On feminism and being a man, Or “at least I tried”.
It’s 8:30am as of this first sentence and I cannot sleep again; I’m stuck thinking about something that happened over four years ago and what went wrong and what I did wrong. In advance: this story is going to be graphic and intense, or at least it felt that way for me.
Here are the characters in this story, all names other than mine have been changed:
Sam: a girl getting blackout drunk on her 20th birthday
Anthony: a soccer player who also played LAX; also a weed-dealing roommate of mine, perhaps most notable for having on going relationships with three girls, all of which thought they would end up his girlfriend.
Scary Spice: one of the three women Anthony had been having sex with regularly, the one who had been doing it the longest.
Tad: a LAX player who was kicked off campus for getting caught with weed; this is how he became an off-campus roommate of mine
Tim: a soccer player roommate of mine that also was a weed-dealer. Yes, I get it, I lived with people who did too many drugs for my personality. Hindsight, 20/20, I get it. He used to sleep with Sam.
Rowdy Roddy Piper: a short but athletic bro who had a reputation as being kind of pushy.
Lax Bros™: Bros that played lacrosse
One Saturday in 2011, it was a Sam’s 20th birthday. Ten or so people, including Sam and a bunch of Lax Bros™, met at my apartment around 8pm to pregame, drank a few beers, and then went to whatever party they were going to. I stayed in to work on my senior project even though it was incredibly early in the year; I hated being surrounded by drugs in my living situation, tried to be numb to it and took solace in composing.
Some five hours pass, and I’m watching Netflix in my room when a wave of people return - Tad (kicked off campus roommate), Rowdy Roddy Piper (short pushy bro), Lax Bros™, and Sam. They’re loud; this doesn’t bother me, but I know it means they are incredibly drunk, so I walk downstairs to make sure everyone and everything is fine. Sam is making out with one of the Lax Bros, and I’m thinking “nice!”: it’s her 20th birthday, if there was ever a time to support a random hookup, it was tonight. The same Lax Bro, after realizing he was no longer making out with Sam in a dark walk but in someone’s living room, looked at me and asked if we had any food. Particularly tacos.
I tell the lax bro that we didn’t but we had pizza bites, and his eyes lit up. Not willing to trust him with a microwave or an oven, I spent about five minutes making him the terrible food as the Lax Bros™ and Tad played videogames and continued drunken conversation. When completed, I walk upstairs to go back to bed.
And I hear the sounds of fucking in my bathroom: a woman is murmuring some sounds of pleasure (it seems) and a sound of body thwacking against body. At first, I am upset that people are fucking in my bathroom: I knock on the door and say “Hey, I live here and I need to pee. Can you get out of there?” The male - whose voice is now identifiable as Rowdy Roddy Piper’s - says “Yeah, sure, just give a minute.” The fucking stops.
Then the sound coming from the bathroom is that of a woman puking. It dawns on me that Sam seemingly disappeared when I made pizza bites. I now realize this girl is being fucked in our bathroom by a guy other than the one she was making out with. I begin to wonder how drunk she is, whether this was something she could want. She keeps puking, I can hear it through the door, and I decide it is not something she could want, or that even if she did want it, she is too drunk, she is being taken advantage of, that this is rape.
I knock on the door again. “Hey, this is Dan, I live here. I can hear what’s going on in there. Can you just open the door?”
“Yeah, yeah, just give me a minute,” says Rowdy Roddy Piper.
The puking continues for a while, then a short period of silence passes. I hear movement and think Rowdy Roddy Piper is going to leave. I am wrong. Fucking sounds commence, this time only the bodies slamming against each other. (My bedroom is approximately 3 feet from the bathroom, for those wondering how I would hear this, and since fucksounds have first appeared, I haven’t left the side of the bathroom door.)
I knock again, hard this time, pounding the door. “I fucking live here. I know who you are. Just open the fucking door.”
“Yeah, sure, give me a minute.”
The fucking sounds stop. Five or so minutes pass - longer than any other gap in this story, there is nothing going on in that bathroom, as if we are two snipers waiting for the other to move. I don’t know what’s going on in there, or what happened in there. I’m telling myself no one would fuck this girl like that. I’m telling myself people don’t do that.
The door opens up. Rowdy Roddy Piper runs past me. I look inside and see Sam passed out, face down on the bathroom tile, shirts on, panties off one leg and hinging on the other, her pants in our bathtub. Rowdy Roddy is saying goodbye to the Lax Bros™. I begin to walk downstairs and he runs out. I announce the Lax Bros™, “he just raped Sam in our bathroom.”
