Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Rape

While writing a fiction piece about the end of the world, I was interviewing women to learn how they thought they would be treated by men in a nascent civilization. Mostly, women were very pessimistic, with some flatly rejecting the idea of starting over in a site where they were outnumbered by men. Some thought being in a camp with men would be favorable to being outside a camp with no protection from men. It was clear that men would be the biggest problem women felt they would face, even if there were monsters who invaded earth that ate people. 

I asked a woman who I didn’t know well at all what she thought would happen. She said once men did all the upper body strength/ he man stuff like putting up fences and farming, it could dawn on them they were in control of everything inside those fences, and women would suffer for this. 

“Just like that? I asked. 

“That’s the way things work now,” she replied. 

She went on to explain she agreed to talk to me about the project, but only in a place where she could see other people, and be seen, because she didn’t know me. A friend referred her to me, knew she would want to speak about the subject, and we were in a downtown coffee shop. 

“Have you ever taken a woman out on a first date to a really nice restaurant?” she asked me. “Not just a first date, but the first time the two of you went anywhere together alone?” 

I stalled out. Surely, in my life I had, but I couldn’t remember. 

“Most women will guide men away from expensive first date venues,” she told me. “That way, the man isn’t as likely to demand sex on the first date.”

I told her I didn’t think dating was like that, and she asked me if I had ever dated a man. My education, it seemed, was just beginning. 

The biggest problem, she told me, is that in order to get sex from a man to whom she was attracted, she had to make sure he wasn’t going to assault her first. Which meant she had to establish some level of trust on the first date, allow a rapport to develop, and keep him at arm’s length should he turn into an octopus. 

Moreover, she wasn’t on the Pill. When she went out with a guy for the first time, she had no intentions of having sex with him no matter how well things went, or how strong an attraction she developed for him. Women have created bail out calls, where if a woman is on a date and wants out, she can text a friend to come get her out. This woman went a step further by letting a gay friend come over and play video games on her widescreen. She would text him and tell him to stay or go, depending on how a date went. 

So, I asked, does this mean you never had sex on a first date? 

She went out with a guy she really liked, they went to a cozy little bar, then went to his place and smoked pot. She was higher than she needed to be, and knew it, and the next thing she knows, he’s pushed her over on the sofa, kissing her, and she has to make a decision fast. She can try to throw the brakes on, try to get him off of her, hope it doesn’t piss him off, and hope for the best. She was interested, just not this interested yet, but why not just go along with it? What she knows to be true, is that there is zero chance this man is ever going to be charged with raping her, unless he beats her bloody and she has war wounds to show for it, and even then, going through the process of going to the hospital for a rape kit, going through the trauma of filing a report, and waiting for a trial that might take months, assures her only that the man she is trying to put in prison knows where she lives. 

She pushes back, tells him to stop, and he does, for the moment. 

Now she has to extract herself from the situation without pissing him off. They are both drunk, both stoned, and she says she has to use the bathroom, which is a disaster, because she has to go through his bedroom to get there. He follows her, lays down on the bed, and she closes the bathroom door behind her, and thinks. Now what? She almost calls a friend, decides not to, thinks she might be overthinking the situation, flushes, washes her hands, and when she steps out of the bathroom, he’s on the bed, naked.

“At this point,” she tells me, “it’s fight or fuck, and after I lose the fight I’m fucked anyway.” 

A few hours later, after three or four sessions of unprotected sex, his urgency and buzz wears off, and he drives her home. The next morning, she hits the pharmacy for a Morning After Pill, and is pissed at herself for getting in that situation. 

“You’ve never raped a woman?” she asks, looking me in the eye. 

“No, never,” I say and I’m mad she would ask. 

“You’ve never taken a drunk woman back to your apartment, started trying to fuck her, and not thought for a moment that she might be afraid to say no to you?” The question is one open to interpretation, and I almost say that, but I realize it sounds like I’m trying to defend myself against an accusation. 

I tell her about the time a woman came home with me from a bar, like in her case, and we smoked some pot, and we were both really stoned. We started kissing, one thing led to another, but she never said stop or slow down, or no.

