My experience with a "potential rapist."

[Orrex]

Last edited Sun Jan 11, 2015, 09:23 PM - Edit history (1)

I ran track in high school. In my senior year I was in pretty good shape but was of slight build and didn't have much power in my upper body. A good friend of mine graduated a year earlier. She excelled in the "strength" events--shot put, discuss and javelin—and in fact held the school's records in each. She was considerably overweight and not conventionally attractive. She was also shy and a bit of a geek, which is part of why we were friends.

While on a visit home from college, she came to the school to watch the track team practicing, and afterward she offered to give me a ride home in her VW Bug. We stopped by McDonalds and drove to some back road to chat and catch up.

During that conversation she lamented that she had trouble making friends, that she had never kissed a guy, and that she didn't understand why guys didn't give her a chance even though she was kind and funny and smart. She expressed feelings of profound loneliness, and she confessed that she felt closer to me than to any other guy.

She paused and looked away for a moment, and in that moment I had an ugly and entirely unfair thought: she out-massed me by at least 70 pounds, and she was much stronger than I was. If she had tried to force herself on me, I absolutely wouldn't have been able to stop her.

Let me stress that she hated violence and was as gentle a person as you could hope to meet. I had no reason to think that she would ever try to harm me in any way, nor has she ever done so. I was ashamed even to think of it, and she would have been deeply hurt if I'd revealed it to her.

Still, I have to admit that I thought of it.

The experience was very brief, lasting just a few seconds, but it utterly transformed my thinking in a way that lingers to this day. I don't pretend to know how a woman feels when a strange man passes too closely on a dark sidewalk, or when a guy makes unwelcome physical contact or stands too near or leers in a way that makes her uncomfortable. Certainly I don't know what it's like to be constantly aware of potential threats in seemingly innocuous settings.

But for a moment I felt what I believe was a similar (though lesser) anxiety, and I think that it helps me understand why men should quit whining about the term "potential rapist." It's not a commentary on the individual male as much as it's a reasonable description of the awareness of real possible danger.[hr]