Post by Willow on Jun 17, 2016 10:32:56 GMT 9.5
“…we should not create a culture that suggests we learn that rape is wrong through trial and error.”
I flew this week on quite a long flight for a very brief stay in San Francisco and the Apple leadership team’s Keynote at WWD2016, and some fascinating discussion about matters of health and apps with other invited colleagues, and Apple’s in-house health team. The meeting itself was a combination of pageantry as only Apple can do it, and an up-close look at genuinely promising progress, and plans, for health-related offerings. But this column isn’t about that. This column is about the trip there, and the cultural context for an intimate story.
My next seat neighbor on the flight out was a health care professional, so for that and other reasons, conversation between us flowed freely. At some point in the conversation, without any indication we were about to take such a turn, she told me that one of her daughters, an undergraduate student at an Ivy League school, had been raped about a week ago.
I was shocked, and rather taken aback. I conveyed my dismay, and expressed my condolences. As the father of four daughters, the younger two in college now, empathy came readily, and forcefully.
I was struck by the relative lack of emotion in the telling, but presume that had something to do with lingering shock on this mother’s part, and perhaps some manner of coping. There were, inevitably, details to this story that made it unique, but we needn’t get into any of that here. All that really matters is: one more young woman, who happened to be the daughter of my neighbor on a plane, but could have been (or could yet be) my daughter, or yours, was raped.
We are told this happens to one woman in five. I have four daughters. I don’t like the math.
At the telling of this story, I felt my fists clenching. I suspect any father of daughters has that reaction. For the duration of this part of the conversation, my thoughts kept returning to how badly I wanted to hurt the guy that did this, and how irrepressible that urge would be if this had been one of my daughters.
Due to some idiosyncrasies, the father in this case does not know about his daughter’s violation, and may not be told. If he has the same impulses I do, I suppose that might help avoid an act of violence, justified though it would be in my opinion. But I also imagine him finding out years from now, and being devastated both about knowing, and not having known.
I discovered that my plane mate was among the few people still unfamiliar with the Stanford rape case much in the news of late, and that victim’s poignant, written account of her ordeal, which she delivered orally in court. I told her about it, and hoped that those words of dignity and desolation might create a sense of solidarity for both her and her daughter, and empower them together in a direction something like comfort.
The juxtaposition of those two violations, the one now known to us all, the other unknown even to the victim’s father, was deeply compelling. This threat is ubiquitous. It is the story we all know, the common understanding; and the private, jarring surprise in a deceptively innocent dialogue.
I found myself thinking about the obligation of us parents to our daughters, to forewarn, and forearm them. But even more so, as I have reflected before, it made me think of our obligation to sons. There is no way to gloss over the fact that if one in five college women is a victim of sexual assault, a sizable minority of our sons are the perpetrators. If so many of them are failing us, we must in turn be failing them.
We are, perhaps, failing to impress upon them what is inviolate. We are failing, perhaps, to help then know, to their very marrow, the distinction between what we want, and what we have the right to take. Perhaps we talk too little about the urgency of the impulse with which they all will inevitably wrestle, the badgering of biology- and the measure of character in subordinating lust to trust every time.
I have reflected before on the need to raise better sons in order to have safer daughters. This time, I am inclined to go further. We need a better culture.
Even as I was setting off on my brief trip, the news was flooded with coverage of the heinous calamity in Orlando. As I write this, a brave attempt to filibuster for gun control is playing out in the U.S. Senate, led, I am proud to say, by Senator Chris Murphy from my own state. I thank him.
Even as I sort out these thoughts about daughters and sons, violation and vindication, the American Medical Association has pledged its commitment and resources to the cause of sane gun control. Bravo.
Of course, there is still a good chance the forces of gun control will lose this argument, just as it was lost in the aftermath of Newtown. Historically, we always lose this argument.
The relevance here, as our collective empathy extends from Stanford to Orlando, is what we lose to. We lose to might over right. We lose to a form of tyranny.
