It’ll be August 21st by the time most of you read this, which makes it almost seven months since I wrote “Rape Responsibility,” And The Fine Line Between Victim-Blaming and Common Sense” and followed it up the next day with “Takeaways From Yesterday’s “Rape Responsibility” Discussion.” I’m sure many of you remember exactly what happened here that week, but for those who don’t, here’s a summary.
I crafted a very ill-informed, arrogant, and hurtful opinion piece about how women can help to avoid getting themselves in situations that may lead to rape by being more vigilant and acting more “responsibly.” It was a response to Zerlina Maxwell’s “Stop Telling Women How Not To Get Raped.”, and I assumed that it would lead to a day of insightful, occasionally heated, but ultimately forgettable discussion and debate. Basically, just like any other day at VSB.
I was wrong.
It was not a good day. Dozens of women left comments recounting stories of their own sexual assaults. Some even said that coming to VSB and reading this was a slap in the face, a gut punch that forced them to recall some feelings they hoped to never have to feel again. VSB was (deservedly) trashed on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, The Huffington Post and at least a dozen other places. (Actually, let me clarify that. VSB was trashed, but Liz and Panama had nothing, I repeat, nothing to do with that piece. They didn’t deserve to have to deal with criticisms caused by something I did.) And, for many people, the sting still remains. Even last week, I saw VerySmartBrothas referred to on Twitter as “the guys who wrote that rape post.”
Now, while all of this was going on at VSB, I spent much of that day (the rest of the week, actually) engaged in Gchat, text, email, and phone conversations with various people about this topic. Friends, family, and even notable feminist-leaning writers I was cool with — Jamilah Lemieux, Latoya Peterson from Racialicious, Deesha Philyaw, Kimberly “Dr. Goddess” Ellis, etc — all hit me up to basically hear directly from me what the hell inspired me to write that. Some, even after expressing how deeply hurt and disappointed it made them, asked how I was doing. One friend even said that when she saw it making its way around Twitter, she desperately hoped that I wasn’t the VSB who wrote it.
The “Takeaways...” piece came the next day. It was an apology that had twice as many words as the entry that sparked it. And, along with apologizing for writing it, I attempted to explain what led me to feel like writing it wasn’t a bad idea. Still, at that point, I still believed that what made people upset was more the tone than the content. Basically, I still believed that I had a valid point, but I just didn’t articulate it in the way I should have.
The abject wrongness of “advising” women that “more vigilance” would equal “less rapes” finally dawned on me a couple weekends later.
I was laying in bed with a person I was seeing at the time. We were both playing on our phones, having a conversation about whatever the hell it is that people talk about while laying in bed half sleep and playing with their phones. After a few moments, she turned her back to me, put her phone down, and went to sleep.
As I watched her fall asleep in my arms, it hit me. I am six foot two, and I weigh somewhere between 220 and 225 pounds. I am a foot taller than her, and I outweigh her by close to 100 pounds. I’m also a former division one athlete who is in reasonably good shape. Yet, here she is, half-naked, sleep, and completely vulnerable. She must really trust me. She must trust me in a way that I’ve never trusted anyone outside of my parents. She trusts me enough that she doesn’t consider me to be a threat to her safety, but she had to work to get to that point.
Although I know I would never sexually assault her, she doesn’t know that. Sure, she trusts that I wouldn’t and she hopes that I won’t, but she doesn’t know. She’s not certain, and she can never really be. This lack of knowledge, this not knowing whether a boyfriend or a husband or a fuck buddy or a platonic friend or a nice neighbor or the cool guy who bought her a drink at the bar is going to be the man who rapes her, is something women always have to think about. Always. Is it always the prevailing thought? No. (Well, at least I don’t think that it is.) But, from what I’ve come to understand, it is a perpetually subconscious thought for most women, a fear that is never really not there.
You know, I’ve heard people use the Black/White analogy when attempting to explain the difference between men and women and the concept of rape. Basically, just how Whites in America will never understand how it is to be Black, we (men) will never understand how it feels to always be aware that a person they adore, a person they love, could do something so awful to them. While I think the analogy works in some way, it ultimately fails because on some level, I do think that White people can have at least a peripheral understanding of what it means to be Black in America.
On the other hand, my insensitivity about rape — and the insensitivity possessed by men like Todd Akin — stems from the fact that I just never had to give more than a superficial thought to it. It — and “it” in this case is “how a typical woman feels about the fact that every man is a potential rapist” — is completely unfathomable. I can read books and blogs, I can ask questions and take classes, but I’ll never know. When I bring a date upstairs to my place for the first time, I don’t have to even consider thinking about how I’d defend myself, alert help, and (hopefully) exit if she wanted something I wasn’t comfortable offering. If I’m laying in bed with a woman and I tell her that I’m a little too tired to have sex right now, I don’t have to worry about her deciding that my “No” wasn’t really a “NO No,” and forcibly coercing me to change my answer. I don’t have to go through the same mental, emotional, and spiritual process a woman does when eventually getting to a place where she can trust that a man won’t take advantage of the access she’s granted him, where she can sleep in his arms and not paralyze herself with worry about what he might do when she’s most vulnerable.
I forgot exactly where I first heard this, but one of the best things I’ve ever learned is that true intelligence is knowing exactly what you don’t know. With this in mind, I have one message for Todd Akin and any other man who thinks they have some irreverent and important insight about rape — a message I wish I would have told myself seven months ago:
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
—Damon Young (aka “The Champ”)
