi has recently been seen frolicking with the other monkeys. My heart.

To watch

The Lunar New Year is here and like many, we went out for dim sum and dumplings to ring in the Year of the Horse. Didn’t think I’d get weepy watching a story about dim sum carts, but this was a beautiful mini documentary about immigrant sacrifices, a dying tradition, and a long-lasting friendship.