How to Charm My Pants Off With Rape Jokes
(Potentially triggering content below.)
Some guys I don’t know are chatting us up at a club. Their buddy comes over, passing out a round of shooters. “What is this?” I ask, as he shoves one in my hand. “Roofies,” he says. Clever boy. I turn the glass upside down on the tray, spilling it’s contents out. You would have thought I stabbed someone. The girl next to me had her glass almost to her mouth, but now she sets it down politely. I’m sure they are nice guys.
In my life, I’ve had approximately 200+ men tell me there are roofies in my drink. So, let’s start with the fact that you are cliche and tiresome.
From there, let’s talk about what you just did and what you meant to do. Do you want to show me how fun you are? You want me having sexy private thoughts of you? You want me to feel loose and happy? Maybe laugh so hard I fall to the floor and put your cock in my mouth? What’s your goal here? Because you really seem to be acting against your own interests.
Pro Tip: When women feel safe, they are much more likely to get freaky…like, really freaky.
What you actually just did is bring back very real and dreadful memories, like the time I spent hours searching for a friend who never came back from the bathroom at a concert. The anguish of going home without her.
What do you do? Do you call her mom? The police? Is that what she’s going to want when they are done with her? I’ve sat beside women enduring rape kits and cops who just traumatize them further and for nothing.
What if she doesn’t come home? The previous year, a freshman at my school died because some frat boys served her a lethal dose. I can still see the agony, how it washed across her father’s face as he realized he’d never see her again because some dudes decided their sadistic fun was worth more than her life. How long do you wait?
My friend eventually came home, thank god. Cried in my bed as she pieced together the details of her rape from fragments of memories marred by some unknown poison slipped in her drink. She was glad I hadn’t called her mom.
There are so many stories. They crest inside my head, one after another, like the tides rolling towards shore. The time we realized my designated driver had been dosed, we found a sofa and I sat on her until I was sober enough to get us home. It was a crude but effective move. I wasn’t letting anyone get to her. Not this time.
The night my drink was poisoned, I got lucky. I told my best friend that I was too drunk for only having had one cocktail. I woke up fully clothed, my door locked from the inside. I was alone. My most trusted friend had walked me to the door and heard the latch lock. I was never out of sight. Two other women who had been at that party reported being drugged. One of them was raped. I guess he hedged his bets.
So no, Dude With Unsolicited Shooters, I don’t feel like making all your nasty fantasies come true at the moment. I feel like calling all my girlfriends to check on them. I feel like vomiting, actually.
Some guy I’ve known for years is chatting impolitely at a formal affair. He’s got this super funny rape story that he just needs to tell me. He knows I don’t like the subject, but it’s fun to troll. I tell him to stop, but men like that don’t enjoy imperatives. They want you to use your charm to reinforce their power. Stroke their ego if you want them to ease up on you. He continues, so I walk away.
What impresses me about this moment are the puppy dog eyes, how genuinely hurt he appears, that I would exercise my control over my own feet to walk away. He is not stricken enough to apolygize, though, or to offer me the emotional safety of vowing not to keep pressing that wound. That’s how I know those eyes are a lie, a guilt trip, like tears of a crocodile, just the next step in his emotional manipulation.
Why I’m a Raving Bitch
Out of hundreds, these two episodes stand out like bookends, marking the range of times I’ve been a bitch about it. Well, a bitch in someone’s eyes.
I don’t have the emotional energy to empathically engage with every rando every time, to deal with their defensiveness, their excuses, or worse. Engaging at any level is always a big risk. You don’t know how far they’ll go to assert themselves. I once had a guy buck up like he wanted to hit me because I took my drink to the bathroom with me. “Oh, it’s just a habit of mine,” I protested, truthfully, and changed the subject.
When you know the person, it’s different. When someone is destined to be in your life because of your job, their connection to people you love, or whatever the situation, you might be able to save yourself some heartache if you have that talk. Sometimes we feel strong enough to advocate for ourselves and sometimes not.
The first three times someone I know decides to casually and jovially bring up rape in a social situation, I do try to reason with them: Hey, some of us are trying to enjoy an evening and not relive our many traumatic experiences out of nowhere. It’s really hard to feel safe when, at any moment, someone might decide to go there just for fun.
It also actually makes us less safe. When rapists hear your jolly rape banter, they think we’re all condoning that behavior. It signals to victims that there’s no point coming forward because we don’t care. And while we’re on the subject, when you use it metaphorically, like “I got raped by the IRS last year,” it diminishes the trauma of that crime. All of this reinforces rape culture. It emboldens violent behavior, and puts people at greater risk.
The third time I review this, I’m just being polite. If there is anything inside them that will be moved to compassion by anything I have to say, then they have already heard it twice.
By the fourth time, I become a bitch. And when I say “bitch,” I mean things like asking them to stop and walking away to join another conversation. You know, the type of totally out-of-line things that will make me a target of their rape jokes for the rest of eternity.
They are so much cooler than I am. I am so up tight. My pain is their fun.
Let’s be clear, I am not griping about people genuinely looking for a sympathetic ear or anyone giving proper gravitas to the subject matter. I’m not nagging people for honestly expressing an opinion I disagree with or having earnest dialog. I am talking about people who are getting gratification from bring it up apropos of nothing.
Call A Bully By His Name
It’s not just men who thoughtlessly slap people in the face with callous references to trauma in casual social settings. Somewhere along the line, I’ve surely done it. However, in my life, 100% of people who persisted after the first time I asked for mercy have been men. Maybe they’ve also been victims of assault. Maybe they have their own story. The majority of people on this earth have had something horrible happen to them, but most don’t use it to justify hurting the people around them for their own cruel amusement.
They’re not “edgy;” they’re bullies. At best, we can call the first one a “micro aggression.” At the point where someone has heard your reasons and continues to say these things to you, that is a power trip. That is not ignorance; that is choice. That is someone willfully rubbing your trauma in your face because it delights their own ego. If I had held the conviction of this truth 10 years ago, I would have cut a lot of dangerous people out of my life a lot sooner.
So whoever you are:
You don’t have to laugh. You don’t have to drink that drink. You don’t have to stand there in that conversation. You don’t have to pretend it’s ok.
You don’t have to call it out, either. Take care of yourself. Be safe out there.