“Could she have walked home from your place safely? Could she have called a cab? Was there anyone close by she could have gotten to come get her? Did you have control over her means of transportation?” she asked, and I could tell this was exactly what she had gone through. 

“Did you try to call her the next day, or later, and did she more or less not want to have anything else to do with you?” she demanded. This all happened long before cell phones, back in the 80’s. 

I thought back to that night. It was cold, raining hard, and we were both pretty blitzed. The woman didn’t seem reluctant, or hesitant. 

“Does this mean she absolutely wasn’t looking for a one night stand?” I asked and the question seemed lame for some reason. 

“No, not at all, she could have very well been looking for sex. She might have had a boyfriend and not wanted to see you again for that reason. “But you had a lot more control over the situation than she. Did you ask her if she was on birth control? Did you offer to use a condom? Did you ever wonder if she was pregnant after that night? The questions were flung out at me, but she already knew the answers. 

“Hey, this was decades ago,” I protested. 

“Good point. Nothing has changed since what happened to that woman happened to me, Mike,” she said. “I’m not accusing you of raping her. I’m accusing you of not realizing you had power over her. In your story, if you set up a camp to restart civilization, how are you going to prevent the men from having power over the woman, and then using that power against the women. That’s the question you are asking, even if you don’t realize it.” 

“Wow.” 

“Take the most extreme example. Do you think Thomas Jefferson raped Sally Heming?” she asked. 

“Yes, a woman who cannot say no cannot say yes,” I replied. 

“Even if she liked him, or loved him, and even wanted him, the power he held over her made it impossible for her to make up her own mind as to what to do with her body. The guy that was waiting for me to come out of the bathroom forced me to either confront him, or go along for the ride. I was young, scared, and took the easy way out. It’s not the classic knife-at-her-throat rape scene, but I didn’t feel as if I had any choice. That’s your story right there. Who decides how much power men have over women?” she stood up, to go, and I stood up, too. 

“You’re on the right track, Mike, but a lot of men are going to read it complete fiction.” 

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith · 1 Comment

Sex and a Smoking Gun

“Remember that party at Beth’s, you walked up and we cracked up laughing?” she asked in the early morning darkness, the chill of the morning slain by our bodies.

“Yes, neither one of you would tell me what you were talking about, and you turned a very lovely shade of red,” I replied. She and I had been friends for a while, and recently decided to date. We went to the beach with some friends, spent time together and enjoyed it, walked by ourselves and talked. On the ride home, we were sitting next to one another in the backseat, and I reached over, held her hand, and she squeezed mine back in reply. It’s odd how two people can wake up one morning alone, and then the next morning they are together, and perhaps in more ways than just physically.

“So are you now going to reveal what you and Beth were talking about?” I asked, and she laughed again, and again, turned red.

“Before we started dating I had sex dreams about you, three or four times, and honestly, I’ve never had sex with a guy I didn’t know. I’m not easy,” she said with a smile.

“I can attest to that. But if you were already thinking about having sex with me, why make us both wait?” I asked.

“Men allow their dicks to make decisions for them, women are more prone to ignoring the advice given by their vaginas. Not that it doesn’t happen; we are hormonal creatures, after all,” she sat up and looked around.

“So were the dreams, uh, specific?” I asked, feeling that this conversation was leading somewhere.

“All of them were us on the floor,” she said grinning, “right there.” She pointed beside the bed.

“I can make your dreams come true,” I said tossing a pillow overboard, and she grabbed a blanket.

Apparently, there was four dreams involving two different positions. There was nothing earth shattering about acting out the dreams, there was no astral choir or trumpets, I think that would have been a distraction, but it was different. Later, she told me the beach trip was set up so the two of us could spend time together, but she wanted to make sure we were compatible before she started flirting seriously with me. I’ve always thought women had the hardest part to play in dating. In my life, I’ve had two women ask me out, and one of them told me she had never done that sort of thing before. That sort of thing, like asking a guy out is akin to soliciting sex or sending him a nude out of the blue. Women seem to think that asking a man out is too forward, while I think it’s culturally backwards for the channel to only run in one direction.

