Most of you (who have televisions) know more than I do about the Kobe Bryant case.<\/p>\n
What I pay attention to and know is brief; there was a sexual encounter, it devolved into the “he said\/she said” of consensual sex versus rape, with what little physical evidence has made it to the media that gets my attention decidedly ambivalent.<\/p>\n
I have all kinds of responses to this: The come from three places – from my own life as a pretty sexually active young man in high school, college, and afterwards; from a painful pair of experiences I had back then; and most important of all, as a man with three sons who do talk to me and who I am responsible for equipping to navigate the treacherous world.<\/p>\n
And finally, there is an issue that comes up under this that transcends the issue of sexual politics and comes out in areas that I feel are broadly important – which is really why I want to write about this.I was fortunate (or not, depending on your point of view) to come of age in the late 60’s and early 70’s first in West Los Angeles, then in Santa Cruz. There wasn’t a lot of parental supervision, and we pretty much got to do what we wanted. Much of it, unsurprisingly, revolved around sex. We had thrown the old rules of courtship out the window, and hadn’t yet made up any new ones.<\/p>\n
So there was a lot of room for bad behavior, and really no standards against which to judge it.<\/p>\n
My own story is relatively minor: A woman who I knew slightly came to me in an emotionally fragile state, and while my memory today is clear that it was she who initiated things, matters came to a head when she, nude, slammed me in the jaw and ran out my door, clutching her clothes. I sat up that night, realizing that while what I’d done wasn’t vile – barely – it was certainly wrong; and that while she’d been the aggressor, a gentle man – a responsible man – would have pushed her away and made a date for a future time when she might be more self-posessed. To this day, I’m grateful to her for hitting me (she’s one of the very few people who have raised a hand to me about whom I would say that).<\/p>\n
In the other issue, I was a witness, then a participant in cleaning up the mess: Two students got onto an elevator and Something Happened. He denied it, she asserted it, and the disciplinary codes at the time gave a fair amount of room to decide what to do. He was my friend, and I didn’t believe him capable of what he was charged with; I wound up as his defender, and got him off with a relatively minor sanction. Of course, it later turned out that the charges were true.<\/p>\n
So it’s a complex world, with rules we often reject where we understand them. And past performance is obviously no guarantee of good behavior.<\/p>\n
Do I think that men have sexually abused women through most of history and gotten away with it? Absolutely yes<\/i>. Do I think that the rules today are totally stacked in favor of the accuser, and that innocent men suffer unjustly? Equally absolutely yes<\/i>. I don’t yet know how we navigate this. I think we have a complex of half abandoned structures that once regulated our behavior, and half-emerged new ones that someday will. And now we’re in the valley, just pushing forward as best we can. There are so many issues where the balance between men and women had not yet hit an equilibrium; I could do an entire blog on it, but this isn’t that blog.<\/p>\n
When Biggest Guy was of an age that he was likely to be sexually active – when he had a car and was out on his own away from adult supervision, he and I had a series of long talks about the risks involved. One that I had been particularly concerned about was AIDS; his and his brothers’ godfather died of it when he was about nine, and was old enough to have some idea of what was going on. I wanted to make sure that the sex=death fear wasn’t there for him, but that the had a healthy respect for the risks. To me the greatest risks weren’t AIDS (actually a low risk in his population subgroup), but the old-fashioned ones of pregnancy and emotional damage. I recently had much the same talk with Middle Guy.<\/p>\n
But when Biggest Guy went away to Virginia and then started school, we had the most serious talk. I explained it to him simply; the rules were stacked against him. It wasn’t right or fair but that’s what it was and that, simply, if he wasn’t a true gentleman, the consequences for him might be much worse than a sore jaw. He got it and so far, from what I hear and see, he’s on his way to walking through this first minefield. <\/p>\n
I’m still holding my breath.<\/p>\n
And on the bigger issue; TG and I were playing with a toddler girl during Dave & Deborah’s wedding; the little girl was at that appallingly cute age when walking it itself a form of self-expression, and when round pink cheeks (usually flecked with the remains of a snack) frame a smile of total exuberance. The girl’s mom and I had chatted and she knew I had older boys. “Do you wish you’d had a girl?” And before I could consciously think, I replied “Well, she’d shoot damn well, that’s for sure.” <\/p>\n
It’s a difficult thing to say, but I think that women have a duty to resist. I’m very aware of the risks. But it’s not to distinguish themselves as victims of violence, rather than someone who “says yes and then changed her mind,” but for the same simple reason that I think we all have a duty to resist. Because it raises the price of being a predator. In matters of sex, men who transgressed were once at risk from the woman’s kin or from the community if in fact their transgression was public enough and the victim someone who mattered. In matters of violence, it was the norm to resist, and the negative consequences of those actions is in part what kept bad behavior in check.<\/p>\n
Today we are taught to passively get through it, and then go seek counseling.<\/p>\n
Men who are basically guilty of not being gentlemen are labelled as predators, and the predators – sexual and otherwise – continue to flourish, because we’ve built an ecology that suits them just fine. <\/p>\n
I think we can change that, one sock to the jaw at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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