PMB wrote a speech, which was read recently at a Take Back the Night event organized by the law schools at Rutgers and Seton Hall. The impetus for this speech was PMB's growing discontentment over the various forms of "unwanted sex" that occur frequently among friends and acquaintances, among educated people, in university settings. This is not to suggest that these are the only conditions for unwanted sex, but rather that the problem persists among people who are being both taught to know better and socialized into university cultures that value both excessive drinking and sexual conquest, generally at the same time. PMB's speech appears below:
Imagine: You’re having dinner with a group of friends after a long and stressful week. This is a dynamic group of people you’ve known and trusted for years, people like yourself: some are lawyers, some teachers or professors, some community organizers or local leaders. As always, your dinner conversation is lively and stimulating.
The conversation turns to those ambiguous but prevalent situations from your college days, when a woman and a man, both of whom have had a lot to drink, go home together and share a bed. What happens when one or both parties don’t remember what happened? What happens if sex happened?
You’re educated people. You believe in fairness and equality. You believe in respect, for yourself, for your body, for the bodies of others. You would never engage anyone in unwanted sex, let alone a friend or a colleague.
But what if sex happened? She was at the bar, and then she was in her bed. She woke up and you were there. Not just there, but there. You barely remember it yourself. She’s hurt; she’s sick. It wasn’t supposed to happen. She didn’t want it. You couldn’t read her mind; you couldn’t read your own after all those drinks. Now a person is suffering in real life, in real time. Who is responsible? This is a disaster. Is it natural or man-made?
She says: If you’re not sure she wants it, then don’t proceed. He says: But how could I ever be sure? She says: It’s your responsibility to be sure. He says: What about her responsibility? Are we not equals? She says: It’s different for her than it is for you. It’s a different experience. You couldn’t understand. He says: That’s not fair.
For all of us the ability to abstract and articulate the meaning of things like fairness and equality will be essential to our getting by in this world. For many of us this ability will sustain our careers. Yet we can’t afford loose sight of the crude anatomical facts of this material world: the facts that no theory of fairness or justice or equality will ever change. Gender equality between sexes does not produce anatomical equivalence. We don’t need to go into the mechanics of sex between a woman and a man to understand, I hope, why a man must bear particular responsibility for how he wields his anatomy. Perhaps this is unfair; but this is the unalterable reality. So, too, is it reality that a man will never have the experience of birthing a child, or the ability to make decisions about the body that carries his child to term. In some ways this is also unfair. But what jurisdiction does fairness have over such circumstances?
This is a plea from one man to all men: Imagine yourselves having dinner with a close group of friends at the end of a long and stressful week. Imagine that the conversation turns to those ambiguous but prevalent situations of unremembered or unwanted sex—the kind that just happens. Imagine sitting at a table full of friends talking in the hypothetical about what’s fair and what’s just and where responsibility lies. Then imagine that not everyone around the table is speaking hypothetically.
This is a plea to men, men who would never do such a thing, well-meaning men, respectful men, strong men, educated men who know better, who can tell you all about fairness and justice and equality: it’s one thing to take responsibility for your arguments, but quite another to take responsibility for your reality. Unwanted sex is not a theoretical matter. What you would do is inconsequential. What you do or refrain from doing is what makes all the difference in the real lives of real people. Despite what you may think, these scenarios don’t really come down to your personal sense of justice or your richly cultivated ethical sensibility. No, these scenarios come down to the cold mechanics of an act, an act that, regardless of intent, accumulates significance in the future-time of an individual like the turning of a gear and the click of a second hand in the momentum of time: once it happens, it can’t be rewound. Once it happens, the reasons behind its happening are immaterial. Only the happenings remain—the bodies—the breathing artifacts of a bad decision, an unfortunate click.
Today I struggle to make sense of what happened to a loved one who passed out in her bed one night and woke up with a male acquaintance on top of her, having sex with her, taking her lack of consciousness as a sign of consent. Or maybe the fact that they chatted earlier that evening was a sign of consent. Or maybe she was shifting in bed, or talking in her sleep, and those were signs of consent. Maybe he was so drunk that he imagined her consent. Maybe she said “I want you to go,” and he missed the “to go” part. Somewhere embedded in the strange semantics of drunkenness, there’s an excuse for everything, it seems. But men: it’s our grave responsibility to be sure. Not hazy, not wishful, not lingering around in a drunk woman’s room at the end of the night. This isn’t a hypothetical. