rape me

the haidl rape trial II continues, very well covered by r. scott moxley in the oc weekly. there you will find all sorts of horrific details about both the crime itself and the way the defendants are ... er, defending themselves. looking at the little punks' pictures, i began to ponder the differences b/w these buttoned-down children of privilege and the rough-n-redneck boys i ran with 20 years ago. the main difference, i realized with a jolt, being that the rednecks were more civilized.

i could have been jane doe. from the limited image we have seen of her, she's a teenage girl who likes sex. although nobody ever questions when boys like sex (in fact, they are suspect if they don't), people are disdainful and even suspicious when it comes to girls liking sex. they want to ascribe motives to something that simple -- the defense in this trial would have you believe she liked sex and used it to manipulate boys ... which is somehow a crime far more terrible than rape. in the first trial, the defense actually contended that jane doe should be on trial, b/c she enticed these otherwise upstanding young men to do these criminal things. (it reminds me of the guy who sideswiped me while trying to cut me off in traffic, and then when later confronted with his actions by a traffic judge, actually said, "yes, i hit her; but she made me do it!") like they had no choice in the matter whatsoever but to go along with her diabolical scheme to make a porn video. she had this mysterious power to make them do her bidding even while unconscious -- oh, i forgot, she was awake when they dropped her face-first onto the pool table. she just didn't even flinch b/c she is such a great actress, with a promising future in her profession of choice, porn.

sorry, but that's bullshit. since subjectivity is the new objectivity, i am basing this opinion on my own experiences as a teenage girl who loved sex -- loved everything about it. i took responsibility for my actions, and, thus protected against unwanted side effects, i enjoyed myself immensely. in other words, i was a slut.

at my high school in rural PA, good girls didn't plan for sex -- it just "happened," you know, when they went a little too far with their boyfriends, or got talked into same by said BFs. in the heat of the moment, they could selflessly give in to the needs of the boy they loved. and it was ok, because girls get validation as women from pleasing their boyfriends. (er, not from other girls, usually, but that's another story.) then they got pregnant and dutifully gave up their lives to raise the resulting babies (b/c getting rid of it would make you a nasty, selfish person ... that is, a bad girl).

but bad girls like me planned for sex by using birth control and figuring out ways to be alone with the objects of their desire. and they didn't need to be permanently attached to a guy. worst of all, they had fun while fucking. boy, did i have fun. i guess i will not get too specific about how much fun. but early on in all this blithe experimentation, i found myself alone in a camper shell with two of these guys who were my friends with benefits, as they say nowadays. we started playing around, and pretty soon it was a threesome. things were getting extremely hot n heavy, and about to go further than i intended. but when i said stop, it stopped.

why? i mean, really. why? they could've easily overpowered me; i was already in a decidedly compromised position in terms of the moral judgments, to say nothing of the legal ones, that likely would've been bestowed on me had i reported it to the police. i never asked them why; all i can guess is that they didn't want to force me. maybe it was fun when it was consensual; after that, it wouldn't have been.

it's funny to think of those guys -- coarse and absolutely with their faults, not the least of which was their eventual attitude toward me, but that's another story -- now and conclude they really were decent sorts. at least decent enough not to rape me, i suppose ... and i don't mean to sound grateful, exactly. it didn't enter my mind at that moment that they wouldn't stop. they were my friends, and i trusted them. or else i wouldn't've been playing decidedly adult games with them in the first place. but compare this to our current jane doe. i don't know how good of friends she actually was with these guys. she'd had sex with at least some of them before. but that, argues the defense, means she is to blame for what happened -- or, perhaps more accurately, that the boys are blameless for thinking they had some sort of year-round, free-for-all pass to her body. after all, everybody knows that saying yes once means you can never say no again ... if you're a girl, anyway. a boy can say yes once, then never even acknowledge a girl's existence again, and that is perfectly ok.

i don't think her previous consensual encounters with them involved having a pool cue shoved up her ass, but the defense would have us believe that there was something inherently consensual in her going to the haidl home that day to party with these guys. as if her simply being there was an express statement that they could do as they pleased with her. again -- bullshit. no matter what scenario you come up with, in terms of her intent, she would still have the right to say no if she decided she didn't want to continue. but they took that away from her with booze and drugs. and now their lawyers are arguing some bogus concept of prior consent. she didn't actually say it was ok for them to do those things to her, but she still wanted them to. they all just KNEW it. and if that doesn't convince you of the boys' innocence, the lawyers further argue, basically, that she deserved what she got for being such a slut in the first place.

the second part doesn't bear addressing b/c it is soooo fucking stupid and evil. but let's just say for the sake of argument that jane doe did have in mind to fuck one, two, or all of those boys once she got to the haidl house. in succession or all at once. first of all, so what? and secondly, i guess i can't help but feel that if she were thinking about getting fucked by three guys, she might have had in mind a scenario perhaps slightly more satisfying for herself. (just a thought.) but even if she did want them to use her as rudely and painfully as possible, if she would've done so of her own free will, that wouldn't be rape. but she didn't do so of her own free will. they knocked her out with booze and drugs, and then used her like a living fuckdoll. she was out like a dead girl. (the cops who first viewed the video thought they were seeing a corpse being abused.) she had no choice in the matter whatsoever. and i admit i have a hard time believing she said, "i want to be used like a fuckdoll, but i don't want to remember it, so please knock me out with booze and drugs and then turn on the videocamera and do what you want to me." i believe she didn't have a choice and would not have chosen to do that.

so ... who was doing the choosing, here? why, the boys were. they had the upper hand -- being more numerous and conscious and all -- and they chose to use her like she was just a set of three holes. they even videotaped it, they were so psyched by what they were making happen. so ... in the here and now we have teenagers who were the same age my friends and i were at the time of our little experiment. but in this oh-so-modern case, the guys didn't stop. in fact, nothing even got started before they took away her ability to consent. (wouldn't want to take any chances of having to deal with unpleasant screaming and struggling now, would we, boys?) ahh, but people say she should have known what to expect in going to party with only guys. OF COURSE they would drug her and rape her! that's what boys do! after all, they can't control themselves.

except, it would seem, they can.