Alex and Julius

Alex and Julius were best friends with the same criticisms of society and quirky sense of humor. They once had a loud argument in a public place while in college about "Mine is longer!" "NO! MINE IS!" 

The argument ended with them agreeing to whip it out right here, right now and prove it, pulling off their belts and one admitting politely "Well, yours is longer." While everyone around them didn't know how to react to this obvious bit of theater.

I met them the summer I turned fourteen when I visited my older sister at UGA in Athens, Georgia. My sister was dating Julius whom I felt was kind of a creep from the second I met him.

Alex was 7.5 years older than me. Julius was 13 years older than me.

My sister arranged to leave me alone with Alex, to kind of babysit me while she was at work or in class. I didn't actually need a babysitter. I was old enough to be left alone in her apartment with a book for a few hours.

I was 5'7" and once when I went out to her car to wait for her in a very packed UGA student parking lot, some fool stopped their car and waited for me to leave though I got in on the passenger side. They clearly thought I was a college student and this was my car, not someone's visiting younger sister. 

Alex taught me to count in binary on my fingers and introduced me to computers and expressed surprise I picked things up so easily. In high school, no one ever asked me out and I was called ugly, attacking nicknames like "Einstein."

We ended up romantically involved and then I ended up traumatized when my mother, father, brother and sister held a family meeting without me and decided behind my back that I wasn't allowed to see him anymore and wasn't so much as allowed to say goodbye. 

He wasn't pressuring me to have sex. We read books together and he took photos of me and we wrote letters. In one photo, I'm holding up the full moon.

And my sister told me years later "He moved to Africa to teach math to savages after he graduated because of that." With a gleam in her eye that I took to mean "Serves him right for being a pervert." and forgetting he had been Julius' best friend and that's why she knew follow up information at all.

I'm sixty.  I met Alex and my family ran him off more than 46 years ago.

I'm having an epiphany and feeling stupid. 

My sister always painted her first marriage like it was an abusive relationship and she was the victim. But my sister treats me like absolute shit and isolating the victim and cutting them off from their social support is what the abuser does in an abusive relationship and that's what my sister did to Julius, not something Julius did to her.

I think Julius was a victim of DARVO and I find myself wondering why the police tested my sister's hands for gun powder if things went down like she claims they did and Julius committed suicide to avoid being arrested after assaulting her.

I was in Germany at the time. Everything I know is second or third hand hearsay.

I have long thought her first husband was a better husband than her second husband.  Julius supported her career when she was a mouse young thing. Her second husband married her for her money and ran tgrough ut like there was no tomorrow while she endlessly complained to me he didn't put out.

Julius clearly had issues and came from a dysfunctional family. But he did housework and genuinely supported a woman's career when that alone was enough to get him labeled a weirdo and moocher and not a real man.

And she gleefully bragged that if her plan to get out of Georgia via taking a federal job succeeded,  it would "humiliate him." I've written about that elsewhere and I think my interpretation of that action that likely sabotaged her plans to get out was too charitable. 

She's probably always been a man-hating sadist. And I increasingly have absolutely no idea whatsoever why she ever got married at all, much less twice.

And I'm sorry for being inadvertently complicit in destroying the reputations and lives of two men -- Julius and Alex -- so she could victimize her first husband.

She did egregious harm to me in the process. She's Exhibit A for why this bullshit that only men can fix rape culture needs to go die in a fire. 

Women are human beings with agency and pretending otherwise just aids and abets abusers.

Footnote 

Julius is dead. Alex is not his real name.