The Electron Pencil

Old Hat, New Head

The very sophisticated barista at the Pencil back office (AKA Soma Coffee) sent me reeling back to my college years by playing Kate Bush this AM.

Kate Bush, Then & Now

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Now, Kate Bush was viewed by the hip college intelligentsia (your humble correspondent, for one) as the cat’s miao some 34 years ago. That, my babies, is antico. Please consult your Italian-English dictionary. Natch, it’s not just emo-arty-baroque pop princesses who are still spun by the youth of this holy land these days. Had the rather sensitive-looking barista been, say, an aficionado of lunkhead rock (as remote a possibility as Michelle Bachmann attending her current husband’s inevitable gay marriage) he might have been playing, oh, Blue Öyster Cult’s Godzilla.

To fully grasp this phenomenon, one must consider whom I might have been listening to in those heady, smoke- and acid-filled afternoons spent lolling about in the University of Illinois-Chicago’s A. Montgomery Ward Student Lounge. In the year 1980, it follows, I’d have had to be grooving to the strains of Kay Kyser and His Orchestra or, IDK, something like  I Can’t Begin to Tell You, a duet by Bing Crosby and Carmen Cavallaro. Need I point out that I was doing no such grooving?

Kay Kyser’s Kollege Of Musical Knowledge

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I know of countless parent-child combos who attend rock concerts together, with the younger halves of those unlikely pairings not cringing in deathly embarrassment. My brother and his sons catch Steely Dan every time that act hits the Chi. area. My friends Kim (a mom) and Harmony (her issue) recently took in the Arrowsmith show up in Indy.

I would have run away from home and sold myself into white slavery had my parents suggested we all attend a Perry Como show at the Auditorium Theater.

Who knows? Perhaps the generation gap has become a crack in the sidewalk.

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Rape

Scroll through this strip. It’s called Trigger Warning: Breakfast. It’s raw. It’s heartfelt. It’s powerful.

Panel From “Trigger Warning: Breakfast”

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Its first line is “The morning after I was raped, I made my rapist breakfast.”

It is, therefore, puzzling.

I don’t get it. And, considering the fact that I’m more feminist-y than even half the women I know, I’m going to suppose 99.9 percent of my gender confreres don’t get it either. So we need help.

Help us understand this.

Help us understand why a woman who considers herself raped would make the perpetrator breakfast.

Help us understand why she wouldn’t plunge a steak knife into his heart.

In April, Philadelphia magazine ran a piece about campus rape that included a story told by a former Swarthmore College student who says she was raped by a man in her dorm room. Here are some details about the rape: she and the man had been lovers for several months but had recently agreed (she thought) to be just friends; he fell asleep on her bed; she changed into her pajamas and laid down next to him; he woke up and became frisky; she told him she wasn’t interested in sex; he ignored her and carried on. Here, let’s let her finish the story:

“I basically said, ‘No, I don’t want to have sex with you.’ And then he said, ‘Okay, that’s fine’ and stopped,” Sendrow told me. “And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.”

The woman considers what happened to have been a crime. A crime she did not report for a month and a half.

I understand why a woman would be loath to report a rape, especially on campus. The man whom the woman says raped her was a frat boy. The person she eventually reported the rape to was a frat brother. When she told the person about the rape, he was aghast that “such a good guy” would do such a thing.

For years, accusers have been battered in rape trials. Tens, hell, hundreds of thousands of them have been called sluts, flirts, opportunists, drunks, whores, man-haters, reckless idiots, and even the Devil in courts of law. No defense attorney calls a homeowner the Devil himself when he appears in court for the trial of someone who, allegedly, broke into his home and stole the family jewels.

Every Rape Victim In Every Court Of Law

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So, I’m not unaware of how the legal system and society winks at rapists. For far too long, we’ve considered the only real victims of rape to be husbands whose wives were so molested or parents whose teenaged daughters had been assaulted. In other words, rape has been officially viewed as a property crime. And the property in question has never really been the vagina, the mouth, or the anus of the true victim. Nor has the true victim’s dignity, sanity, or physical health been of much concern to the courts.

Until more women are elected as legislators, this take on rape will continue to be predominant.

Now that my cred has been established, I ask loyal female Pencillistas to come forward and explain something to me. I want to know.

I want to know why the Swarthmore College woman continued sleeping in the same bed until morning with a man she says raped her the night before. I want to know why she didn’t tell him to go fuck himself when he continued to press for sex after she’d said no.

I want to know why the earlier-mentioned woman didn’t add arsenic to her former boyfriend’s eggs.

In each case, the upshot might have been a fight. So be it. I want to know why the women elected to avoid a fight at the cost of their future sanity and self-regard.

Teach me.

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