Tyranny is the imposition of the will of a well-organized minority with power on the majority. A decisive majority of Americans favor gun control measures that cannot be implemented. That a group so often invoking the need to defend against tyranny as their rationale is inclined to perpetrate it so blithely is the very pinnacle of hypocrisy.
That hypocrisy is relevant. The message in it is: take what you want. If you can exploit others and gain at their expense, do.
This same message is propagated every time we dismiss or deny the damage we are doing to our home, this world. Environments are decimated, species go extinct- because we take what we want. It is brutal, but justified, to say that modern culture routinely rapes the very planet for its short term, and short sighted, pleasures. What does it tell our sons, who are watching?
We are surrounded by examples of might making right, or what passes for it. The spectrum of cultural hypocrisy is vast. It extends from a food supply willfully engineered to exploit the vulnerabilities intrinsic to Homo sapien metabolism, and violate public health for the pleasures in corporate profit; to the diverse denials of all inconvenient truths, and the harassment of those who champion their inglorious imperatives; to the glorification of overt lying as a political asset. What dissuades a rapist from an alternative narrative in lieu of contrition, when the fabrication of such alternative narratives is routinely tolerated, and frequently triumphant? Not enough.
I suspect we all like to think that honor and honesty, civility and propriety, respect and restraint, and maybe even something a bit like chivalry are in the mix when we speak of our culture and values, and hail their flag. But we look out daily at the growing collection of evidence to the contrary.
I cheer the brave words of a young woman who would not be the victim twice. But I fear her enemy is bigger than the egotistical delusions of a college swimmer, and the attendant defense team’s persistent assaults by defamatory innuendo. I fear it extends into the intangibles all around us, the persuasions of culture playing out in every shadow.
Can we hope to raise safer daughters, and reliably honorable sons, in a culture inattentive to honor, disparaging of civility, dismissive of propriety and respect? Can we hope to teach our sons that the might to take what they want does not confer the right to do so, in a culture that routinely exemplifies the converse?
The ominous trends and epidemiology of rape suggest that the answers may be no. I have a son, and that is unacceptable. I have four daughters, and I do not like the math.
-fin
David L. Katz
Such an excellent article
I flew this week on quite a long flight for a very brief stay in San Francisco and the Apple leadership team’s Keynote at WWD2016, and some fascinating discussion about matters of health and apps with other invited colleagues, and Apple’s in-house health team. The meeting itself was a combination of pageantry as only Apple can do it, and an up-close look at genuinely promising progress, and plans, for health-related offerings. But this column isn’t about that. This column is about the trip there, and the cultural context for an intimate story.
My next seat neighbor on the flight out was a health care professional, so for that and other reasons, conversation between us flowed freely. At some point in the conversation, without any indication we were about to take such a turn, she told me that one of her daughters, an undergraduate student at an Ivy League school, had been raped about a week ago.
I was shocked, and rather taken aback. I conveyed my dismay, and expressed my condolences. As the father of four daughters, the younger two in college now, empathy came readily, and forcefully.
I was struck by the relative lack of emotion in the telling, but presume that had something to do with lingering shock on this mother’s part, and perhaps some manner of coping. There were, inevitably, details to this story that made it unique, but we needn’t get into any of that here. All that really matters is: one more young woman, who happened to be the daughter of my neighbor on a plane, but could have been (or could yet be) my daughter, or yours, was raped.
We are told this happens to one woman in five. I have four daughters. I don’t like the math.
At the telling of this story, I felt my fists clenching. I suspect any father of daughters has that reaction. For the duration of this part of the conversation, my thoughts kept returning to how badly I wanted to hurt the guy that did this, and how irrepressible that urge would be if this had been one of my daughters.
Due to some idiosyncrasies, the father in this case does not know about his daughter’s violation, and may not be told. If he has the same impulses I do, I suppose that might help avoid an act of violence, justified though it would be in my opinion. But I also imagine him finding out years from now, and being devastated both about knowing, and not having known.
