Two people have now mentioned the Lexington Ave. line – that’s what I had to take from Grand Central up to 68th St. (I went to Dominican Academy). Wonder if it’s jinxed. Or maybe it’s because so many young girls, and particularly young Catholic girls were taking that line (Dominican Academy, St. Vincent Ferrar, and then further up, Loyola, Marymount and Sacred Heart, plus Hunter College and MMC). I wonder if the powers that be will ever realize that sending a young girl out in the typical Catholic uniform is about as bad as sending her out in a G-string and pasties…

It is about anonymity and banking on the young to be vulnerable and insecure.

There’s something so vile about shattering young girls this way. I recall being at a horse fair up in Vermont (where we had a summer house), and a man exposed himself to me. I was 8. That horrible, creepy, skincrawling, fear-filled feeling stayed with me for a long, long time, and even thinking about it now makes my stomach flip-flop. And the shame, of course, since I had such conservative Catholic parents. I knew I could never mention it to them. And then, years later, when a girlfriend and I were near-molested (someone showed up unexpectedly on the scene and intervened) in the mailbox vestibule in our apartment building, she and I both knew we could never tell our parents – that it would be construed as the two of us having done something wrong.

You put it behind you, though, and you get tougher. Downside is you’re always a little wary when it comes to men.

But, as low on the ladder of sexual offenses as subway groping or flashing may seem to an uninvolved person (compared to serial child rape, for example), it’s just as bad. It’s all about destroying innocence and trust and confidence.

All those catcalls and lewd comments and little “accidental” brush-ups and so forth take their toll after a while.

Or, in the “Trust Christ” guy’s case, he thought it was a reasonable chastisement of immodesty, or something.

and had a van slow down, pull up almost onto the sidewalk next to me, have a man yell “WHORE” at me

Which reminds me. How many men are deafened by the cognitive dissonance of yelling something lewd at you on the street, which you proceed to completely ignore, only to have them get pissed off because you dared to ignore them and then shout “WHORE!” at you? I mean, WTF?

and had a van slow down, pull up almost onto the sidewalk next to me, have a man yell “WHORE” at me, and speed off. That last made quite an impression on me, since stenciled in giant letters on the back were the words “TRUST CHRIST.”

Well, obviously, he was offering to escort you safely home by making a reference to the Bible story in which Jesus saves the woman taken in adultery from stoning.