How Not To Ask Someone About Their Sex Assault

A text message odyssey

Yesterday, a straight man texted me.

Specifically, he’s a guy from the movement called “organized skepticism,” which could functionally be called the Male Doubters Club.

So it should have come as no shock that someone from this environment would be the brave hero to casually ask me this:

Well, whoops. Don’t ever do this!

He really thought he was nailing it, too.

He was trying to be REALLy sensitive here.

He manages to go on.

He just wanted to know the circumstances!

IT WILL HELP HIM!

AM I NOT INTERESTED IN HELPING HIM?

(I am not interested in helping him.)

What is the problem, do you reckon? What doesn’t he understand?

Is it:

(a) He’s not sure if he’s raped someone (by my definition)
(b) He’s not sure if his friends/colleagues have raped someone (by my definition)

( c) He wonders if I would hate him — or them — if I knew.

(d) He wonders if I’m a radical, using radical definitions; he wonders if he’d call it by the same term, now that he suspects there was no weaponry

(e) He needs to decide whether to discredit me, as a narrator.

(f) All of these

I don’t care about helping him with any of that.

He didn’t think he would need to use any persuasion!

He thought he would just ask about my rape, and I would deliver the deets.

He wouldn’t even need to explain why it would help me, in any way.

He felt that entitled to the information.

Isn’t this extraordinary? Isn’t it cuh-razy that people do this?! It’s cuh-razy!

Here’s another cuh-razy fact: the people who don’t do this… they end up knowing the entire story. Their route to the information is less direct, you see; it involves years of solidarity, mutual bravery, learning, attention, and care; things “skeptics” do not prioritize.

For those who don’t know, James Randi (see dude with cane) was a magician who kept a 50-year grudge with a con artist. The dude and I both admire James Randi.

Randi knew hate.

When I knew Randi (that’s what we called him), he would still actually spit when he spoke about his enemy, Uri Geller. He didn’t feel he’d gotten him, not yet. It was four decades in.

That’s hate. And like it or not, it’s a fundamental part of justice, law, journalism, and activism. It drives a whole lot of important human behavior. And I know its stamp.

I know hate. I know her face. She looks nothing like this “skeptic” describes.

Like Randi, I know that hatred can be fruitful, driving, beautiful. A seeking of justice for a specific character whose harm will finally be tempered when he is stopped. Nothing to be ashamed of, when you are certain it is warranted.

So I don’t trust people who fake hatred; they are faking justice.

I showed this conversation to a few people. They all bugged their eyes out. But then, some of the women said: I have had this happen, too.

The guy who wants to work out his definitions on you, make a project of your experience for his own private education, his own secret ends.

And what do we do? Most of the time, we cave. Because they are sincere. Because they really are looking at you, that puppy-eyed, that ignorant.

They really haven’t read about it by now,

really haven’t asked a woman they respect by now,

really haven’t figured out what they think by now.

We owe them nothing.