In the Sauna, Hanoi

He wrapped his sweaty hand around my ankle. It was wet and torrid and disgusting. It wasn’t there to do good, and touching me wasn’t the goal in and of itself. This man, Scarhip, intended to move my leg to restore his unrestricted view of my penis, so he grabbed my foot and threw it off the sauna bench. He had harassed me before, had actually groped the very parts he now wanted to look at, but that hadn’t felt remotely as intrusive. Being the target now of this unexpected sexual aggression left me helpless. I was being handled like an object  – and in that instant, for the first time in my life, I actually felt like one.

Being a tall and physically strong straight white male usually protects me from this feeling. Only rarely have I been assaulted or intimidated. The last time I had been physically afraid of somebody was when I met the Ukrainian heavy weight boxer Vitali Klitschko. But even then, I would have indignantly rejected the possibility of confusion and paralysis in the face of a threat. I believed that if the champ were to come after me, I would fight back. I would, of course, lose, but I would go down swinging. In hindsight, the fact was I was too enamored with my own masculinity and omnipotence to think otherwise. And that hubris was doubly insulating in the sexual realm. Like many men, I couldn’t even fathom an unwanted sexual approach. In my world, ‘sex’ and ‘unwanted’ didn’t belong in the same sentence.

My encounters with Scarhip changed that. This stocky, middle-aged Vietnamese guy damaged me in a way I’d not understood was possible.

This story begins and ends in the sauna of a gym in Hanoi. It’s part of the most expensive chain in the city, frequented mostly by Vietnamese businessmen, foreign diplomats, and overpaid language teachers like myself. I was naked and by myself when he came in and sat down about 4 feet from me. He started looking at me from the side. I dropped a lazy ‘Hey’. He responded by looking at my crotch and holding his two hands up in order to estimate the size of my penis. His miscalculation and appreciative nods made me smile. I was flattered and annoyed at the same time. In one quick motion he slid closer and just grabbed my penis. I immediately fought him off, slapping his hand and yelling “No”! He grinned at me while using his hands to make another admiring misjudgment of my dimensions. I shook my head and laughed incredulously.

I have to admit that I didn’t take this first contact as what it actually was: sexual assault. During my time in Asia, total strangers had touched with awe my blond hair, my arms, even my legs, usually without asking for permission.

After a short break filled with helpless smiles and attempts at communicating my disinterest in English, a language he seemingly didn’t understand, he made another move. Actually, it was an exact duplicate of the previous, with the only difference being this time he didn’t grope my penis directly but rather bounced it off his fingers as if he wanted to wake it up. I slapped his hand away again and stood up to leave. I was neither upset nor disgusted, just stunned by his brazenness and amused by the clumsiness of his sexual advances.  

When I came out of the shower, he was standing naked in front of the mirror making weirdly pseudo-seductive faces and rubbing his private parts against the lavatory. I felt sorry for him, thought he must be a hapless gay stuck in the closet, only able to show his true desires to an unthreatening foreigner. He pointed at me, then himself, then toward the sauna. I couldn’t believe it, this guy really didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. I patted his shoulder and once again said “No,” before leaving the wellness area.

Later, I would ask myself if I could have done something differently in our initial encounter to avoid the subsequent escalation. I wondered if a clearer ‘No’ or a more outraged rejection of his advances would have drawn a clearer line in the sand. Like nearly every victim of sexual harassment, I blamed myself. I wondered how I could have gotten the message across better. Should I have not held eye contact for so long? Should I have worn a longer skirt?

When I met Scarhip two weeks later for the second time, and he put his sweaty hand around my ankle, things became so confusing that it took me a long time to truly understand what happened, why I reacted the way I did, and what both our actions actually meant, beyond the obvious.

I was sitting in the sauna again, naked with my legs up on the bench, open and stretched out. And then the bliss of being by myself was once again suddenly interrupted when he came in. At first, I didn’t recognize him, because I hadn’t thought much about him in the meantime. It was just an odd incident that I didn’t think would have any kind of continuation. But when he sat down at arms length from my feet, I caught sight of the thick scar on his right hip that I’d noticed during our first encounter.

