Having a friend who raped a girl when he was a teenager, I can say that yes, they do go on, and quite possibly it affects them, but you tend to justify it in your mind, and get over it. I was drinking too much, It’s not like me, Everyone else was doing it, etc…
But whether now or later, it will catch up to them.
And even better, one can always casually drop that event into conversation later with the fellows. Wasn’t that funny, way back when? I know that’s an evil evil thing to think about, but if I truly hated the person I wouldn’t be able to resist.
How…how the [Pit word] can you be the only one who saw that? No, I’m not questioning your account; I’m just at a loss to understand how the others could not see that.
Or worse—enjoy it.
**
And, as I pointed out in one of the K-b- Bry-nt threads, some guys truly believe that every hetero woman on earth wants to get with them.
But, try as I might, I cannot fathom the mindset of the guy who said “Bitch wants it.” He saw the young woman struggle against Blotto. He heard her cries. Did he need Louise to stick the gun in his face and tell him, “When a woman’s cryin’ like that…she isn’t havin’ any fun!”?
**
True. As someone pointed out upthread, some of the guys were probably afraid to lose face by not appearing to relish the experience.
You know, if it makes any difference, there might have been a few who couldn’t perform that night either.
God almighty.
:::silent prayer for Sherrie/Shellie:::
Well… I have cats.
One cat, Bunny, firmly believes she is the dominant cat in the house, despite the fact that Buffy is twice her size.
Occasionally, she will dispute a position, or a point of parliamentary procedure with Buffy, who will then knock her silly.
What does she do? She promptly goes and finds one of the other cats, and bites them on the butt.
The other cat is bewildered as to why Bunny has walked up and attacked them.
I could tell you why. But you already know. She’s takin’ out her frustrations. It’s a pecking order thing, a way of imposing dominance and venting bad feelings.
Humans aren’t supposed to do this to each other; it’s generally considered “wrong.” But we do, and in some contexts, it’s not even considered a breach of the peace.
In the town I grew up in, I saw a man beat the crap out of his son, once, because his son ran from a fight with three older boys. He wanted his son to be “tough,” and gave his son an option: get beat up with honor, or get beat up by your old man.
Helluva choice, I thought.
That same man – I’ll call him George – did not treat his wife very well. Saw him slap her stupid, once. The fact that he did so in public, where I could see this, says a lot about the guy, I think.
This also had something to do with “tough,” I think. Y’see, you can’t be “tough” if you’re going to be worrying about what other people feel and think. You do have to worry about the opinions of other “tough” guys, but everyone else is pretty much dispensable. Empathy is a liability.
And when you’re a kid, it’s pretty easy to buy into this shit. Particularly if it’s your old man telling you “that’s how the world works.” George’s son, “Jim”, was at the party in question.
And so it goes. At least, that’s the only way I can rationalize how that one guy at the party seemed to think and behave. He was a “tough guy,” and everyone knew it, knock you stupid as soon as look at you, and by ghod, HE was gonna “get some,” and who’s with me?
Instant mob.
Particularly when he’s the oldest, toughest guy there, and everyone else is young, drunk, and horny… and easily led.
It’s always easier to participate in anything “wrong” if you’ve got company. That’s why there are laws against conspiracy.
I guess I’m a wuss. I don’t have what it takes, then or now, to torture someone who’s never done me wrong.
I think, though, that I should mention some of the facts I do have, even if they don’t have much to do with Sherrie.
George’s wife left him around the time I graduated high school. Lot of people wondered why she took so long. His daughter, who was a teenager by then, supposedly told him to his face that she didn’t wanna see him again until his funeral, and even then, only to piss on his grave.
Don’t know what happened to his son. I’d like to think he broke his programming, though. And I do wonder, occasionally, if he thinks about what he did that night.
You know, there was a girl in my high school who was known as the classic “easy lay.” We all snickered at her, girls, too, because she was weird and her mother was really, REALLY weird. (Dressed like June Cleaver, down to the pearls – in the '70s – and taught her Sunday School classes that the garden of Eden was really located in South Carolina. Huh?)
I remember once hearing about how Debbie had taken on the whole football team the night before. We all snickered about it.
I’ve often wondered if (a) it really happened, but now I’ll always be wondering if it did happen, was it Debbie taking on the whole football team – or the whole football team taking on Debbie?
I can verify that in those days, as Wang-Ka points out, “no means no” wasn’t even on the radar over the horizon. And if a girl got raped, she probably asked for it. And “boys will be boys.”
Thanks for making me rethink some of my own peripheral youthful stupidness, Wang-Ka.
Thank you for sharing your story, Wang-Ka; it’s beautifully written, visceral and immediate. I’m quite certain that it will touch many lives when you’re ready. And I particularly value the ways you’ve discussed your ambivalence about yourself and your peers - that alone will open many doors with kids, IMHO.