The first time we were making out, and it was very clear things were heating up, she suddenly stopped me, put her bra and shirt back on, and just seconds before, I thought more clothes were coming off. Later, she told me she wanted to make sure I would stop when she asked me to, and she wanted to make sure if she was ever in a vulnerable position, I wouldn’t simply overpower her and keep going, unless that was what she wanted. How, I asked, was I supposed to know? She said if I knew her well enough, I would know, and that’s one of the reasons she stopped me, was because neither of us were at that point yet.

All of this is way past what I was going to write about this morning, but pertinent because last night I dreamed I was sitting in a coffee shoppe, drinking coffee with a woman I know only from Facebook. Sharply dressed, in a black outfit and her make up expertly done, for some reason I thought she was going to a job interview, or something work related. Florence and the Machine was playing in the background. We were talking about if snakes could survive in a zero gravity environment, or if catching prey would be too difficult.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, and putting her purse on the table, she pulled out a Glock, aimed it, and shot me in the chest.

People screamed, as I fell over backwards, and hit the floor. It felt like I had been kicked by a mule and the pain flared like a supernova.

She walked over to where I lay on the floor, pointed the gun, smoke still wafting from the barrel, at my head and said, “Don’t bring that up again, okay?” And fired.

I’ve been awake since then.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith · 2 Comments

My Date With A Cannibal

She was an angry woman, someone who had been wronged, and clearly, she was one of those people who rather be anywhere else than where she was, no matter who she was with. I didn’t want to do the bar thing, so I signed up on Match and started trying to shed a divorce that had begun to stick to me like a second skin. We were like two in that, she and I. Neither of us knew it at the time, but what we had in common was invisible, and both of us, once we realized it, had to part forever.

We met at Books-a-Million, and from the first few minutes, I thought she was about to get up and walk out. But we had read enough books to find comfort in trying to figure out what else there might be. She wrote poetry, but rarely, and I wrote too much fiction. There was a movie we both wanted to see, so we sat in the dark and in silence, which is what movies are good for, in the final truth. After a while, we held hands and watched the credits roll.

“I hear there’s a good Mexican place in Quitman,” she said, and I offered to buy her dinner there. She followed me to the restaurant, and we drank Margaritas and listened to a couple sing slightly off key.

We said our goodbyes at her car, and she told me it had been a great time but it was the wrong man at the wrong time, and if it was okay, we needed to part ways. I had just paid a lot of money to be shut of a woman so I knew it was a gift to be able to simply walk away.

I pulled into my driveway and she pulled in behind me. “Let not talk about it, okay?” and we didn’t. We smoked a little pot she had, drank Scotch that I had, and very slowly, but most certainly, she allowed me to ease her into my bedroom.

About three in the morning, she got up and dressed by the light in the bathroom, and I propped up on one elbow and watched.

“Left at the driveway, right at the light in town, right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Don’t call me, please,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’m married,” she said and neither of us spoke again as she left.

It was another couple of months, and I was still adrift in the sea of unhappy people looking for other unhappy people on computer screens, and a text popped up. She showed up at my house an hour or so later, and she looked happier, somewhat, but we still didn’t want to talk about it.

“I got divorced,” she said, “but I’m not looking for anything right now.”

“Why are you here?” I asked. I had almost fallen asleep.

“I thought you’d get a kick out what happened when I left here last time. I went home. I had been gone most of the day, most of the night, and when I walked into the house my husband was sitting in his chair playing some video game with three of his friends, just like they were when I left. None of them had so much as changed positions. I don’t think he realized I had been gone. I sat and watched them play, knowing they would be there, endless hours followed by endless hours. I propped my feet up on the arm of his chair and cleaned my nails by scraping them against my teeth. There were tiny pieces of your skin under my nails. I held each piece in my mouth, just letting it sit there a bit, then I swallowed them. Pieces of someone else inside of me, in more ways than one, and me just a couple of feet away from a man who wasn’t aware who I was anymore,” she said.

“That’s fucked up,” I said, fully awake now.

“That’s marriage,” she said, and I never saw her again.

Take Care,

Mike