Everyone sees that I am angry, visibly angry, shaking in anger. They do not believe me, but they believe something happened. They rush upstairs to our bathroom, where I did not leave the door closed. They see her panties half off, her passed out carcass face down on the floor, her pants in the bathtub. They have a light “whoa” moment.
Then the lax bro from the pizza bites says, “Man, that should’ve been me.” They all begin to crack jokes about what a slut she is. I am now more angry. I tell them to get downstairs and shut the bathroom door. I text Anthony and Tim saying a girl was raped in our bathroom.
30 minutes passes before Anthony gets home with one of the three girls he is fucking-but-not-in-a-relationship-with-but-thinks-she’s-going-to-have-a-relationship-with-him, Scary Spice. Anthony is pissed and wants to take a piss and needs to use our bathroom and I tell him no, he has a penis, there is a passed out woman without panties on in our bathroom, go outside. He goes outside but then comes back with Scary Spice and asks to look in.
Scary Spice says “oh my god”, Anthony is just pissed.
Scary Spice texts Sam’s best male friend, and asks Anthony to give her a spare outfit. Anthony begrudgingly gets some sweatpants and boxers and a shirt.
Best male friend shows up, literally says “oh my god”. I am sitting on the stairs, shaking. Anthony and Scary Spice go downstairs to join Lax Bros™, who haven’t left for some stupid reason and are still playing videogames. I announce, looking Tad in the eyes, “Rowdy Roddy Piper is no longer allowed in this home.” They quietly nod but go back to being bros playing Call of Duty fast.
Sam is leaving her “passed out on the floor” stage and is now communicating, starting to move around. She doesn’t ask any questions about how her pants got in the bathtub. Best male friend doesn’t tell her anything, essentially just handing her spare clothes, looking away, helping move her to the toilet to puke, holding her head back.
Scary Spice approaches me. “Dan, you always seem so stressed.”
I am perplexed as to why this would be the topic at hand tonight. I want to be nice to her. I am not. I say, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“This is your last semester of college, you should just be trying to have a good time.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?.”
“If you take this attitude with your life, you’re going to be miserable forever.”
I am now rocking back and forth while sitting on the stairs. I do not understand how this isn’t a big deal to her, nor why this late of night when she is drunk would be the time for her to teach me a life lesson about doing coke with her not-boyfriend instead of objecting to rape. I am furious. I am trying to think of the steps to not explode in anger. I am trying to think of anger management. I open my mouth.
“Listen, there’s some validity to that, but please shut the fuck up tonight.”
She shrugs it off like she gave it her best shot and I am not worth talking to. I am still rocking back and forth. Best male friend calls my name. I walk upstairs. He asks if it’s cool if he and Sam spend the night here. I say yes, give them a towel and a bucket, and say I’ll drive them home in the morning.
Lax Bros™ spot Sam when she moves to the couch and literally turn up the volume on Call of Duty. I cannot witness this. I go to my room. I lay in bed. I stare at the ceiling. I do not sleep. Somewhere between 4 and 6am I text my friend Emma (whose name has not been changed because I have referenced her in multiple stories), and say “A girl was raped in my bathroom last night.” She doesn’t respond. I spend an hour staring at the text screen.
At 9 or 10am, I go downstairs when sunlight hits my window. I decide it is time to pretend I have just woken up. I am still angry. I used to have anger problems, and I am trying to work through this as though I did not have to spend a large portion of my life figuring out how not to murder people when they’re stupid. I am making myself an egg sandwich. Best male friend wakes up, and Sam shortly after - this after I’ve made my egg sandwich but before I’m done eating it. I ask if they would like breakfast. I make them egg sandwiches.
When done, I ask if Sam would like a ride home. She is very clearly hungover. She says yes. The three of us get in my car. I drive them the short drive to their home on campus, and we are parked. She is in the passenger’s seat, and I look to her as if I am about to say goodbye. Sam says “god, I got so drunk last night.” I say “you have no idea.” She says “What did I do last night?”
I stare at her awkwardly. Two or three seconds pass.
I look back at best male friend, who I decide would know better whether she remembers and doesn’t want to or doesn’t remember and is genuinely asking. I do not know if I should answer this question with “you got raped”. I do not think it is my place, but I have never read anything on rape, feminism, sexuality, outing people, or anything like that at this point in time, 2011.
