A modest proposal

Enough with all the date-rape hysteria, already. Enough with the screaming, the outrage, the defensive indignation, and the hyperbole. Pretty Lady proposes a new solution. The legal phenomenon of 'no-fault divorce' is now prevalent; she suggests that this concept be extended to include 'no-fault rape.'

Stop your jumping up and down.

Pretty Lady was thinking, just this morning as she moodily vaccuumed, about the time she was vaguely violated by an acquaintance of hers. She has meditated for years upon the strange fact that she emerged from this experience virtually unscathed--physically, psychologically and emotionally. She has waited in vain for some suppressed outrage, misery or psychic scarring to erupt into her consciousness, and it never has done. After more than a decade, she must conclude that she was not, in fact, lastingly traumatized by the experience. An exasperated annoyance is the sum total of her negative associations with the man.

No, it is not Pretty Lady's intention to cast blame far and wide; she does not regard all men as potential violent criminals with the power to shatter her fragile self-regard with a single act of non-compliant intimacy. Neither does she pretend to despise those unfortunates whose experiences WERE genuinely scarring, requiring years of equally traumatic lawsuits and counselling to recover from. Her aim is, merely, to provide a little Inside Information as to the workings of the female mind, on behalf of all those beleaguered potential rapists out there.

Knowledge is power, in other words.

Now. Let it be known that in her late teens and early twenties, Pretty Lady was anything but a provocative dresser. (This is key; bear with me.) Having been psychologically warped by twelve years of classical ballet training, far more so than by any act of mere sexual violation, Pretty Lady was accustomed to regard her lithe, athletic and shapely figure as a monstrosity of inconvenient and unaesthetic bulges. Thus she habitually draped herself in tentlike, oversized garments, frequently obtained from the men's section of the Salvation Army. Likewise, she tended to scrape her long, shiny blonde hair into a tight braid, lest any untidy blowsiness mar the severity of her profile. Friends of that era say that they had no idea what sort of figure she had.

Even so, Pretty Lady did not noticeably lack for masculine attention, the masculine mind being an exceptionally imaginative one in some arenas. (She was once swarmed upon by a friend of her roommate, who confided that 'She looks like a classic librarian, except that if you took her glasses off and messed up her hair, you'd get Daryl Hannah.')

More than that, she tended to acquire packs of buddies. There were several years when she ran with the café crowd--a loosely associated tribe of useless intellectuals, alcoholics, avant-garde rock musicians, wastrels, and perpetual pretenders, who spent large portions of every day drinking too much coffee and smoking filterless Camels. Thus she had a large number of masculine acquaintances who argued Camus with her during the day, and picked esoteric fights with, or made aggrieved, drunken confessions to her, at night. (Once Christopher S. came up to her at a party and declared, "I can't impress you, Pretty Lady. Nothing I do impresses you." Pretty Lady was so naive at the time that it hadn't occurred to her that he'd been trying.)

The point she is making is that by the time Geoffrey W. called her up and invited her out to play pool, she'd known him in this context for quite some time. She'd never paid much attention to him, since he had neither much of a chin nor much of an intellect. But she had quite a good time dancing to his rock band at a co-op bash, and had to admit that he had a bit of talent. And at the time he made the call, he had grown aesthetically astute enough to grow a reddish beard, which balanced out his chinlessness.

Practically as soon as she'd settled onto a bar stool at Maggie's, Geoffrey W. let it be known why he'd called. "When I ran into you at the Chili Peppers, you had your hair down and these shorts on...". This ought to have been a Red Flag. It ought to have been a bigger Red Flag when he began whining about the fact that some provocatively dressed woman he'd met at a club in London refused to go home with him after ten minutes of conversation, "You should have SEEN how she was dressed," he grumbled, indignantly. Furthermore, at the pool table we ran into a young lady who seemed quite put out at seeing us together. "She thinks she's my girlfriend, but she's getting so damn possessive," he declared.

Yes, dear friends, Geoffrey W. was proving himself to be somewhat of an icky character.

Pretty Lady's problem was that she had too many male friends, and was far too accustomed to cutting them a lot of slack. She was Restraining Judgement; she was Being an Understanding Buddy. Plus, she'd been hanging out around Geoffrey in a non-dating context for such a long time that she wasn't inclined to make a 180-degree switch so quickly. Her interpretation of playing pool together was that she was getting to know her buddy better.

So when she pulled up in front of Geoffrey's house to drop him off (yes, she was driving), she was utterly unprepared for the speed with which he launched himself at her face. If he'd casually slipped an arm around her shoulders, she would have been ready with a polite, "Oh, Geoffrey, I'm so sorry, but it just isn't happening for me."

But Geoffrey moved like a killer cobra. One second she was bidding him goodbye with her hand on the gearshift, the next she was knawing on his teeth. A few moments after that she was performing some acts of technical virtuosity which Marian the Librarian never heard of.

She has no excuse for herself; of course a truly virtuous woman with ironclad self-esteem would have dealt Geoffrey an undercut to the jaw, and bitten down on his knacker as soon as it made its appearance. But as she explained at first, this story is not about blame. This is to give you gentlemen some insight as to what goes through a lady's mind in this sort of circumstance.

What went through Pretty Lady's mind was, "Maybe I sent the wrong signal without realizing it. Better give him what he wants, and get rid of him without a fuss."

You see, boys, women are Relational. We perceive all sorts of subtle cues in people's behavior which men are biologically blind to; we feel it is our duty to keep things running smoothly. When an untoward situation occurs, then, we are inclined to Blame Ourselves. If the boy misbehaves, we assume it is because we failed to steer him properly. Or at least Pretty Lady, deep in the throes of undiagnosed codependency, made this assumption.

Now, the end of this story is simply that Pretty Lady gave Geoffrey some of what he was after, in exasperation and contempt, and drove away, feeling that he was rather icky. She had no Great Revelation years later; she did not track him down and take him to court. Upon mulling it over, she decided that she needed to avoid fellows like Geoffrey, perhaps speaking up, or even walking out, a little sooner when they made icky comments.

But this is because Pretty Lady likes herself, she likes men, and believes that in most situations, miscommunications are mutual. Problems arise when two people enter into an interaction bringing radically different assumptions with them. The solution is improved communication, not wild, hysterical blame.