Rape

The recent news of party rape among the students at West Point makes me ask myself once again how it is that a young woman could trust males to the extent of going to that off campus house. Whenever I express this sentiment, I am attacked.  I don’t know why, and need to be instructed. When my husband and I exited the theater last Saturday night in London at Piccadilly Circus there was an enormous crowd of young men celebrating the results of some soccer match, and just looking at them, their height, the breadth of their shoulders and chests, their muscles, the shining intoxicated eyes, their drunken smiling mouths made me want to get out of the area instantly.  While I have a hard time understanding Russian soldiers on the march toward Berlin raping every woman whose path they crossed, young, old, whatever, I can more easily understand the problem of sexual control.  I remember very well in bed with a young man with whom I was having a very casual but fun relationship at a time when we were on a trip to New York City, and we had already had sex twice on that day when I once again penetrated him, bending his legs back to do so, and he said “You know, I really don’t feel up to this again,” and I ignored him, and then he repeated what he had said, but I was too far along on the orgasm train to pay him heed, and I just pumped away to conclusion.  I apologized, and he wasn’t really angry, because he himself understood the loss of control at that moment, but clearly he thought if I had responded by withdrawing when first he asked then I could have, and that was right.  I remember another time when I was in a bed with a guy I had just met through friends and we were in his hotel suite and he asked if he could enter me and I said no, because it had been a long time since I had something like that, and so we went along, and then he asked again, and he was such a nice guy, and so sexy, and by chance such a celebrity American athlete, that I said “okay.”  Well, indeed, it hurt, and after a moment or two it hurt more than maybe I really wanted to endure, but then I realized he was well along on the orgasm train and was probably not going to hear consciously, and he wouldn’t stop, so I thought well, it isn’t the end of the world, and let him go on to the end.  One night when I was out buying some cigarettes back in my high school days,  I met one of the star athletes of the school with whom I had had lots of encounters, and we chatted for a few moments, and then he looked me in the eye, and kind of crazily demanded that I give him some satisfaction, and when I said “no, not tonight,” he grabbed me by the shirt, ripping it, as I squirmed away, and ran out the door, jumped in my car, and fled.  He pursued in his, and it was only by some really crazy dangerous maneuvering (turning off the headlights, going down a darkened lane, making a sudden turn) that I eluded him.  I pulled over, shocked and terrified; he was always mild mannered, he had never done anything like that before.