A chasm separates invitation, violation

By Jim O’Neal
Staff writer

I first recognized my unwanted ability to terrify on my way to a class at Saint Louis University. It was snowing heavily, and where sidewalks had been there were now just narrow trenches.
A woman ahead of me was having trouble negotiating our trench, and each time one of her soles skidded she glanced back at my feet. Fearing my tempo had made me seem pushy, I slowed and dropped back.
After we’d walked a few more yards, she stopped suddenly, half-turned, and in a tight, quivering voice pleaded, “Please go around me.”
I obliged, puzzled. Only after I’d passed did it occur to me that she had feared I was stalking her. Something that had been in the back of my mind had been foremost in hers: There had been two rapes on campus that winter, and no suspect had been caught.
I felt empathy with the distress that so darkened the snowy day through which this woman unsteadily stepped, but I also felt vaguely indignant. Seeing myself as a gentle man, I did not feel I deserved to walk in the hot glare of suspicion.
The men among you know that feeling.
It’s what you feel when you ask an acquaintance for her number and, though she’s interested in getting to know you, she gives you her e-mail address instead.
It’s what you feel when a woman who was about to leave her car instead locks the door and sits tight until you’re past.
It feels as if you’re wearing a sandwich board that says, “Potential rapist.”
We don’t fault women for employing security precautions; hell, we teach our daughters to do those things. It’s just irksome to be perceived as threatening.
Men don’t talk about this feeling around women because it’s such a petty thing next to the agonies of assault. It would be like complaining to wheelchair users about the inconvenience caused by handicapped parking spaces. But it’s there all the same, along with a certain shame by association.
I felt those feelings pointedly while crossing the University of Iowa Pentacrest on a recent Monday. I encountered an exhibit of T-shirts created by survivors of violence against women. The images and words on the shirts voiced woundedness, rage, contempt.
A recording played chilling sounds: A gong rang every 10 seconds to signify the rate at which women are battered in the United States, and a whistle blew once a minute to signify the frequency of reported rapes.
It was a painful event to take in, and my manhood made it painful in a peculiar way, because all the women behind all those shirts and whistles were victims of people like me.
It hardly surprised me that I was the only man viewing the exhibit for the 10 minutes I was there. My people, most of whom are innocent, recoil from the hot glare. We cringe when a gong resonates with a blow struck by one of ours.
But getting defensive and tuning out the fear and fury we don’t merit as individuals can keep us from hearing a message that we, the unviolent members of a far too violent clan, need to hear.
Rape is a wrenching trauma. It ignites wildfires of fear, guilt and shame. It shatters sleep and peace of mind. It spoils the sweetness of touch.
To come closer to understanding that, men must employ a bit of imagination, because a woman’s body is receptive, and therefore vulnerable, in a way we men can only imagine.
I know what it means to open my heart to a lover, but I don’t know what it means to invite another person to enter my body. Imagining what that’s like makes me appreciate what an honor, and what a delicate gift, such an invitation is.
That’s why I’m perturbed by those public service announcements in which celebrities spell out the difference between ardor and rape. I think: What blockhead doesn’t get this?
Any man who perceives the difference between invitation and violation as a fine line is a menace and should drown himself before he causes tragedy. Because it’s not a line at all: It’s a chasm.
But it’s a chasm that someone leaps across every 46 seconds in our country, and every person who makes that horrible leap is a member of my tribe.
Like it or not, men, that throws some responsibility onto our shoulders. The drives of a rapist – sexual frustration, unfocused rage, a need to overcome a feeling of powerlessness – are forged into an act of atrocity amid a dominating culture that we help create.
We create it when we speak of women as if they were lumber to be nailed or drilled.
We create it when we boast of a sexual encounter, real or fictional, as a conquest.
We create it when we endorse the code that says that most intimate of invitations is unnecessary because marriage or an evening on the town or a perception of “come hither” signals bestows a right to enter a woman’s body.
We create it when we treat women as means to get pleasure or to elevate our pride rather than as persons whose rights and needs are on a perfect par with ours.
Women, including our wives and mothers, our sisters and daughters, deserve to live in a society in which their inviolability is held sacred.
Building such a world is largely our responsibility. Because those of us who have the power to leap across that terrible chasm have the duty to teach our brothers and sons not to.

Jim O’Neal is a copy and design editor at The Gazette. He can be reached at jimo@fyiowa.com

This column ran in The Gazette of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, Iowa, on April 30, 2000.