I would hope that my Rosie only dated men who valued HER enough to not do anything to her without her consent. Never mind his career. Why date anyone whose chief concern wasn’t you? And, of course, if it turned out Rosie made a mistake as to her date’s character and intentions, as can happen to anyone, I’d hope she packed her pepper spray. I’d hope that, if she couldn’t reach for her pepper spray on time, she would remember what I taught her about the proper self-defense method for forcing a man who’s grabbing you to let go. Peel in a twisting motion starting from the pinky finger because the pinky has the least strength and will let go first, weakening his grasp. Remember the most vulnerable pressure points. Only minimum necessary force, then run. If I were a Montessori teacher I could break that into a thousand steps and give it a jargon-sounding name like “Junior Anti-Assault Hand-Crimping.”
Anyway, why are we having this conversation?
When I was young, the highly conservative adults I knew weren’t defending handsy teenage boys. They were blathering about “courtship,” which is as affected a term as anything in the Montessori vocabulary, and making their children take ballroom dance classes that they thought would make them chaste. There was no excuse for doing anything that even hinted of unchastity. You couldn’t touch a girl except in the context of dance lessons. Their sons and daughters wouldn’t find themselves driving a pink car down Lovers Lane after dark, because their sons and daughters would only be allowed on adult-supervised group dates to the parish youth pizza party and Benediction Holy Hour. Don’t tell me you never went to one of those if you were a Catholic teenager in the late 90s.
Now, all of a sudden, that exact same crowd is properly horrified that anyone would object to a little teenage groping. They’re shocked, shocked I tell you, that now their sons have to worry about their careers being ruined if they force themselves on a woman. Why can’t everyone lighten up?
I’m not going to say I’m surprised, but it’s funny.
We might all just try respecting each other.
That’s not enough in itself, of course. I am a Catholic, writing for a largely Catholic audience on a Catholic blog here, and I believe that we need the Church’s teaching to tell us how best to respect one another in matters like sex. We need to be chaste in our interactions with dates and anyone else, even if there’s mutual consent to do something unchaste. But at bare minimum, right out of the gate, I think that everyone of goodwill, Catholic or not, can agree that we ought to at least respect one another. If we respect one another, we realize that we ought to keep our hands to ourselves if we have reason to believe the other party wouldn’t welcome the touch. We ought to stop touching immediately and apologize, if we misread the person’s queues and did something it turns out they didn’t want. Or better yet, we ought to just ask. Another artist, Kenny Wyland, edited the comic to say “The era of #metoo isn’t that hard,” with the teenage boy just asking for a kiss and the girl assertively saying “yes.”
That’s not enough, but it’s a start.
And don’t go to Lover’s Lane. It’s a silly place.
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