Jezegate & Date Rape

I've been thinking a lot about the whole Jezebel VS Liz Winstead debacle (if you don't know what I'm talking about, read this and then this). I'm not going to weigh in on the whole 2nd wave feminists ranting against 3rd and 4th wave feminists thing because this isn't the place to do it. Plus, my opinions about what happened are utterly unformed, mainly because the event was called Thinking & Drinking, which is just a dumb idea and probably why the divorce rate is so high. You can't take what anyone says seriously when they are drunk. I spent all night Friday telling anyone who would listen that I boned the hot tall guy from Fanny Pack on America's Best Dance Crew. Totally not true, and I have no idea where it came from. I was drunk and just blurted it out and decided to keep rolling with it, because it made me laugh inside my head.
Anyway, the one argument that was raised in the whole Jez spat that I do want to write about is Moe talking about how she didn't feel like turning in her date rapist (full disclosure: I know both Moe and Slut Machine on a casual social level, but I'm pretty sure they don't even know this blog exists). Anyway, I empathize COMPLETELY with Moe on this matter. I am a little iffy on how to categorize what happened to me, but the short story is that when I was 18 I got wasted at a club and let a 39 year-old man take me home. When we got to his place I told him no anal because I was a virgin in that regard. He pinned me down with one forearm over my windpipe, did it anyway, and threw me out of the house. Is that date rape? Or regular rape? Or was I asking for it for being so dumb? When I told my little sister what had happened she spray painted "D----- S---- is a rapist" all over town, but I still wasn't truly convinced.

I didn't turn him in because at the time I felt I had no real categorization for what happened. I was a dumb, uninformed teenager and I didn't think guys could get raped. It just seemed like a rite of passage every young gay guy had to go through at some point or another. Also, he scared the shit out of me.
I know a ton of fags who have a story exactly like mine, including two guys who had it done to them by the same guy who choked & poked me. When I found out about them I felt terrible, because I went into the whole mind spiral of "If only I'd said something these guys would be OK." But I didn't, and then they got raped, and probably a bunch of other young guys did too and maybe it's even still happening today. But the statute of limitations has long since passed that I could ever press any charges now and it's thoughts like these that send me straight to the drug dealer. Even worse, I think the real reason I never turned him in is because I just flat out hate the idea of being a narc.

I know a pedophile that I could name right now. He admitted it to me one night when we were really fucked up at a packed bar on Avenue A a few years ago. We'd been making out and talking and I was telling him about a story I was working on for a magazine about a very specific, very messed up subculture of sexual fetishists. I told him about how I felt sorry for a lot of the people I had been interviewing, because while they had this particular sexual fantasy, they knew they could never act on it because they knew how horribly, morally wrong it was. The guy got really quiet and then said, "I'm a pedophile."

I said something like "Oh, really?," thinking he was making a stupid joke. But he was dead serious. He told me that what he really wanted more than anything was to have sex with REALLY young boys, like 8,9 and 10 year-olds. But that he, like the subjects I'd been interviewing, would never act on it because he knew how evil it was. I think he expected me to think this was OK because I'd just been talking about my sympathy for hardcore sexual deviants, but child molestation is where I draw the line. The conversation just sort of fizzled out after that and I excused myself to get a beer and I didn't see him again until a couple of years later, when he showed up as a recurring "challenge photographer" on America's Next Top Model. I hope to god or whatever that he has still never acted on his impulses. All I have are his pathetic drunken ramblings to go on, so there is zero case against him. If there was, I wouldn't hesitate to narc on his ass.