We’re the same age. I remember when the perception of rape started to change - I’d bet that, even if she had gone to the police, they wouldn’t have believed her. Particularly when athletes were involved, particularly in a small, rural town.
That there is a mentality in which it could be expected that one should participate in a gang rape — that such a mentality exists — is beyond bizarre, beyond imagining. I guess I live a sheltered life.
Teenage boys are weird creatures, folks. Believe me. I was one, and now I deal with them.
If there are no appropriate role models for them, they will go out and find some. And sometimes, they make some pretty poor choices. This is how street gangs get started.
Wang-Ka, thanks for having the courage to tell your story. You might have been able to do something (call the cops or your own father or another responsible adult while the assault was occuring), but you were a kid. Now, however, you’re a man - a man who has chosen to make his life’s work teaching young people.
You owe it to Sherry to speak up now. Stand in front of your class and tell this just as you did here. Sure, the kids will look bored, maybe even snicker, but I promise at least one - that girl you overheard, or her friend, or another decent young man who wants to be one of the tough guys - will hear you. You can change a life, possibly save one, by telling your story.
You owe it to Sherry, and to the scared, helpless kid you once were.
Wang-Ka linked to this in a Pit thread, but it hasn’t really been out of my mind since I read it. So I hope no one minds my bumping it to make a couple of remarks.
Reading between the lines, I can see how the Jackass Squad must have justified their actions, consciously or subconsciously. Sherrie had too much power for a female: the power to command attention. Something had to be done about that; she had to be shown her place.
I love how no one ever questioned the morality of the guys. No, it was Sherrie who was a slut for being the person they had “sex” with; nothing unbecoming about their behavior, even if she had been willing.
Wang-Ka, you said in the preamble to the OP that you thought women might find this “offensive”. Au contraire, mon frere. I am the exact opposite of offended to find that there’s at least one man* who could be in this situation and still not succumb to the herd mentality. Disturbing it was, but not offensive.
Have you scheduled that assembly yet? Only partly kidding; I know you have to establish yourself in the school district before you can do anything like that. But I do hope you tell this story at large to some impressionable teens. More than once, if at all possible.
*yes, I’m sure there are others, but one rarely hears from them
Been three months since I posted this story.
It really used to itch at me. It wasn’t something I talked about much, or thought about, because it BUGGED me. As long as I put it away and didn’t THINK about it, it was okay.
The last time I really took it out and looked at it was when I told it to my daughter. She was leaving home to go to college, and I needed to tell her that story. Can’t say it was one of the more pleasant father-daughter experiences we’ve ever had, but I felt it needed to happen.
…and when I posted the story here, it took a lot out of me to commit the words to paper, so to speak. Yeah, I didn’t wanna. I REALLY didn’t wanna go back and do that night over again.
But after that stupid friggin’ conversation between those two teenage girls in that class that day, I felt like I had to. Had to get it out where I could edit, cut, paste, and turn the thing into a weapon, you know? Or a tool. Or something useful, as opposed to something to be ashamed of. Someplace out where it could could be read, and do some good.
I was a little shaky when I finally hit the SUBMIT REPLY button.
Y’know what? Rereading it now doesn’t bother me at all. Sure, it’s visceral… but it doesn’t tie my gut in a knot, the way it used to when I took it out and thought about it. It’s like I finally got all that out of my system, and dumped it all here, instead of inside me.
So now YOU all get to deal with it.
And yes, Rilch, the time is coming. When I wrote this, I was beginning my student teaching semester. Now I’ve completed that semester, and have landed a job.
Teaching freshmen.
Master Wang-Ka:
I read this when it was originally posted and was reminded of it again when it was bumped. I just wanted to let you know that I thought it was one of the most striking and moving things I have ever seen posted on these boards. Regardless of whatever minor changes you may have made to the end in terms of artistic license, it rings with TRUTH. I feel badly for both you and for Shellie/Sherrie.
Although this is clearly neither mundane nor pointless, thank you for sharing with us. I’ve printed it out and, if you don’t mind, plan to share it with my six month old daughter when she reaches a suitable age.
I don’t know how I missed this the first time around.
Master Wang-Ka - You may no longer find it visceral. I am still shaking. The OP is one of the finest - and strongest - I have read, here or elsewhere.
Thank you for sharing.
And I dare say there are more than a few young people here reading your message. Hopefully, you may have already helped someone out there, without even knowing it.
You could have not changed the outcome. You did the right thing - the only thing you could have done - by refusing to participate. And you are doing the right thing again - by sharing your experience.
