2022: The Year of the Sexual Correctional
If you have a penis one thing should be clear at this point: nobody's playing with you.
They say nothing changes on New Year’s Day. But it’s hard to square yourself with that when it’s quite clear that everything changes on every day so why should New Year’s Day be any different?
And blasting out of a New Year’s Eve party in Harlem, all 16 years of me at this point, and correctly tuned up with a headful of coke and Southern Comfort, and yeah, youth is an excuse, the wander was on. Because? Because Brooklyn kids didn’t know shit about Harlem and, of course, the aforementioned headful of “disturbants” were having their way.
It was well after midnight and so the kissing and cheering and shibboleths about grand promises for the “new” year had been spoken, so homeways was rightways, and working my way through mostly empty Harlem streets I could see the subway rising off in the distance. It was precisely then that two things happened.
The first was that I noticed the famous Cotton Club at the bottom of a hill. A steep hill.
The second was that I noticed an abandoned Big Wheel at the top of that very steep hill. A Big Wheel, a BIG WHEEL! That low-riding multicolored tricycle with the huge plastic front wheel that was THE SHIT in the ‘70s. If you were 10. And if you were 16 and high the lure and allure was even higher. Especially at the top of a hill.
So on I got and with the slightest of pushes I started to barrel down the hill. In literary terms we might consider this foreshadowing.
But the night air was in my face and the intersection where the Cotton Club sat was “suddenly” alive with traffic and finally a thought regarding the stopping of the Big Wheel and the immediate and pressing need to move beyond thought into very real action. The pedals connected to the front wheel were spinning too fast to be able to gain any kind of purchase, and my disco shoes had smooth bottoms, and so stopping, I quickly calculated, while totally necessary, was not going to be possible by conventional means.
[A]nother way to separate sex from commerce and power[?] … following the Maxwell, Epstein, Prince Andrew, Trump, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz trail of semen up to and through the so-called Lolita Express, I wonder.
Leaving? Intersection auto death. Or…intersection auto death.
It was 1978 and the only thing standing between me and nonexistence was the luck of the draw. Or a time machine. Until I noticed the best of the horrible options right there in front of me: a mailbox. Which I chose to crash into. In the end: I was saved by the least efficient of our governmental entities.
And as fun as this was, this was not the story of the evening.
“You want to dance?”
In the closet doing blow, I had emerged…invigorated. The dance floor was alive. The fact that it was a dude who was asking me didn’t upset me in the slightest. I had noticed women towing each other out to the dance floor where they danced with each other and sidling up to them seemed to be a strategy that made sense.
What I hadn’t made sense of was the fact that he had no interest in dancing with them and had a lot of interest in dancing with me. Which I found amusing but not as a long term prospect thing. So the song ends, I wave him off and head back to my man with the party favors who had not managed as of yet to get out of the closet. And so where the coke was the party would remain. Until a knock on the door.
“You want to dance?”
This time I looked. Glasses. About 28.
“No, man.”
“OK.”
And when I emerged from the closet, invigorated, 15 minutes later, again .
“Hey. You want to dance again?”
Jesus. Is this what women have to go through? Sometimes? ALL the time?
“I already said ‘no’, man.” But this time with a steady gaze, the absence of a smile or a laugh and an intonation that suggested asking again would not be viewed as anything other than an act of hostility and would be met in kind.
I had forgotten all about this until recently.
Is this what women have to go through? Sometimes? ALL the time?
I’ve heard men chafe about #MeToo but entire careers are now being built on “cancel comedy”. I’ve heard Gene Simmons, whose sexual partners famously number in the thousands, defending Canadian musician David Foster for running with bikini shots of his post-pregnancy wife. I’ve heard about the woman “Lily” in the AT&T commercials facing down violent social media commentary because…? Well, just because.
Undergirding this all seems to be a failure to embrace how big of a drag this is. Until such time as, at least in my case, you turn the tables. But here I can just cut to the chase: according to statistics 41.8 percent of American women have had to deal with sexual violence other than rape, with 80 percent of female sexual assault victims having this happen to them before they had turned 25.
So while I’d still leave the house even if I stood an almost 50/50 chance of being sexually assaulted, I’ve been preparing for the possibility of sexual assault before I’d even known that 21.4 percent of American males are survivors of sexual assault. I also realize that most men are not factoring their own possible assaults into any or many of their doings.
Nor are they expected to smile or be easy about existential threats because they were just “jokes”. So all in all it seems to me that women are doing a remarkable job of being “good sports” about it all.
“You know why we’re ‘good sports’?” My wife who blinded an attacker in a late night street assault a few years ago asked. “Because none of this happens too far away from the possibility of us dying.”
