no means no

Sometimes it’s good to ignore reviews. 

Zelia and I see a play, The Long Shrift at my favorite little hole-in-the-wall theater, Rattlestick. 

We both love it.  The writing is provocative and the acting is good.  The critics hate it.

The play is about a squeaky-clean high school boy who has sex with the rich and popular other-side-of-the-tracks prom queen.  He ends up in jail for five years and comes out a hardened, bitter man.  She, too, has had a miserable time of it.

As a mother of a boy, I tell my son more than he wants to hear, if a girl says no, don’t question or doubt her. No means no.  It doesn’t matter if it’s delivered playfully.  Teasingly. Drunkenly. Or any other way.  Just stop whatever it is you are doing and leave.

A good friend of mine from the Midwest has a daughter.  When her daughter was a freshman at a very good liberal arts college, she willingly ended up with a fellow freshman in his dorm room. They both had been drinking.  One thing led do another, as these drunken encounters do.  He went further than she wanted to.  She resisted. He persisted. She reported it to the school as rape, after he and his friends began harassing her.  There was a lengthy review, and the boy was not allowed to finish the school semester (this was in March).  The girl was outraged.  The boy eventually dropped out of school in his junior year and the girl helped the school set in place a better system for reporting and reviewing on-campus sexual abuse.

It’s a tough topic with no easy answers.  Colleges are doing their best to address it, but so much more can be done.  Most rapes that do get reported are of the he-said-she-said kind.  Very difficult to prove.   And no one, understandably, wants to find someone guilty of rape if there is any doubt of his guilt.

Despite what the calendar says, it’s a perfect fall night.  Zelia and I stroll through the West Village and talk of our children (she has a son and daughter, both in college).  Beautiful East 10^th Street near Washington Square is quiet.  No people, only stately townhouses. It reminds us both of a much earlier New York.  The place where Edith Wharton and Henry James lived.  I imagine it as a less complicated time.