In 30 years of marriage, Nancy Fagin had never told her husband about “the handling’’ — how, as an eighth-grader volunteering at a small museum in Chicago, she was molested by a security guard.
That changed last week. As the couple discussed Michelle Obama’s speech condemning Donald Trump’s treatment of women as “intolerable,’’ Fagin, 62, who spent her career running a specialty bookstore in Chicago, turned to her husband and said that something had happened to her.
“I just sort of had to say that,’’ Fagin said in an interview.
Her husband, Ron Weber, 75, said he responded by talking about how his former wife had been assaulted. “It’s widely occurring, and most women don’t bring it up,’’ he said.
Far from the campaign trail, the shock waves about Trump’s crude language, captured in a recording, and accusations against him of sexual assault by numerous women are reverberating through marriages and relationships across the country. Couples say they are talking to each other about the degradation of women in new ways and revealing assaults that had been buried for years.
For the first time, women say, they are telling their husbands and boyfriends about the times they were groped at nightclubs or on a subway, flashed on the street, shushed or shouted down at work.
Some men, in turn, said they were seeing how gender could shield them from needing to palm their keys as they walk to a car, from being trailed home by a stranger, from having co-workers rate their bodies.
The conversations are revelations for people who have raised children together and shared the most intimate details of each other’s lives. Some men said they felt a reflected sadness and anger as they absorbed stories about what partners had gone through.
Kristen Little, 31, a tuberculosis and HIV researcher in Washington, has been incredulous over the male politicians and television commentators who rushed to say that neither they nor anyone they knew engaged in what Trump called “locker room banter.’’
Maybe so, Little said. But nearly every day, she faces a barrage of this from strangers on the street: Hey, hottie. I wish I was your bike seat.
A 2014 survey of 2,000 people in the United States commissioned by Stop Street Harassment, a nonprofit organization, found that 65 percent of women said they had been verbally or physically harassed in public places. About one in four men said they had been harassed.
“I don’t think it’s out of the ordinary,’’ Little said. “I find it incredibly hard to believe that these kinds of conversations aren’t happening in groups of men, just based on what men feel free to shout on the street at me every day. Literally every day.’’
