It’s All About Me

One person's seduction is another's sexual assault. 
A few posts ago virtual friend and sometime sparring partner Rob Belgeri left a comment (a pretty solid one, I might add). Very soon thereafter, however, he deleted it. I’m always intrigued by unforced acts of self-censorship. I’ve practiced them myself on occasion. And actually Rob's self-censoring in itself was rather germane to the blog topic, which was comedy vs. political correctness--specifically the question of who gets to edit creativity…the creator or the various and sundry bluenoses who object to the creation? When I asked Rob why he removed the comment, he wrote back, “It was all about me, and it ain’t about me.” (Full disclosure…I’m paraphrasing here…and at my own risk, because Rob is a hell of a writer in his own right. What Rob really wrote was “Too autobiographical. I hate when I do that.  It ain't about me.” But I massaged his words to make them fit with the title of this post…and also because…well, because it is all about me.)
This blog, of course, is about me. Without me, I’d be out of business, though there’s little business in the commercial sense going on here (unless I’m selling a book!). But my me…my story, my experiences, my thoughts and observations, my passions and antagonisms are what fuel and drive this blog. Without me, I have very little to say about very much and am empty. But with me--with what I’ll blushingly call my humanity--I have at least some key to gaining insight into people whose lives otherwise might be remote or alien to me.
Here’s an example. As I said in that post that prompted Rob’s comment, it’s been a long while since I’ve been on a college campus, so there’s a lot going on there that I hear about on the news but can hardly relate to--not just political correctness, but the whole rape culture thing. Recently the statisticunderpinning the notion of rape culture on campus was reinforced: 1 in 5 college women report that they have been the victims of sexual assault, ranging from unwanted touching to rape.
Though I’m sure it happened in real life (albeit with less frequency) in my college days, the only discussions I can recall of rape would be in regards to films that featured rape scenes (most famously Gone with the Wind, which was in re-release in 70mm at the time, all the better to appreciate Scarlett’s lascivious smile the morning after being raped by Rhett). But in my writer’s struggle to access a sense of what’s going on at today’s colleges, I managed to unearth three memories that seem in retrospect somewhat relevant.   
In the first instance, I had come back to my apartment to gather up a forgotten book...or paper or pen, whatever. When I opened the door to return to campus, a woman who lived across the hall was standing in my doorway and blocking my exit with considerable attitude. I told her I didn’t have time to talk; I had to get to class. She said she would let me pass after I kissed her. This was the first time anything like that had ever happened to me, and Catholic boy that I was I was duly flustered. I tried to treat the situation as joke, but she was serious and repeated her demand. Reality check #1: I didn’t find this woman at all attractive. Had I, perhaps the situation wouldn’t have felt so intimidating. Reality check #2: she was petite and as such presented little resistance when I finally pushed past her and left. Had I been the petite one, it’s quite possible that this memory would be far uglier.
The second instance answers a key question raised by the first: does attractiveness mitigate against aggressiveness? Same apartment…different woman, a co-ed I had once been quite attracted to. We had a cancelled class together and decided to spend the free time at my place. When I returned from the kitchen with drinks, she was undressed and beckoning me to join her on the couch. Six months earlier, my attraction to her easily would have trumped her aggressiveness toward me, and I’d have been down and dirty with her on the couch, happily so. But in the time between her break up with her last guy and that afternoon, I had fallen helplessly in love with Lorna,and there was no way I was going to trade that winning lottery ticket for a one time ticket to ride.
The final instance involved a rather renowned professor in the English department. I had gone to his office to pick up Lorna’s final exam. As I got up to leave, I found myself in exactly the same situation as I had been with the petite woman in the doorway…only there was nothing petite about this PhD. He was quite heavyset and easily blocked my exit and asked me to kiss him. I looked at him in shock…I never saw that coming. Heavyset or not, I bulled my way out of there. I know this is redundant with the first story, but this is where it gets depressingly resonant with what we’re reading and hearing about on today’s campuses. A few months after the incident, I described it to a faculty couple that had become social friends of ours. This was in no way a report on my part, formal or informal. It grew out of our discussion at an evening dinner. But when I finished my story, both husband and wife--highly educated and fiercely liberal though they were--refused to believe me. They insisted that their colleague was just joking and that I had misread his intentions. 

None of these instances are as heinous as the one I blogged about some years ago, which I believe gives me some standing to write about rape if not rape culture. But each of them puts me in—or rather out—of the shoes of the women currently making their complaints about what’s going on in a world I no longer inhabit. I have no trouble seeing how lucky I was in each circumstance to successfully navigate through them. I also have no trouble seeing how frustrating and frightening it can be to find yourself in such circumstances where you are clearly the vulnerable one…by virtue of physical size or innocent insobriety. Finally, I can see how isolating it can be not to be believed by either those who should be protecting you or those who should be supporting you. That's when it becomes all about you in the worst and loneliest way possible.