Immediately my guard went up. I was literally exposed and he had a perfect view between my legs, staring without the slightest display of shame. It was a new and unpleasant feeling to be so abased like this. But instead of leaving right away, I went into hiding by closing my eyes. I didn’t want to look at him looking at me, and I certainly didn’t want to change my behavior because of him. I wanted to stay and enjoy the sauna, to be stronger than this disturbance.

After a short eternity of trying to relax in vain, I decided it was time to act. I didn’t want to let him win, so leaving was still no option. Instead, I chose to interfere with his intrusive viewing pleasure. In a predictably futile protest, I put my right leg over the left one to hide my penis in between. Without hesitation, Scarhip grabbed the ankle of the leg I had moved, lifted it up, and tossed it off the bench.

This was not a playful provocation or a flirty invitation anymore – this was a disturbing aggression. I had communicated that I was uninterested and uncomfortable, but his reaction showed that he did not care about what I wanted, and that he was willing to break any resistance to his demands.

Every man I tell this story assures me at this point that he would have, in some way or another, physically confronted Scarhip. They say they would have pushed him away, choked him, hit him or even branded his face with a hot stone. Male fantasies of sauna-related violence can be astonishingly cruel and creative. And I suppose I am no different. To this very day, I fantasize about having taken the giant ladling spoon from out of the sauna’s water bucket and hit Scarhip in the face, breaking his grinning jaw and nose… and then moving on to his hands, bashing each into mush. Because that is how a ‘real’ man would have handled this challenge: always an eye for an eye.

But instead of acting out the Hollywood action scene, I just left. Sure, I gave him an outraged and disgusted look, but I was too surprised to do anything more than that.

It took me almost an entire hour to get my act back together. I wandered through the gym, all churned up, weighing my options. In the end, I talked to a gym representative who was visibly embarrassed once he understood my complaint. He asked me if I could point out the person, but I told him that he had certainly already left. Only later did it dawn on me that that was exactly what I had subconsciously wanted: doing something but with no direct consequences. I suppose now that happens to a lot of victims of sexual assault. Their source of torment is two-fold: first, that which occurred, and second the remerging self-reproach for not having resisted. I can attest to this: I later hated myself for going belly up without a fight and not confronting Scarhip right after the fact.

In reaction to #metoo statements, I’ve heard some men ask why these women just don’t go to human resources or the police. I don’t pretend to know the answer in every single case, but the fact that I couldn’t even bring myself to speak to the gym management brought me far closer to imagining the predicaments in which many victims must find themselves. All there usually is in most cases, I guess, is a humiliating story with at best seemingly tenuous proof. Shutting up and telling yourself it won’t happen again is so much easier than trying to persuade a third party. It’s astonishing how quickly a once clear and present danger can fade into a distant, lighter memory. In no time a person begins to question if what happened was really bad enough to warrant involving others. But convincing our consciousness not to act is considerably easier than convincing our subconsciousness to forget.

Maybe I’m lucky to say that there has never been a single human touch which had such long lasting negative effects on me. I once got attacked and robbed in Bolivia, I was in a couple of fights as an adolescent, and I had been groped by the genitals two weeks before. But none of that managed to lastingly change my behavior in a way this ankle grabbing had. An innocuous physical motion was made sickening by the context. I saw how a neck massage by a superior could turn into torture, how something that looks innocent on the surface can be traumatic because of the underlying power dynamics.  Because that’s what Scarhip touching my ankle had been about: power.

Unequivocally he made clear that his sexual pleasure was more important than what I wanted. I simply didn’t count. I was in his country, whose language I didn’t speak and where connections and money are more important than the rule of law. And he, as a local who could afford this rather exclusive gym, likely had both. This feeling of impotence came as a shock to me. It was something fundamentally new, because as a white European man I’m usually not exposed to objectification and other sexual humiliations that are being perpetrated ruthlessly and with impunity.

