Trigger warning: This article contains personal anecdotes of sexual violence and abuse that may prove triggering for some.
Lisa Hickey wants to have a conversation about rape. But until today, she didn’t know where to start.
The spot of blood on the sheet was a perfect circle, an “oh”, an exclamation. Bob and I stood at the foot of the bed, groggy, half-morning light, we leaned in together as we realized what it was. A split second of awkwardness, then he quickly threw the top sheet on top of it. We muttered some sort of “see ya around” and I dashed off, down the stairs from his third-floor attic room overlooking the fraternity quad.
I was 16.
I had been drinking, the night before, as always, as I had since I was fourteen years of age. Did I say, “yes” to Bob? I’m sure, at some point that night, I did. I’m also sure I said “no” or at least “I’m not sure.” I clearly remember saying, “wait,” over and over. But I wasn’t specific in my timeframe. I meant “wait” as – days, weeks, months. Not “wait a minute.”
Was that rape? How much does that matter? In some states it would have been statutory rape, regardless of what I said. It was certainly not good judgment on either of our parts.
But good judgment wasn’t something I had much of back in those days. I was 16 and a freshman in college, and trying my best simply to block out a past I couldn’t handle. Both my parents were abusive alcoholics. Back then, what they did to me was called “spankings,” but spankings don’t usually carry with them the out-of-nowhere rage that I rarely saw coming, an ongoing feeling of confusion and terror, and a perpetual sinking feeling that this time it might never end. No matter how much I tried to justify their behavior, a father usually doesn’t say to his daughter, “I am taking off my belt now” before he hits her with it.
♦◊♦
My father died the summer before I started college. I found out while was at freshmen orientation, sitting in an auditorium filled with 500 equally bright-eyed students. I heard the words from the man at the podium, “Is there a Lisa P. in the audience?” I stood up and said in a tiny voice “I’m Lisa P.” “Well, then, your mother wants to see you.” The crowd twittered. I had to climb over two people to get out. One of them said, “Your mother wants to see you. Boy, is that embarrassing.” I left a small navy pocketbook behind.
My sister has vivid memories of sexual abuse, by my father, of me. I don’t have the memories she has. I do have clear memories of sexual inappropriateness by my father, but prefer to keep it at that. My childhood was not all bad. There were swing sets and stargazing and Monopoly games. But what I do remember is that while other kids dreamed of being movie actresses or doctors or joining the Peace Corps, I dreamt of being kidnapped. It was a very specific dream. I couldn’t wait to be kidnapped by two men in a dark blue Ford Station wagon. That would be my way out. I used to wander the streets of Queens, NY, looking for that car. As a child, it was my only hope. “Please let me be a different kind of victim than the one I am now.”
♦◊♦
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At midnight, Cinderella is supposed to lose her shoe, not her virginity. And not to a guy who was as stumbling drunk as she was.
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So by the time I met Bob, and was asked by him to go to a Fraternity Dance at the last minute, I thought I had arrived in a new type of civilization in all its glory. I was petite, I had a blue-flowered halter dress, my hair was spun gold. That night I thought I had finally made it––somewhere, somehow, despite myself. But by that time, I was already a blackout drunk. At midnight, Cinderella is supposed to lose her shoe, not her virginity. And not to a guy who was as stumbling drunk as she was. But I didn’t even have enough self-awareness to know that the story I was living wasn’t the one I thought it was. I wanted that Cinderella story, badly, with whatever bargain I had to strike for it. Bob and I barely talked again afterwards. I didn’t even tell my friends.
♦◊♦
I was gorgeous back then—almost every sixteen, seventeen-year-old is gorgeous, though, have you noticed? It’s hard to go wrong if you’re seventeen and perfectly in shape, have an easy laugh and don’t talk much. Beauty, sexual attraction—it was the only power I had. I think my resultant promiscuity all four years of college was simply a way to somehow, desperately attempt to take charge of my sexuality. And as odd as it sounds, being promiscuous was my guard against being raped. If I was the aggressor, if I was in charge, then things were not happening to me against my will. I was in control of my sexual destiny.
That was the megalomaniac in me talking, of course. The side of me with the inferiority complex realized I had already completely screwed up my sexual history to date, and felt awkward and guilty over it. But surely that didn’t matter. All could be forgiven. I would find someone to have sex with me; damn it, and one of those sexual encounters would turn out the way it was supposed to. The guy would have sex with me and fall madly in love with me. Of course that never happened. I had a series of one-night stands; sometimes while I was so drunk I was completely passed out. Clear, conscious consent? Not likely.
♦◊♦
The thing is—when I think about how important a clear, conscious “yes” is—I also know how difficult I made it for guys. I was handing them a “yes” on a silver platter the moment I walked in a room. I want to make this perfectly clear: I was not the only victim here. Sending confusing signals, saying “yes”, and then “no”, using sex not just as a release but as a form of therapy, convincing myself I was falling in love with guys—guys I didn’t even know—so that I could justify wanting sex with them. None of that was good. Not for me. Nor for men.
I was misguided in my intentions, misguided in my actions. In the screwed up mind of an addict, being wildly drunk each time gave me the perfect excuse for my behavior. I was the one who would stand in the dark hallway and say, “kiss me.” I sought out guys who were just as drunk as I was. I made it perfectly clear—at the start of the night—that I was ready, willing and able to have sex, because I thought that was what I wanted. But what I really wanted was just for the story to turn out differently.
And that’s why this has to be talked about.
♦◊◊
There’s no use in making generalizations about guy’s behavior, or women’s behavior, or whether I got what I asked for or who was at “fault.” There’s no reason to feel sorry for me—I’m many years sober, have an amazing life, I live in the present, in a life that is filled with such daily awe and wonder and breathless anticipation for the future that—now—what happened to me then was simply what happened to me then. I have guys who are dear friends, guys I can talk about this stuff with. And all the guys who work with me now—you know who you are—we have great, professional relationships, filled with warmth and intelligence. I still have an easy laugh.
♦◊♦
The reason I’m writing all this is because I wanted to have a conversation about rape. Because I, for one, don’t know how to talk about it. And because my personal confusion around the subject is so deep, I can only guess about the confusion men might also have. And I wanted nothing more than to end my story with a blithe “oh well, all’s well that ends well.”
Which doesn’t really get at the fact that rape, and childhood sexual abuse, and sexual violence is still a problem—if no longer for me, then for countless men and women. And, so, when I asked for comments, to try to get clearer in my thinking, Lili had a very passionate point of view:
“We are socially educated and conditioned to think of rape as a violent act, a knife to the throat, a hand clamped over a woman’s mouth–not something that happens between two kids who picked each other up at a keg party, now laying together in the quiet afterhours of a frat dorm room. Yet, what is this if it isn’t rape? “Just” non-consensual sex? Do we like the sound of that term better because it relieves us of feeling bad as men that we’ve allowed some predatory instinct to take over? Are we hiding behind a patent refusal to even look at these issues, because dammit, we didn’t rape her; at best we had non-consensual sex with her? But if we aren’t getting a clear YES from a girl, should we maybe interpret that as a clear NO and then take ourselves right out of there? How do we navigate those uncertainties when our hormones are firing, goaded on by alcohol running through our veins. And, as women, the shame, self-loathing, we’ll carry all our lives, as young women engaging in thoughtless, or drunken sex, all that…young men need to know that young women experience it like that before we can ask them to grow a conscience around that.
And I read those words, and thought “yes,” “YES.” All of that is important.
But that’s not what I came here to say.
What I really want to say is: “We can’t solve the problem if we can’t talk about it.”
So for me, personally, what I’d really like to do is call a truce—to stop placing blame just for a minute and figure this out together, ok? Let me repeat that. Just for a moment, not talk about who’s to blame, but let us as men, let us as women, actually get together and figure it out. This is not a call for inexcusable behavior. This is not to say we shouldn’t hold people accountable for their actions. You can hold me up and judge me if you think for a moment that might actually help. But just for once I would like to sit down and talk about this topic without the fiery inferno of shame and guilt that seems to burn through every conversation about rape. Guilt and shame that’s felt by men—and women—as equals in a sexual partnership. Guilt and shame that prevents the honest, deep, back-and-forth dialogue that could actually lead to understanding and change. I’d like to figure out together how to stop our sons or daughters from being in a position where they don’t know what a clear, conscious “yes” is. How to get teenagers to talk about sex—with us, with each other, honestly, intelligently, before it happens. To understand at what age it makes sense and when it doesn’t and why. To stop underage drinking, not just for it’s own sake, but so it doesn’t lead to they types of horrific consequences it can have. Because the truth is, although my life is amazing now, I almost didn’t make it.
♦◊♦
The most important thing is that I want this to be to be a platform to have a dialogue – a public, meaningful dialogue, of what the consequences are if we screw this up. To think of ourselves as a partnership, a social force, a team of men and women and women and men who are just trying to figure it out together, so that sex is as it should be—a safe way for a pair of people to experience mutual affection and enjoyment with each other.
About Lisa Hickey
This may be the most courageous thing you’ve written here. I laud your candor, and hope this launches meaningful dialogue.
Jackie
Echoed…
A lot of rapes happen after break-ups, when men can’t deal with the pheromone withdrawal, “territorial” usurpation, and loss of what in many cases is the only real intimacy in their lives. In desperation, under the influence of the reptilian part of their brain, they show up to “take” what has been “theirs.” Often the woman is reluctant in these instances, for a variety of reasons running the gamut from residual affection or love, to sympathy, to fear, to get her ex in serious trouble, and so absorbs the violation.
If such a return happens once, and the man realizes how off-the-charts crazy he has gone, there can be forgiveness, as long as the act stayed within the bounds of “sexuality.” But if it happens a second time the woman needs to break clean by any means necessary.
When a woman is raped, she is not “reluctant” — she said no and he did what he wanted anyway. There is no “absorption” of the violation. Men CAN and SHOULD deal with their problems, not take them out on exes. Are you really suggesting that it’s totally okay for men to rape an ex “just” once? If one of my exes raped me, I would not be okay with it and there would be no forgiveness from me.
I said, “there can be forgiveness” not “there should be.” The definition of “rape” is obviously as open to interpretation as any word. If you define “rape” as any sexual encounter a woman does not want to have, it gets inextricably tangled. Whether you’re drunk and unable to to mount effective resistance or decide to allow for whatever reason the man to proceed, it might still be called rape. At that point its all about what a woman decides to do after the fact.
No, Mark. It is rape no matter what the woman decides to do afterward, and no matter whether the police refuse to help her or the DA refuses to prosecute. These types of rapes are rarely prosecuted. And sometimes that is almost worse than the rape.
and this is the main problem of taking a transactional/commodified view of sex instead of a collaborative view
I like that you address (albeit through a personal story) one of the key reasons I never want to talk about rape:
“I sought out guys who were just as drunk as I was. I made it perfectly clear—at the start of the night—that I was ready, willing and able to have sex, because I thought that was what I wanted.”
This, to me, is the major reason I never want to discuss rape.
For some reason, in our culture, men are assumed to have a super-human ability to regulate their own consent, even in situations where women are assumed to have lost their ability to give consent.
When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine got in real trouble for exactly this sort of behavior: he went home with a girl while blindingly drunk. She actually pulled him into the cab, and had previously extended an invitation to go back to her place, I witnessed it personally. The next day she claimed he took advantage of her while she was drunk, the University got involved, and he was disciplined (thank God, not so seriously that he could not graduate, this was a few years ago and both have moved on).
I find it difficult for situations like this not to dehumanize men. I will admit to having at least one sexual encounter while drunk that I would have refused while sober. But as a man, society never considers my consent. Merely the fact that I am involved implies my consent. This, to me, is unacceptable.
Why would I want to join a conversation when my starting point is less-than-human? What makes such a conversation worth having?
Hi Mike,
Obviously what I wrote was extremely difficult to write and publish, but I did so for exactly the reason you point out — that I don’t want to *ever* have a conversation that starts with men as less-than-human. It’s ridiculous. And if I were a man I wouldn’t want to have the conversation either.
So I thank you for jumping in here, and agreeing to be a part of this in some way — however small you think your role was, you are playing a part, and I thank you. And I agree we can’t talk about women’s consent without talking about men’s as well.
“What makes such a conversation worth having?”
Why…? Well, because it’s the right thing to do!
I understand your pity party, but at the same time that doesn’t change the facts. Your personal pity party doesn’t erase the fact that women are being taken advantage of and raped. Some of these women are left with STDs, pregnancies etc.
THEY are the answer to ‘What makes such a conversation worth having?’
And you just proved Mike’s point. Way to totally disregard his pointing out of the disregard of male consent.
People like Mike might be more willing to join such conversations if it weren’t for people like you dismissing his concerns as “pity parties”. And the fact that women are being taken advantage doesn’t erase what Mike is talking about.
So in all actualilty that THEY you speak of is made up of more than women, sure most of them might be women but acting like its only women that are treated this way is exactly why Mike asked that question in the first place.
By the way, I’m totally with you guys on this one. After all — there are tons of bad things that happen to guys, too. But you don’t see many women who stand up and talk about all the horrific stuff that happens when guys get sent to prison (and yes, the rape and sexual assault and violence that happens there.) And you don’t see many women stepping up and talking about the negative stereotypes when men are portrayed in the media. Or the loss of jobs by men in this recession.
The truth is — I didn’t talk about it either. I spent most of my life trying to hide all the bad stuff that happening to me. There’s nothing worse than trying to have a conversation and being dismissed out right. But trying to have a conversation and saying “this is why it’s hard” — that’s important.
thanks for your comments.
“But you don’t see many women who stand up and talk about all the horrific stuff that happens when guys get sent to prison (and yes, the rape and sexual assault and violence that happens there.) And you don’t see many women stepping up and talking about the negative stereotypes when men are portrayed in the media. Or the loss of jobs by men in this recession. ”
Wow, that’s actually just not true. I just posted a comment in another thread about the portrayal of men in the media about 15 minutes ago. Every discussion I’ve come across about prison abuse, abuse in the military, hazing abuse at frats, etc. has had solid female input. Most of the articles on this site do, too, if you read the comment section.
Point taken. Just because I don’t hear those voices as loudly doesn’t mean they are not there.
“Pity party”?!? are you serious?
What was brought up is a valid point. It both participants are black out drunk, how do you determine who needs to give consent and who needs to ask for it? In cases where one person is relatively sober and one person is clearly intoxicated, it’s pretty easy to determine who took advantage of whom. But, it’s usually some type of grey area. The man should not, by default, always be deemed the guilty party.
If someone says “no” at any time, the line is pretty clear. No means no. But when you’re talking about instances where yes doesn’t mean yes, such as when a person is intoxicated, your dealing with a major issue. In order for something to be considered “taking advantage”, the person doing the taking has to be aware that the person saying yes is unable to give consent. Sometimes, it can be very difficult to determine how drunk a person is. If someone is unable to talk or walk, is falling down, is vomiting, keeps falling asleep, etc. these are pretty reliable signs that a person, male or female, is too drunk to consent.
I think an issue that comes into play here is the view of men as raging horn dogs. Why would a guy not consent to sleeping with a woman? Everyone knows that guys will do pretty much anything with a vagina. If he doesn’t consent, then he must be gay. Concepts like these are incredibly damaging.
First of all, Lisa, thank you for having the courage to share your story. As a gay man, I have never been raped or abused. But I have often engaged in sex, I think, simply because it was expected of me, and not because there was any passion or romance (as opposed to physical desire). That, for me, is the issue to address. Is sex worth having for its own sake, in the absence of genuine human emotion? Should we be teaching our kids to say no? Or how to say yes when the time is right?
Yes. We should instill in our kids (and the kids in our family – as the only girl in my generation I had this conversation alot…with my neices who wouldn’t have gone to their parents about it) the self-esteem to know to say yes only because they want to, and the smarts to know what might constitute a bad situation.
P.S. Not all 16- and 17-year-olds are gorgeous, as Melanie Safka so poignantly sang in “Seventeen”. I certainly wasn’t then or anytime since.
Lisa,
I don’t even know where to begin – except to thank you for the invitation you extended to all of us to be real, and honest, and self-reflective, and willing not to cast blame, so that we can take a good clear look at a topic that is rarely dicussed from such a gracious perspective.
Roger
Yes. Please. Dialogue. Let’s do.
Thank you so much for being so brave!
Peace
Ty
I am so moved by your ability to be intimate at this level. Your childhood, Lisa, was not what a childhood should look like even though you say some of it was fine. The fact that you dreamed of being kidnapped as a possible escape from your life…that says a lot. You are an amazing person and I’m glad that you have been able to overcome these memories in some way. And thank you for sharing.
Wow! Thanks & wow! ….. just way to much going thru the head to say more than Wow! & Thanks!
Thank you for writing this. It’s really courageous to put all of that intimate personal experience out there, and I really appreciate the call for discussion. Situations where people are emotionally vulnerable, maybe desperate, maybe drunk, and don’t know what they really want, are so complicated, and I think it’s by talking about how to deal with those complicated situations that we can best learn how to stop rape (especially date rape and acquaintance rape).
I’m a white middle-class man in college, and I’ve reached a point in my life where I can limit my romantic and sexual pursuits to emotionally stable women with a healthy feminist viewpoint and self respect. But it seems almost every one of my friends and relatives who are women went through times in their lives, usually in adolescence, often in college, when they felt similarly to the way you described – needing validation, wanting to be wanted, and needing to have control over their own sexuality without yet knowing how – and had experiences that they regret. Of course we’re not talking about fault, they ran the spectrum from bad decisions to mistakes to simply becoming a victim. But I don’t think anyone should have to have that experience, and I want to help prevent it in the future.
My first girlfriend was a year younger than I was, and we were together from when I was 16, through most of her first semester of university. We both came in to the relationship with basically no sexual experience, so I had always felt that we were equals. I later learned that although she had a healthy enough sense of self-worth, she didn’t really know what she wanted and had a very passive viewpoint of her sexuality. I had always thought we were discovering things together, and it was always consensual. She later told me that although there was never a time we had sex that she regretted it afterward, she did often feel pressured into it. I was confused and crushed with guilt, and I have carried that with me for a long time.
I think that “no means no” should be very easy to understand for anyone who’s not mentally ill, but what can be harder to deal with, especially for well-meaning but confused men, is that yes does not always mean yes. Many young men don’t have enough understanding of the vulnerability of girls or women their age because of the way mainstream society teaches women to hate themselves. They don’t understand that there can be complicated power dynamics and that they can be pressuring their girlfriend, or date, or whoever, into sex without meaning to. In a perfect world (maybe one day), all young people would be raised strong enough to resist that pressure. But it’s not the case, and we have to figure out together how to deal with it, and pass on what we learn for posterity.
There was a really good article on (I think) Jezebel that challenged the way drinking and sex and consent are dealt with. I think that it is still possible for people to consent unless they are so drunk that they literally don’t know what is happening. A lot of women get raped because someone takes advantage of their intoxicated condition when they can’t fight back. That’s not what I want to talk about right this minute though, because I think that’s crossing a huge line vs. those awkward situations when women feel pressured into sex implicitly, not explicitly – when yes doesn’t really mean yes. I want to help ignorant but well-meaning men to identify and deal with those situations in a responsible, feminist way. What signs we should see and think “Well, even if she would technically be consenting, I still shouldn’t take that chance in this case because it would be complicated.”
I have a 12 year old boy cousin and an 8 year old girl cousin who lost their father. The 12 year old looks up to me, and I want to make sure he learns how not to put a confused young woman in that kind of position, before it’s too late. My sister and I also want to make sure the 8 year old develops good instincts, self-worth, and attitudes, so that she doesn’t get into bad situations. What should we tell them?
I’m going to be watching for more comments on this article, I’m really interested in reading what everyone says.
Wow, Lisa. I didn’t have abusive, alcoholic parents, but my high school and college years were rather like yours. But it seemed normal — most of my girl friends were as obliviously promiscuous as I was. I think we thought we were empowered when we were really giving ourselves away for cheap, in an insidiously destructive manner. I worry about both my son and daughter being on separate sides of this equation.
“I think we thought we were empowered when we were really giving ourselves away for cheap….”
What do you mean by the above Pauline?
Giving oneself away for cheap is a curious phrase to use in this context.
I get the sense from perusing these “rape” threads that we’re still harboring strong remnants of the female gatekeeper / economic model of human sexuality.
When I read Pauline’s line that “we thought we were empowered when we were really giving ourselves away for cheap” I thought it was so right and well put. Girls think that their only value is their attractiveness and availability (as someone above said) and that they have to have to have sex for all kinds of other reasons (to keep a guy’s attention/affection, to prove that they’re desirable, etc.) that they never get to the truly empowered place of figuring out what they actually *want*. What would sex be like if girls truly were able to decide when, with who, what acts, in what context? Many girls (and women) are not yet at a place where they truly value themselves as people, rather than sexual commodities. When they get to that point, then their sexuality can be about their own pleasure, rather than all this other stuff.
Hi Lisa,
What a beautifully written and courageous story. I particularly applaud your ability to approach the often neglected dimensions of what constitutes rape. Thanks for creating, once again, such important conversations.
Best,
Andrew
I liked the first part of the article, but the later part was naieve. In this society, women and men are not equals in a sexual relationship. The culture is still male dominated and as long as deny that we’re affected by it, we’re not going to have much dialogus and progress.
This is one of the better pieces written about non consensual sex I’ve read. I think we overestimate both the woman’s ability to state her preference without ambiguity, and the man’s ability to read the woman’s every signal and utterance while in the midst of rampaging hormones. Add alcohol into the mix and it turns messy fast.
Thanks for writing this. And to the commenter who accused the writer of a “pity party,” you’re completely off base. She’s done the opposite.
Thank you for telling my story — the abuse was different, but the same. Different family dynamics, but I was left with the core belief that my sexual attractiveness and availability was my only real value. And I kept waiting for the strangers (or friends) to fall in love with me and change me. I was deeply broken and I want to publicly thank the men in my life who said “no.” Who saw that I was not right and who were loving toward me without taking me up on the offer. They were the first to help me find my feet as a person.
Well done, Lisa. This was fair-minded. Some folks will never be as fair-minded as you. They just don’t have it in them. I forgive them and move on to those who are equipped to talk about such difficult issues. Objectivity is frowned upon in a society ruled by gods of war. Cliches are preferred over original thoughts. Anyone who doesn’t react instantly with a judgment-seething opinion is automatically suspect. In short, rape is still taboo. Keep defying taboos; some of us actually benefit from the kick in the pants, myself included.
Lisa thank you for this fantastic piece of writing.
As a youth educator on issues such as sexuality and body image, you have provided a wonderful piece of writing that addresses so many of the complex issues surrounding rape, lack of consent etc. It is such a delicate balance, and I think it is really valuable for for boys and young men (and indeed women) to be able to read such a candid account such as this.
I have also really enjoyed reading the comments, it’s a great conversation to be having.
Thanks for all the comments, everyone. I was more relieved than I care to admit that most of the first group of comments came from *guys* — I apparently still needed some validation that this stuff really was ok to talk about around men. And the tone and thoughtfulness of the comments was great to see also.
The sad part — was how many women contacted me throughout the day. By email, by phone, in person, by Facebook chat. And the message was always the same — “Thank you for saying that. I never could. A similar thing happened to me, but I can’t say it in public, so I’m not going to comment. But thank you.”
It certainly wasn’t an easy post to write. But if if something is important for “us” as a society, to talk about — that means it’s important for me to talk about. I no longer want to be the one that hopes someone else creates social change. And yet, I am only brave enough to tell my story because I have listened to the stories of those who came before me.
thank you.
Lisa, if you want to create social change, start giving feminists some credit. I’m sick of all the anti-feminist trashing on this website. Yes, I’ve read Bob Jensen’s and Hugo’s articles, but I think you’re using them to mask the male chauvinism of The Good Men Project.
Give feminists some credit for her personal insights and struggle? … As a feminist, I don’t expect this woman to give any credit she is not herself inspired to give. I didn’t organize anti-rape protests, campaigns, educational campaigns to get “credit”. I did it because it’s what decent adults do.
I also do not expect any one individual to become the apologist for any publication UNLESS THEY CONTROL IT. You have problems with other authors or editors? Please do contact them, post on their pages, please blog on your own site etc. but don’t ask someone to do your own activism with the subtle insinuation that she owes you or feminists or her foremothers.
I found this article to be brave, articulate, thoughtful, and spoken from one person’s personal experience. I am impressed, and grateful, that it was written and published. I am glad that it seems to be inspiring thoughtful reactions as well as a few PC quibbles over semantics. because I want to live in a world where rape is intolerable to everyone, not just feminists or women.
“So for me, personally, what I’d really like to do is call a truce—to stop placing blame just for a minute and figure this out together, ok? Let me repeat that. Just for a moment, not talk about who’s to blame, but let us as men, let us as women, actually get together and figure it out.”
Lisa, we cannot call a truce until we admit that we’re still living in a male dominated society and that men have to take as much responsibility for it as women.
BTW, I cringed when you used the sexist word, freshman and I noticed that you always address men first, as in “men and women.” I would like it very much if you also addressed women first, as in “women and men.”
I’ve read several of your articles and I think you privilege men over women.
Are you a POE?
“Guilt and shame that’s felt by men—and women—as equals in a sexual partnership.”
In this society, women and men are not equals in a sexual partnership.
True, some women and men are aspiring to it and coming close to it, but they know all too well that they are often going against the culture. And they know that it’s very easy to give in and take the path of least resistance.
In spite of some sexist language, I continued to read your article until I read the naieve statement, “By men – and women – as equals in a sexual partnership.”
I was saying that as the ideal. Let us be partners together in a sexual relationship. If you don’t believe you can be an ideal, that’s unfortunate. But that is what I believe. That it can happen.