Lessons From Steubenville

Catalogued somewhere in the darkest corners of my mind are a few too many memories from my teenage years that now, as a parent, I’d rather forget. They’re as hazy today as they were then, distorted by alcohol and late nights. But they all follow the same pattern, the same dance. At frat parties or on dates or hanging out with friends in the bedrooms and basements of suburban McMansions, a boy would hand me a beer. Or a bourbon and coke. Or vodka mixed with Kool-Aid. And I would drink it.

At the time, it was a game. Just a game. The boys had their role and we girls had ours. It was up to them to  try and get as many drinks into us as possible. It was up to us to drink what we could without blacking out or passing out or acting stupid or allowing the boys to go too far.

Like any game, sometimes we won and sometimes we lost. A high school friend passed out and woke to find that a group of boys had written insults in Sharpie pen all over her body. A sorority sister called me at three in the morning, crying because she’d woken up naked in a strange boy’s bed and had no idea where she was or where her clothes were or how she’d get back home. A college roommate regularly broke down in tears, reliving the memory of a party she had gone to in high school where she’d fallen asleep on a couch and woken to a man raping her. When she told her friends the next day what had happened, they said she deserved it for falling asleep on the couch in the first place.

Even then, I felt like I’d gotten off easy. I’d pushed away guys’ hands more times than I could count, was humiliated by stories boys told about me that weren’t true, and endured nasty break-ups with guys I thought I loved, for the sole reason that I wouldn’t “put out.”

But I was never raped. And for that reason, I considered myself one of the lucky ones.

This is why the Steubenville trial strikes a chord with so many of us. Variations of it happened in my hometown, in my neighborhood, among my friends. Nearly all of us have “been there” to some extent, whether we were the victim or we stood by and watched the fallout of another girl being victimized.When we were teenagers, it was a game. Those girls simply lost. We didn’t think about consequences. We didn’t think about punishment. We didn’t think about our actions and reactions coming back to haunt us, 10 or 15 or 30 years later.

I agree that women never deserve to be raped or assaulted, no matter how drunk they are or how short their skirt is. I agree with Jessica Valenti, who wrote: The worst a dude expects if he passes out drunk at a party is maybe a few dicks Sharpied on his face. But women should just anticipate rape?”

But I also identify with an eloquent commenter from this post, who wrote:

As someone who was raped in a bar bathroom while drunk, I did learn a lesson. Not that I deserved anything, or that men will be men, but simply that rapists will be rapists and they do exist (whether we like it or not), and that had I been less drunk I might have been able to fight more and get away.

I have written Suburban Turmoil knowing that my children would read these posts one day, and I squirm thinking of them reading this particular post. But there will come a time when I’ll want them to know what happened in Steubenville, and I will want them to see the all-too-similar stories that Steubenville has inspired women to start telling publicly for the first time.

I want my daughter to know what could happen if she drinks too much. It shouldn’t happen. She doesn’t deserve for it to happen. But accepting all those drinks from boys puts her at far greater risk of it happening. I also want my daughter to help the drunk girl at the party, rather than stand by and judge or make fun of her.

I want my son to see that this “game” his friends are playing can have far-reaching, lifelong consequences. I want him to know that even joking about rape or trying to getting girls drunk with the intention of convincing them to put out is never okay, and that it takes men, real men, to stand up and say something when they see it happening. I want him to see every girl at every party as someone’s sister. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s future wife.

We’ve got to talk about these things with our kids. It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable. It may involve dredging up some truths about ourselves and our pasts that we’d rather not share. But it horrifies me to think that one of my children might end up like the 18-year-old teammate on the witness stand in Steubenville, the one who said he didn’t try to stop what was going on because he didn’t know it was wrong.

“I didn’t know exactly what rape was,” he said.

This is exactly what we, as parents, can’t allow to continue.

Steubenville is our wake-up call.

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