Campus Correspondence : Better Than Ignorance, but No Suit of Armor : Sexual Fears: Our generation has words for ‘date rape’ and other dangers. But knowledge doesn’t confer enough power to keep us safe.
I was walking down a quiet street on the USC campus at sunset when a white van drove up to the crosswalk. I heard a voice, the words unclear, coming from the vehicle. As I kept walking, the van rounded the corner and drove very slowly alongside me. The driver was on my right. I heard him say, “Hey, girl!” and “What’s the matter, honey, don’t you talk to strangers?”
I kept walking. Head tall. Chest out. Shoulders back. Not breathing too well for all that.
“Look at you. Walking like you don’t even notice.”
I was just about to swear, just about to blow my cool, and then maybe run, when he said, “Jennifer, aren’t you even gonna say hello?”
I looked at the driver--one of my classmates from last semester. My cheeks burned. But I was embarrassed only for a moment; then told him how well-trained I was by my self-defense class.
The instructor had warned us never to let strangers talk us into stopping in place--not to read maps, not to tell them the time, not to help them check their tires to see if they were flat. “Because that’s exactly when the guy’s accomplice comes running up behind you and stuffs you into a car,” she said.
As I read the accounts of the recent serial murders at the University of Florida in Gainesville, I wonder if the women there are also walking faster, trying hard not to run in the face of their terror.
Last year, a college classmate was raped by an intruder in her apartment in the middle of the afternoon. As she lay bound in her bed (with the television blaring in the next room while the rapist packed up her stereo), she said that a feeling beyond panic came over her.
She worked on her ropes until they loosened, ran into the street and pounded on three doors before someone let her in.
I wanted to ask my self-defense instructor, “What kind of hints do you have for women watching TV in their bedrooms?”
I worry more about rape than my mother did at my age. I worry about it at night, during the day, at home, on the street, in the near-empty campus buildings.
My mother didn’t worry about living alone--she was married with two children by the time she was my age. She didn’t worry about living in the city; it might as well have been the suburbs in those days, for all the difference in the crime rates.
I worked last semester in Pasadena, in a neighborhood that reminds me of where I grew up. I liked it. I thought it was safe. Then I read in the paper that a woman was raped at 3:30 p.m. in the underground garage of the mall there. The same week, another woman was shoved into her car and raped at 5 p.m. in the parking lot of the town’s library.
So maybe I’m more afraid than my mother was because I know more than she did. I can pick up the paper most days and read an account of an assault, whether it’s splashed across the front page of national papers, as in the Central Park jogger case, or a few lines in the police blotter of the local weekly--testimony to the danger that is everywhere.
When my mother was in school, there were no words for “date rape.” These days college women are more likely to be assaulted by someone they meet at a dance or party than by a bogyman lurking outside their dorm.
In a recent study by UCLA psychologist Neil Malamuth, about 50% of men said they would force a woman to have sex against her will, if they knew they wouldn’t be caught. But when asked if they would rape a woman if they knew they wouldn’t be caught, only 15% said they would. That’s what date rape’s all about; she calls it rape, he calls it a golden opportunity.
But just because my mother’s generation didn’t have words for date rape doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Along with the increased media attention to rape has come a change in our awareness of the whole range of violence against women--violence that has always been with us. We just have new ways to describe it.
To compare my fear and sense of vulnerability to how my mother felt at my age is nearly impossible because rape was a dirty secret back then. And, as the UCLA study shows, some aspects of rape are still dirty secrets.
A more valid comparison would be between women like me, born after women’s liberation, and the children of blacks who fought for civil-rights laws. We’re the generation after the struggle; we were supposed to be born feeling empowered, entitled. But instead of being at the vanguard of a new era, we’re idling in an intermediate stage.
Like blacks in the post-civil-rights South, we know that in some ways our new-found power is not all it looks to be. So we’re left with our awareness. Better than the naked vulnerability of an earlier generation, but no suit of armor, either.
And I’m left with the day-to-day question: Where am I safe? Malls and libraries in the middle of the afternoon are apparently more risky than I thought. When am I safe at home? Should I get a dog, a security system, another lock?
Should I go back to the self-defense class again this semester, to that roomful of scared-looking young women, and brush up on my crotch-punching and blocking techniques?
Will I be able to scream if I have to? Our self-defense instructor told us to imagine as we scream and fight with our attackers that we’re protecting a child--then we’ll be more angry than terrified.
She also told us not to scream “Help!” but to scream a man’s name. The attacker will think “our man” is right around the corner, or just inside our front door, ready to come save us from the bad guy.
How ironic--I’m supposed to pretend I’m protecting my child and waiting for Superman to come swooping down to save me. This instructor must have me confused with my mother.
