Letters to the Editor
Christopher1988
Published Letters: 681 Editor's Choice: 46
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Mwise,
[Read the article: Katie Roiphe's morning after]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So why is it that I've never heard male boss says to his male underling "if you want to get ahead in this company, you need to give me head?" but I've had that said to me.
One summer I worked at a chain bookstore. All the managers were women. Almost all the clerks were cute young boys of about senior high school age. They were regularly made uncomfortable by the women's comments (trying to understand what they did wrong at a particular task while the manager said, slowly, after a pause, "Do you know how cute you are?"). Never promoted, always sexually targetted, visibly uncomfortable about having to be alone with one of the managers. Fortunately, I was a few years older (and perhaps not as cute) so they didn't try to pull that shit on me. I guarantee you, I would have filed a sexual harrassment charge and made the situation very embarrassing for what is still one of the most famous chains in the country.
So the reason you've never heard a boss ask a male employee for head is because these invitations aren't announced over the intercom. And the men aren't likely to acknowledge the conversation occurred (a man is much, much more inhibited about admitting to such situations than women—and this is especially true if, as in the situated you sited, the person agressively coming on and holding power over him is another man). Do not assume that only women have this problem. Or that it is a sign of what men do to women, never what women due to men.
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--Anonymous “but Roiphe likes sex”
[Read the article: Katie Roiphe's morning after]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was also in college when Roiphe's book came out. I did not know anyone who had filed rape charges, yet I knew many who had been in a questionable position to consent to sex, and many who had bad, awful sex. Who were all these recruits taking down those boys because they were shamed by their own actions?
Well, then you went to one kind of college. You didn’t attend, or apparently hear about, places like Brown, where if a man touched a woman (not in a particular place, simply touched her) she could bring him up on charges of rape?
What I did see is that we couldn't go out at night alone, even for a run (in my small southern college town girls disappeared, they were not just raped),
Sounds like the particulars of your college. When I was at De Paul, the women would not go out late at night, or early in the morning, alone. Duh! It was the middle of downtown Chicago! As a man (or boy, considering my age and maturity) I wouldn’t do that very often, either, and even then just to a safe location like another dorm or the local greasy spoon.
and if you got a male escort better not be drunk or you might just be consenting to something else in return?
Well, yes, I think if you choose to let someone bigger than you, who is there because he is stronger than you (if you were as strong, you wouldn’t need the escort), then you’d best not choose someone whose personality you don’t know, especially if said person is not in a rational state of mind. On the other hand, I suspect there were many decent guys who would have escorted you home and, however drunk they were, would never have attacked you.
The logic is crazy. Men can get drunk without being violated by women.
This is the problem with feminism of a certain stripe. It rails against things that are useless to rail against and picks its battles poorly. This is SOOO indicative of what Roiphe is/was railling against.
There’s no logic, there’s only physical reality. Few women are big enough to hurt a man when they are drunk, but men are generally stronger than women, and if there’s a lot of drinking you’ve got a good shot at being at a frat party where the guys are in superb shape due to football, rugby, the gym, etc. So know the man you’re with.
And futhermore, this scenario ignores that lots of guys and girls meet up, and have sex, and it isn't rape. Rape is a brutal crime. It should always be reported. But what Roiphe was talking about what a state of hysteria where everyone was on guard about rape, but the situations she and her friends were finding themselves in were not of that nature (famously, she talked about being more afraid of being attacked by the geese on campus than any college boy). She was talking about a McCartyesque hysteria in which, rather than a Commie under every bed, there was a rapist on top of it.
Many campuses at the time were setting up guidelines under which waking up the next morning and finding you weren't happy with the choice made you the victim of rape. And the cases didn't go to court (where they should have) but school tribunals with no legal authority, whatsoever. That was the reality on many college campuses.
By the way, in terms of having to worry about the physcial inequality that makes going off alone with a man potentially troubling, men make these choices all the time: Who's a threat to me? Where is a threat to me? Can I stand up to that threat? Do I have to find a way to avoid it?
Really, it's part of life. For both sexes.