I discovered that my plane mate was among the few people still unfamiliar with the Stanford rape case much in the news of late, and that victim’s poignant, written account of her ordeal, which she delivered orally in court. I told her about it, and hoped that those words of dignity and desolation might create a sense of solidarity for both her and her daughter, and empower them together in a direction something like comfort.
The juxtaposition of those two violations, the one now known to us all, the other unknown even to the victim’s father, was deeply compelling. This threat is ubiquitous. It is the story we all know, the common understanding; and the private, jarring surprise in a deceptively innocent dialogue.
I found myself thinking about the obligation of us parents to our daughters, to forewarn, and forearm them. But even more so, as I have reflected before, it made me think of our obligation to sons. There is no way to gloss over the fact that if one in five college women is a victim of sexual assault, a sizable minority of our sons are the perpetrators. If so many of them are failing us, we must in turn be failing them.
We are, perhaps, failing to impress upon them what is inviolate. We are failing, perhaps, to help then know, to their very marrow, the distinction between what we want, and what we have the right to take. Perhaps we talk too little about the urgency of the impulse with which they all will inevitably wrestle, the badgering of biology- and the measure of character in subordinating lust to trust every time.
I have reflected before on the need to raise better sons in order to have safer daughters. This time, I am inclined to go further. We need a better culture.
Even as I was setting off on my brief trip, the news was flooded with coverage of the heinous calamity in Orlando. As I write this, a brave attempt to filibuster for gun control is playing out in the U.S. Senate, led, I am proud to say, by Senator Chris Murphy from my own state. I thank him.
Even as I sort out these thoughts about daughters and sons, violation and vindication, the American Medical Association has pledged its commitment and resources to the cause of sane gun control. Bravo.
Of course, there is still a good chance the forces of gun control will lose this argument, just as it was lost in the aftermath of Newtown. Historically, we always lose this argument.
The relevance here, as our collective empathy extends from Stanford to Orlando, is what we lose to. We lose to might over right. We lose to a form of tyranny.
Tyranny is the imposition of the will of a well-organized minority with power on the majority. A decisive majority of Americans favor gun control measures that cannot be implemented. That a group so often invoking the need to defend against tyranny as their rationale is inclined to perpetrate it so blithely is the very pinnacle of hypocrisy.
That hypocrisy is relevant. The message in it is: take what you want. If you can exploit others and gain at their expense, do.
This same message is propagated every time we dismiss or deny the damage we are doing to our home, this world. Environments are decimated, species go extinct- because we take what we want. It is brutal, but justified, to say that modern culture routinely rapes the very planet for its short term, and short sighted, pleasures. What does it tell our sons, who are watching?
We are surrounded by examples of might making right, or what passes for it. The spectrum of cultural hypocrisy is vast. It extends from a food supply willfully engineered to exploit the vulnerabilities intrinsic to Homo sapien metabolism, and violate public health for the pleasures in corporate profit; to the diverse denials of all inconvenient truths, and the harassment of those who champion their inglorious imperatives; to the glorification of overt lying as a political asset. What dissuades a rapist from an alternative narrative in lieu of contrition, when the fabrication of such alternative narratives is routinely tolerated, and frequently triumphant? Not enough.
I suspect we all like to think that honor and honesty, civility and propriety, respect and restraint, and maybe even something a bit like chivalry are in the mix when we speak of our culture and values, and hail their flag. But we look out daily at the growing collection of evidence to the contrary.
I cheer the brave words of a young woman who would not be the victim twice. But I fear her enemy is bigger than the egotistical delusions of a college swimmer, and the attendant defense team’s persistent assaults by defamatory innuendo. I fear it extends into the intangibles all around us, the persuasions of culture playing out in every shadow.
Can we hope to raise safer daughters, and reliably honorable sons, in a culture inattentive to honor, disparaging of civility, dismissive of propriety and respect? Can we hope to teach our sons that the might to take what they want does not confer the right to do so, in a culture that routinely exemplifies the converse?
The ominous trends and epidemiology of rape suggest that the answers may be no. I have a son, and that is unacceptable. I have four daughters, and I do not like the math.
-fin
David L. Katz
Such an excellent article