Now multiply that by every single woman we know, and know that the aforementioned statistics still stick. So you, if you’re a woman, and we can all add in our mothers, daughters, sisters, girlfriends, wives, all choosing to leave the house under a very unsteady social fabric that gets all “yeah, but”-y when we start talking about your assaults? Know that it’s nothing that any man would put up with for even a day.
Which, when taken in total, is enough to make your head spin.
And while socially speaking we’re barreling down a hill into a future where our obsession with shopworn sexuality — and its use as a sales crowbar covers everything from hammers to motor oil, or for no reason at all on funny TikToks — is all we’re breathing, drinking and eating, it makes me long for another way to communicate. Beyond that at least a way to separate sex from commerce and power.
But following the Maxwell, Epstein, Prince Andrew, Trump, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz trail of semen up to and through the so-called Lolita Express, I wonder. We’ve seen Prince Andrew and it begs the question: on what planet is any 17-year-old thirsting after him? And how did he manage to believe it was really so separate from private Lear Jets and vacation villas activity framed for molestation?
Recently, someone close to me revealed that they had been invited to an “Epstein” party. Out of their age and experience range but it was at first blush just…a party. During the course of the party she and a friend were Bill Cosby’d by the married with children power player whose party it was. His wife and kids were out of town and so as the occasion arose he raped two drugged women.
But the woman that spilled the story to me explained that the drug had just incapacitated her and that she had remained conscious. Through her friend’s rape, and her own.
His case is now wending its way toward trial, which is amazing since less than 20 percent of rapes are ever reported. Of course for every 1000 rapes, 995 rapists will go unpunished.
That means the likelihood that I will see this guy in line at Safeway? High. That also means if I beat him half to death in Safeway I would be punished more severely than he will be. Besides which it doesn’t undo the rape. There’s not much that could.
Outside, maybe, of realizing that the distaff side is absolutely not fucking joking about what it’s like out there. If anything they’re underplaying it. And just to be clear the problems, short of rape and sexual assault, don’t begin when a man asks a woman for sex. Or even with a clumsy pass (or a bad date).
But it picks up pretty quickly when he asks again. And again. And again. Because by the third time it’s much more than clear: this has now become a threat.
And this is no white knight stuff. This is just a suggestion: stop asking why women are “crazy”. The reasons should be much more than evident.
“I already said ‘no’, man.”
Indeed.
I wish I could "like" this about a hundred times, or so. I, too, am one of those mothers, daughters, friends, sisters that ended up being assaulted sexually - more than once - and whose attackers did not face any consequences for said actions. At 67, I'm not sure it'll change in my lifetime, but I am encouraged by writing like this. Thank you.
I had three eye-opening incidents:
1) College: My one 98lb friend, J, became fall-out drunk at a party we were both attending. I tried to walk her out, but wound up having to fireman-carry her. On the way out, a fellow Resident Assistant (!!!) said “Damn man, you like it like that!?” I was like “Huh?” and he waved me off, shrugging “That’s okay, my brother is like that.” It took probably a full minute before I understood what he thought he was condoning.
2) College: My other 98lb friend, A, stole my vodka bottle one night, after a bad breakup, and left a note “I’m going out.” I frantically made my way into almost every frat house, finally finding her at an off-campus party, with some rando with his hands all over her on the dance floor while she was staggering, listless, with her eyes half-open. I walked right up and got in his face, and rather than the confrontation I expected, he just shrugged, smirked like a bad kid, and walked away like “Damn…so close…!”
3) At age 29, I got engaged, and announced it at work. I temp who I’d previously flirted with later caught me alone in my office, closed the door, and propositioned me - very graphically. Granted, she was hot, but I was still floating on my new engagement, and I also knew she was damaged goods. I told her no, but she kept going. As the minutes passed, it was all fun and games…until I began to realize that, with the door closed, she could later paint this picture the opposite way. So I got up, and she barred the door. I said something flattering and disarming, pushed past her with minimal contact, opened the door, and told her I was busy and to stop playing and get out. Okay, It was over, and my only lasting emotion was irritation. But looking back, I realized - had she been a man barring my door, and me a woman…I couldn’t have laughed it off, knowing the whole time I was fundamentally in no physical danger, and able end this exchange at will. That sh*t would have been TERRIFYING!! Even as it was, I was afraid to tell my fiancee for like a year, because I thought she would accuse ME, either because the woman was hot, or because I’d once flirted with her - by that time, MONTHS ago. Again - imagine how a woman would have felt in that same situation…
This stuff that goes on is a daily operation (shout out to Gang Starr), and it shouldn’t take a ton of life experience, morality, or imagination to figure it out.