I'm very lucky these days. It's been a long time since any of the women I know and care most about have faced violent hate crimes with nothing to do with sex. It seemed as though it was a weekly event in my college days. Sometimes, there were a few degrees of separation but there always seemed to be a woman I knew well suffering from violence or the long aftermath. If you don't limit it to physical violence, it was an everyday event in truth. There were women all around me who believed that they needed to submit to sex in order to be in a relationship. If you want to expand it to a verbal level, I was one of the tens of millions of men who used words like bitch on a regular basis though usually not at someone. That just means they weren't in the room so I guess that doesn't count for much.
Honestly, I have to admit that bitch doesn't strike me as a particularly offensive word even when I've meant it to be hurtful. Like the classic f-bomb, it tends to be so divorced from its literal meaning that I hardly consider its meaning at all. If I've been offended by a man, I'm likely to refer to said person as an asshole. If the offensive person is a woman, I'm more likely to say bitch. For much of my life, women provided more of my emotional trauma than men did though that was likely because I preferred the company of women. Let me be clear and state that I'm not referring to sexual company of any sort. I'm what I might jokingly call a mono-sexual meaning that I'm devoted to my wife and she's the only person I've ever seriously thought of as a sexual partner.
Thus, the supposed motivations of the California mass murderer seem like something that belong on another planet. If we're going to talk about good old Earth, I've been deluding myself for a long time that such misogyny is limited to other cultures like jihadist type Islamist groups. (If I've misused either religious term, I apologize and welcome gentle corrections.) I remember my college days when it seemed that nearly everyone who went out did so find an attractive girl drunk enough to want to go home with him. It used to bother me that this was considered OK as long as no one got AIDS or got pregnant. Most of my friends were women yet there were few objections toward any other effects this behavior might have.
I do not understand anyone who feels a need to "get laid." I understand the desire and the pleasure involved but only at the highest levels of commitment. I believed this was related to my birth defect. If I had proper bladder and bowel control with nothing deformed, I believed that I might have tried to join the hook up culture. Of course, serious history students try to avoid wasting time on counterfactuals. (What if Hitler had been killed in the First World War?) That's how seriously I take the concept of being born normal. If being born normal meant that I would need sex to see myself as a man, I guess I'm glad of spina bifida.
If I asked a woman out, it was because I wanted to spend time with her and that was time with our clothes on. As often as not, I was as interested in the suggested activity as I was the company. I'm ashamed that I felt anger about the series of rejections that marked the first 20 years of my life but I think I was being rejected by a lot of young women who thought I wanted more than I did. There was one time when a woman made it very clear that she might just be sexually available for the asking and this struck me as a bad idea despite all the alcohol we'd consumed. How could I trust her that much when we barely knew each other? The main thing that kept me from running away was the fact that we were in my room! Thankfully, she closed the door on the subject quickly.
People talk about masculine culture and blame it for sexual violence but I don't know. I'm far from an expert on the subject but the closest thing I've had to a big brother in my lifetime was a self described "male whore." He was heterosexual and liked sex with willing women so much that he seemed to be involved with a lot of them. He never seemed to believe that they were anything but what he would be if he were a woman. At the same time, he respected my decision to wait for the right woman and never so much as teased me about it. He also respected my views on violence in general and showed me how to avoid looking like a victim without having to fight anyone. I associate masculine culture with him though he is likely a minority of one among the "manly men." I know other perfectly decent men but they would never describe themselves as being terribly masculine.
I never touched anyone without permission even when I was touch deprived enough to enjoy sitting in an over-occupied car or bumping into someone in the hallway. No, I'm not contradicting myself because I let people bump into me and the car thing was mutual crowding. It was nothing sexual but simple touch is impossibly important for human beings.
I want to know what it is that we need to do to make college campus safe for women and everyone else who suffers. Do we need to eliminate the culture of freedom that allows young men and women to flaunt what few rules there are and go from co-education to near cohabitation? I hope not. I remember and treasure so many late night and early morning conversations that I shared with women friends. If it would have kept more of my friends safe, I guess we could have talked on the phone. What do we need to do to help keep women safe?
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