In the weeks after this second incident, I would spot Scarhip occasionally in the gym. I could recognize him now, without a doubt, from every angle. Whenever I saw him, I would experience a wild mix of alertness, anger, disgust and a strong urge to leave. First, I was surprised about this automatism, then increasingly frustrated. I didn’t want to feel like this. I tried to fight it and tried to relax, but this feeling of uneasiness wouldn’t stop until I left the gym. I couldn’t even go the sauna anymore; the steam had become toxic. Somehow Scarhip was always there, even when he wasn’t. He had impregnated that space with his sweat and spirit. As if he had passed on his scar. This is, I guess, the closest I have ever been to trauma.

When telling my story this is always the most difficult part. I usually present these events as bizarre, yet funny. I want to make people laugh, to not worry about me. Therefore, I have tremendous problems in conveying this eerie feeling of being haunted. I’m afraid to come across as a victim, because this is neither how I see myself nor how I want to be seen. I also worry that nobody would buy my victimhood. I’m just not the type. At least that is what I tell myself. To be honest, sometimes I almost don’t believe that I ever truly suffered from this situation. Even now, when writing this, I wonder if I actually felt the way I described or if I inserted pain and indignation I have read about somewhere else.

In the following couple of months, I saw Scarhip a handful of times, but without further incident. I never bothered talking to management again, not wanting to deal with it and believing the story had come to an end. At the time, I thought I was being strong and stoic, rising above my assaulter, but I was really just running away from him. And one problem with running away from somebody is that they might follow you. And that is exactly what Scarhip did one day. 

I walked into the locker room and saw him changing into his streets clothes. Happy to see he was on his way out of the gym, I put my swimming trunks on and went upstairs to the pool. To my surprise, he also showed up there a couple of minutes later and got into the water. I got out of the water immediately and went to the sauna. In hindsight, I wonder if I was testing him, or looking for the final showdown. Most likely, however, I was just trying to hide again.  

I put my legs on the bench and tried to relax. But before I could close my eyes, Scarhip came in with a triumphant look on his face, happy to find me there, perhaps believing he’d won whatever game he thought we were playing. With just a towel around my hips I jumped out of the sauna, and raced downstairs to the gym. I was aggressive, hysterical, and ready to end this here and now. I didn’t care anymore who he might be or who he might know. There comes a moment when you just can’t stand it anymore. When the pain makes you scream, and you just want to be heard.

Like a gladiator that had lost his mind, I was running through the gym looking for somebody who spoke English. The employees stared at me in disbelief, trying to understand what I wanted from them. But I didn’t care if they understood me or not. I didn’t want to explain myself. I felt I had the right to be rude and ruthless. It was time for revenge, and revenge always goes over the top. 

The two Vietnamese bodybuilding instructors who intercepted me seemed to speak some English. I ordered them to follow me to the wellness area, where I explained hastily what had happened and what I expected them to do: tell Scarhip that I didn’t want him to follow or touch me ever again. I was talking feverishly, probably not making a lot of sense to them, but they nodded and got Scarhip out of the sauna.

They could only ask one question before he snapped. I could see the embarrassment on his face, but for everybody else it must have looked like outrage. He was running in circles, yelling at the instructors and at me. I assumed he was denying everything and calling me a liar. Finally, with one of his infamous quick motions, he pushed me out of the way. I pushed him back, towards the door. I would have loved to push him again, push him down the stairs, but the instructors separated us. Scarhip escaped and was never to be seen again.

I asked the instructors what their one question had been. If he had been following me, they answered. They weren’t supposed to ask him anything! I had wanted them to deliver a message, not make an inquiry. But before I could complain, they had a question for me: Are you sure it was him? I looked at them in despair. Sure if it was him? After all I had told them, these guys were actually considering that I had the wrong guy! I felt as I had when Scarhip grabbed my ankle: insulted and helpless. They might as well have asked if I was sure about what he had done to me. It would have been the same question, transmitting the same message: they didn’t really believe me.

Shortly after they left, I was all by myself in the wellness area. But there was no more wellness in this place for me. I had fought and I had lost. Not being believed and watching the offender leaving unpunished had a devastating effect on my trust in justice. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the sauna, nor could I leave the gym, so I just sat there, in front of my locker, lost and very lonely.