Dani
Master Wang-Ka,
There’s precious little I can say here that hasn’t already been said. Still, as I read this I couldn’t help but think how perfectly this could be made into a short story for a publication like Reader’s Digest. I’ve seen them do stories like this before. Perhaps if they got this they would be willing to publish it. If nothing else, it might get to someone and change their thinking just a bit.
I’d like to think that if I were in that situation, they would have to kill me to stop me from trying to help that girl. I can only hope that if push came to shove, I’d have the courage of my convictions.
Master Wang-Ka, I didn’t see this thread when it first got posted. But, let me tell you that even if it’s three months old or so, it still hit me hard. And a story like that should. . .
Even if that story still bugs you, keep in mind that this board and your thread may be read by thousands, and out of those thousands of people, you may have prevented just one of them from falling into this.
It also reminds me of the time that my Mom told me my sister was “attacked”. Me, being a guy am thinking, ‘What, someone took a swing at her?’. “Mom, whaddya mean ‘attacked’?” It took her a couple of dodges and euphemisms before I understood she wasn’t militarily attacked . . .
. . . and to this day, my dear mother will not tell me the name of who attacked her. She knows I would act on it the day he would be released from jail.
Master Wang-Ka, I thank you for posting this.
Tripler
Thank you. Sincerely.
Well… that’s one of the reasons I put it here: for it to be seen.
My experience with teeners is that the LAST thing you wanna do, if you want them to absorb information and act on it, is to PREACH at them.
Teeners do NOT want to hear that you know something important and wish to pass this information on to them. Not unless it’s about a dollar sale at Hot Topic, or how to instantly hypnotize women into having sex with you, or something major like that.
And even then, you’ve got to keep it short. You are, after all, a lumbering obsolete creature, one of our Ancient Ancestors, only slightly less ancient than the dinosaurs, and nearly as extinct, as far as relevance and coolness go.
…so if I’m gonna slip the message through… I find that I have to begin with hooking their attention, and then I either have to go with utter, smooth subtlety…
…or hand grenades.
I’d like to think this one was a little of both…
I read this the first time, but I forgot about it.
You know, if it’s any consolation, maybe for Shellie, knowing that at least one person tried to stop things-even though he didn’t succeed-might give her comfort. I know that’s a reach, but…
May I make a suggestion? Go for the hand grenades - it wasn’t all that long ago that I was a high school student, and I never saw subtlety have much of an effect on most high school students. (Of course, maybe it did have an effect but was so subtle I missed it - but let’s accept for the sake of argument that this is not the case.)
If you were to give a lecture on this subject, I would suggest keeping it under twenty minutes and hitting on these four points over and over again:
1.) Rape of any sort is torture. Pure and simple. It is no more acceptable to have sex with a woman without her explicity and non-intoxicated consent than it is to stretch a man on the rack.
2.) Rapists are pussies - I would suggest using that language, or something similarly strong, if you think you can do it in a context that won’t simply provoke laughter. Don’t pull this punch - rapists are pussies. A real man isn’t such a sadistic fuck that he would ever think he needs or wants to rape someone. Rapists are disgusting.
3.) Rape will land you in prison for a long, long time. DNA evidence, victim testimony, witnesses - there is no such thing as the perfect crime, and no rape can come even remotely close. If you committ rape, you will be caught. If you are caught, you will go to prison. If you go to prison, your entire life is ruined. Forever. This isn’t the sort of thing you come back from. (Don’t know if this is entirely true - the certainty of conviction or the degree to which prison ruins one’s life. Doesn’t matter - it can be made to sound convincing.)
4.) Women must take precautions against date rape. This is where you can borrow from the “driver’s ed” school of education, which asserts that effective education is horrific. If you have videos of women speaking about being date-raped, use them - if you can get someone to actually speak in person, even better.
I’m sure you’ve already thought of all this, but I thought it might be helpful to type this thing up. If nothing else, it was an interesting exercise.
Master Wang-Ka, you are going to be one of the truly good teachers. Thank you for that.
I also missed this the first time around. I found it as moving as did everyone else. What I wanted to say though was that I shared the story with my 17 year old son. I kind of cherry pick the stuff from this board I let my family see – they all know that this is “my place” and don’t intrude unless I invite them. Anyway, this story, is one I shared with my boy. His responses were both reassuring – he knew right away that the whole thing was wrong and I did not have to defend the girl to him or explain that “no always means no” – and alarming – he told me that he would have had to try to save her even at the risk of life and limb in order to “live with [him]self.” That, even if he couldn’t stop them – and he acknowledged that he probably couldn’t have – and was badly hurt, he would know he’d done what he could. That last was a little scary – but no surprise. He’s a bodybuilder, very strong, and thinks (like so many teenagers) that he’s made of titanium… We talked about what the girl went through and how likely she was to have been able to put it behind her and, also how the boys have dealt with it since then. We agreed that not all the rapists could have been totally monsters and those of them with any kind of conscience must find it awfully hard to look at their 14 year old daughters today. Nick brought up the end of Saving Private Ryan – when Tom Hanks admonished Matt Damon to “earn this.” Nick felt that those boys were unlikely to ever be able to earn back enough good points to redeem those bad ones. It would be a hell of a bad thing to know that your Karmic books could never be balanced because of a stupid decision made under the influence of alcohol, peer pressure and hormones at age 17… We had a really good talk – and a really good, deep talk with my precious, handsome, decent 17 year old is a rare enough thing that I wanted to thank you for it, Master Wang-Ka. Thank you.