He says, “You don’t want to know.” I wish them well, they get out of the car. I drive home. When I get back, Anthony says, “a girl fucked a guy in our bathroom, and rather than get mad, you let her stay here and made her breakfast?” I say “fuck you, dude.” I walk upstairs. I lay in my bed. I wonder what life is about.
It is from that moment on that I consider myself a feminist. I don’t know that I ever would’ve if something terrible hadn’t happened. I don’t know that my “feminism” is important or has done anyone any good. I know that I saw this tweet and knew I had never assaulted someone, but wonder what the worst things I have done were. I removed “feminist” from my Twitter bio. I have apologized to three women who were into me that I was a total creep and jerk to, and I cannot apologize to them enough. I have apologized to a fourth who was not into me, but I was a jerk to. I have been blacklisted from an outlet for some combination of criticizing their inconsistent policies and a tweet which dehumanized two of their female writers. I wrote apologies to both writers, but I suspect neither heard what I said to dehumanize them, only saw the apology, and now think I am a creep.
I have made a ton of mistakes and I will likely make a ton more. I hope the rate in which I am making them has slowed down. I cannot undo anything I’ve done, but I can say firmly that I am sorry for them. I am sorry for the bad things I have done. I’ve never assaulted someone, but every time a woman doesn’t want what is happening to happen, I am haunted by this single night in 2011 that I think about every day. I think about what more I was supposed to do? And I think there was so much more I was supposed to do, that ultimately I didn’t want to break down a door, that ultimately this woman was less important than a door handle to 2011-me, and I break down and cry and wonder why I didn’t use my anger to do something. I don’t know why. I don’t know why at all. That door handle didn’t mean shit to me. The security deposit didn’t mean shit to me, but even if it did: was her rape worth $650 to me? That doesn’t seem like an even trade. Why didn’t I do more?
And then I try to shrug it off, and just say to myself, people make mistakes, and the most you can do is say you are sorry, and mean it, and try to move on.
Well, I am sorry, “Sam”. I think about it every day, and you may not even remember it. I think about it. I remember it. I am sorry.
I felt the need to write this out because over the weekend, jzcamp talked of a man I knew (or thought I knew) grabbing her butt at a bar and trying to scurry off, and she told him off. And David Greenwald tweeted about starting a sensitive man’s mag, to which a handful of sensitive men were like “yes” and a handful of other men (both sensitive and not-sensitive) and women were like “noooo”.
And I just think it’s worth noting, it really…. it doesn’t matter what you do in writing, or what your thoughts are in a discussion. No one cares about what’s in your head. Yeah, maybe if there was a generation raised with women in true equal power with a sensitive men’s magazine, things would be better. And sure, you can work toward them.
But agreeing or disagreeing with that means nothing, because it doesn’t matter.
What matters is what you do.
I was that butt-grab guy in middle school and early high school. I regret it. I’m sorry. I said really sexist things - things about gender roles and “the kitchen” and men this women that, and that was probably just five years ago. I regret it. I’m sorry. Three years ago, odds were if you were bisexual I was the type of guy to say you were better off with a man. I regret it. I’m sorry. Still on going is when I say something I would say that is dehumanizing even if it were a man, but it is about a woman. What I mean is, intent means nothing: only result. It doesn’t matter if you or I are not trying to be sexist, if we meant well, if we would say it even if you were a man.
What matters is how it feels to the other person.
That’s the hardest thing for me to check and filter through, because I am only me and I don’t care what you say about me. But that’s easy for me, I’m a straight white heterosexual male, what could you possibly say about me that would offend me? “Oh man, making more money for no reason must be so difficult”? Furthermore, if I’m still thinking about trying and failing to stop something from four years ago, how do you think the victim feels? How haunted do real victims get?
I regret this,I regret saying dumb things in jest that hurt people. I am trying to work on it. I’m sorry I’ve said the things I’ve said. I’m sorry I’ve done some of the things I’ve done. None of that shit haunts me, not really, anyway. The thing I said that got me blacklisted at one outlet, yeah, I think about that now and again. I made a mistake and I’m doing my best to learn from it. But it doesn’t give me nightmares. It doesn’t keep me up at night wondering why.
I’m sorry I failed that woman in 2011. I regret it. I think about it every day. I’d say “at least I tried”, but intent means nothing. I wish I did more.
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