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SOMETIMES PEOPLE TELL YOU THAT YOU’RE LUCKY THAT YOU have sons so they won’t have to deal with all this crap. It’s true that your kids, by virtue of both being boys, will be in a privileged position, but the idea that they “won’t have to deal” with rape culture makes you shudder. You very much want them to “deal with” rape culture the way one “deals with” a cockroach problem. Sometimes you think about what you’ll tell them and come up surprisingly blank. It’s the words that fail you, not the ideas. The ideas are there. Though you aren’t sure exactly what you’ll say, these are the things you
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We speak of men and their rage as if it is laudable. “Men just get mad and punch each other and it’s over,” we say. “Women are just bitches; they never let it go.” That’s because we never can let it go. Because where would we put it? What system? What faith? What institution has room? Has patience? Has understanding for an angry woman?
I am angry too. I am angry for them. Angry for me. Angry for all those women in homes with men on the roof, avoiding them.
WHEN YOU DON’T WALK ALONE AT NIGHT, YOU ARE ROBBED OF the world’s quiet. The world is, you hear, very peaceful after 2 a.m. You’ve been told it’s pink-lit—awash in a stillness usually only achieved by plugging one’s ears. You imagine other people enjoying these pockets of quiet.
Because it seemed, as liberated, educated, nonreligious women, we’re urged to have lots of sex—great sex!, whatever sex!, sex like a straight guy!—but not no-sex. Because it’s now more of a public disgrace and bodily phenomenon to be prude than promiscuous.
Because then we’d have to discuss it, and if we discussed it, then we’d have to discuss everything else—rape culture, masculinity, gender inequality, femininity, patriarchy, complicity—and who wants to get into that?