…and there’s a question I’ve asked myself a time or two down through the years.
Should I have stood my ground, not walked away?
I’ve kicked myself more than once for taking the soft option. I was frankly told that doing otherwise would not change the outcome for the girl in question; it would simply delay it while a bunch of drunk football players took turns kicking my ass all over the house.
…and there’s the sixty-four dollar question: is that what would have happened?
Well, I was there, you see.
And being there is where you see the whole thing, up close and personal, and you can get an idea of what THEY are going to do… and what YOU are going to do.
…as opposed to what you think you might have done in that situation. Hypothetical moments of truth are NOT real ones, no matter what you might think. You don’t really know HOT until your feet are actually in the fire, and I will gladly call anyone a liar who says otherwise.
My estimation of the situation was… and is… this: I would have gotten beaten stupid, certainly. What we had here was a mob, with the addition of alcohol. I’m no weakling… but I am a realist. If I was quite lucky, I might have managed to cold-cock one guy, maybe hurt two guys, but I’d have gone down quite quickly, and as worked up as some of them were, they might not have stopped whaling on me anytime soon.
I would have been pretty seriously hurt. Hell, they might accidentally have killed me. Stranger things have happened.
Now, after tenderizing my face and torso, would they have returned to the original objective?
Good question. Hell, maybe I could have stopped the entire thing. If anyone was thinking logically, they might have said, “Hey, wait a minute. A minute ago, we could have just said she wanted us all to fuck her, and it would have been our word against hers, and we were home free. Now she can say that she didn’t, and that we went ahead anyway, and HE tried to stop us, and we all beat the crap out of him… and the cops might believe that, once they get a look at his battered ass. It ain’t just her word against ours no more.”
Then again, maybe no one would have said anything. Look what happened to the LAST guy who spoke up.
Perhaps, though, the act of kicking my bleeding body all over someone else’s house might have really awakened some of these dinks to the concept of “hey, we’re into felony territory here.” If nothing else, perhaps I could have kept quite as MANY guys from raping Sherrie. Some of them might have said, “Hey, this is bad news. We gone. YOU explain to the owner of this house and the cops exactly what happened.”
I will tell you this, though: from what I saw in eyes and faces that night, that realization would not have come to many, if any, before I had gotten beaten to hell and back. And it would not have come to some people at all. The “bitch wants it” guy mentioned in the story was a bit of a jerk, and a bit of a sadist, even in school – the kind of football player you see in gleeful altercation with the nerds in high school movies, you know? He’d have beat me unconscious, given me a few extra to wake up with, and then merrily porked the lady fair for all he was worth…
…as long as someone was willing to do it with him.
And that’s where it all comes down. Would the mob mentality have survived beating me stupid long enough to rape Sherrie?
I think it might have. He wasn’t the only asshole there. This was the first time in my life, though, that the concept of “asshole” extended to “willing and able to psychologically scar someone for life for a few minutes of fun.” Then again, I guess high school nerds who had to put up with football players could tell you some things. That’s another thing I began to notice, after that night. Some people LIKE terrorizing and humiliating others. It’s fun. It’s harmless. It’s a gas…
I’m never gonna know for sure what would have happened, though. And at the time, none of this stuff ever crossed my mind. At the time, I was fairly sure that they’d just beat on me until I was no longer able to move, and then turn right around and go back to Plan A.
…which brings us back to here and now. I’m glad I wrote this thing. Likely going to use it in class at some point… tucked away in a self-selected reading packet, ready to go off like a bomb when some teener picks it up and reads the thing, all unwilling. Perhaps I’ll lead in with the
fart story, or the cat story, just to hook’ em in, get 'em laughing… then drop the bomb with the rape story.
At any rate, I’ll accept your thanks and praise. I’m not proud. Like I said, I put the story here for a reason, and if it can make a difference, well, this is good. A bit late, perhaps, but good.
Although I’ve wondered occasionally what would happen if Sherrie’s still out there, and it turned out she was a Doper…