This is weird! A bunch of SEO data somehow inserted itself into this post. My apologies… think it’s fixed. But since I proofed this piece several times, I’m sure I would’ve seen that bit of strangeness. In fact, I recall reading that passage several times. Is WordPress as weird as Wyrd? Should we rename it Wyrdpress?
The News of the Day is its usual eye-popping self. Lots of shouting and self-righteous screaming just now about the Stanford rape case. Anyone who dares to suggest that it might not be wise to drink until you pass out next to a garbage bin is instantly accused of sexism and abetting the rape culture, to the tune of RAPE IS NOT OK delivered in high decibels. As though questioning the victim’s judgment equated to “rape somehow is OK”!
As a practical matter, that ugly turn of events is the logical outcome of the drug- and alcohol-laced party culture that permeates college campuses in this country. Elite schools are no exception. It also is the outcome of the (highly profitable!) custom of lionizing college athletes, leading them to feel entitled to do as they please.
When my son was at his elite high school, he and his friends took to calling young men like Mr. Turner “jock-rapists.” By that they meant handsome, affluent, athletic, aggressive “stars” of the sort who spend their college years making lots of money for schools like Stanford (and all the rest of them) by playing on athletic teams. Surely, a degree of sour grapes was going on there…but as we can see by the circumstances around the Turner case, he and his pals were not so far off base.
I knew a young woman who attended a private liberal arts school in the same tier as, say, Claremont, Whittier, or Carleton. She and her friends were given to some very heavy drinking and also to a bit of drug use. This was current and customary on the campus, where dormitories were coed and many students lived, unsupervised, in apartments near the campus.
One evening she went out with a handsome jock-rapist type and got very, very drunk indeed. This, we might add, was nothing out of the ordinary — it was pretty typical behavior in her social set on the campus. She went to the young man’s dorm room — his bedroom — where she took off all her clothes and climbed into his bed.
What you would expect to happen…well, happened.
If you were a studly young man, what would you think a girl wants when she gets naked and climbs into your bed?
The next day, she went to the infirmary and asked for a morning-after pill. There, the college’s nurse informed her that she had been raped (because she was drunk at the time, you understand, and so in theory couldn’t give informed consent to the young man into whose bed she had installed herself). The nurse urged her to file charges against her fellow student.
Probably to the benefit of all concerned, the young woman declined to do so.
The point is, I fear, we are failing our girl children today in not teaching them that, unfair as it is, they run certain special risks because they are female, and in failing to teach them how to keep themselves safe. Colleges compound that failure by failing to restrict behavior in on-campus and near-campus living facilities and by failing to engage strategies that foster safe conditions for residential students.
In the same way, we’re failing our boy children. Mr. Turner’s life is ruined, permanently. He will never fulfill the promise he showed in a high-school career that got him into Stanford. Had my acquaintance reported a casual sex act that ensued after a night of heavy drinking as “rape,” another young man’s life would have been ruined.
We fail our young women when we give them the idea that they’re entitled to do as they please, even in very risky situations, without helping them to understand the potential consequences. We’re failing to let them see that having a right to be safe from harassment and unwanted sexual advances does not mean you are safe from those things.
Because we’re letting them think they can drink themselves into a stupor and dance suggestively on tables and stumble around the streets late at night with impunity, we set them up for harm.
Where were both young people’s parents when they were in high school? Why did Mr. Turner’s parents and Ms. X’s parents not teach them how to drink? And did Mr. Turner’s parents really not inform him of the damage he could do to himself in a single booze-enhanced moment, to say nothing of the damage he could do to someone else?
Yeah, I know: it’s illegal to give your kids a highball or a glass of wine with dinner. But I also know that in the homes of the rich and famous, it’s commonplace. One woman in our neighborhood of lawyers and doctors used to throw an annual party for her high-schoolers, where drinking was allowed openly, on the theory that if the parents could keep an eye on the brats, they could see to it that they didn’t weave off into the night in their cars.
That’s inappropriate, IMHO.
But it is not inappropriate, in the privacy of your home, to let your nearly adult kid have a glass or two by way of instructing him or her on how alcohol affects the body. Experience is the best teacher — certainly, when it’s about something that’s influenced by a lot of peer pressure, guided experience is one helluva lot better than a lecture or some video delivered in a classroom.
There are experiences that no human being should have, and one of them is being attacked while laying unconscious in an alcoholic stupor. My point is not that RAPE IS OK, for godsake, but that even though it’s not OK, it does occur. Unless we teach our young women that they are at risk, unfair as it is, and that the risk is hugely enhanced when you’re impaired by alcohol and drugs, these horrible things are going to keep happening.
If I may, by way of heading off the self-righteous shrieks likely to follow on this rumination, let me tell you that I also was attacked in circumstances very like Ms. X’s, when I was about her age. A neighbor in the apartment building where I lived — a guy that I’d met at the pool and knew casually — invited me over for a daiquiri.
This gent could make a killer daiquiri. And of course, that was what he was counting on. He’d laced the drink with copious amounts of rum, which was pretty much unnoticeable behind the sweetly delicious blend of mixers. I hadn’t finished half of a refill before I could barely stand up.
At that point, he started to take my clothes off.
I resisted. He tried to restrain me. I was in no condition to fight him off.
Fortunately, he was momentarily distracted by someone outside. I managed to slip away from him and get out the front door. Once I was running across the balcony in my high heels, headed toward my own apartment, he pursued me but didn’t catch me — it was a crowded apartment building with a lot of people coming and going, and if I’d yelled for help it would have attracted attention.
I made it to my place, got inside, locked the door behind me, and called my boyfriend. Then I spent a fair amount of the evening throwing up rum.
Yeah, the guy was a scoundrel and a predator. If he’d succeeded in screwing me, he probably would have deserved to go to jail.
But I don’t believe I was without fault in that scenario. I knew better than to go to a strange man’s apartment alone. And it was incredibly stupid to accept a sugary alcoholic drink from such a man. In his apartment. Alone. I was lucky alcohol wasn’t the only thing he put in the stuff.
The point is, no, overly trusting women don’t “deserve” to be attacked by predatory men. But all women need to be aware that such men exist and that some circumstances predispose us to attacks. To ignore the risks is foolish. To insist that nothing will happen because nothing should happen is foolish.
You can’t go around in a chador. But neither should you wear a sign that reads “CFM.”
The weather is actually cooler than it has over the past week here in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun. It was only 96 today, probably because we had some cloud cover. Now, at quarter to nine p.m., it’s a chilly 91.2, with a 20% chance of rain.
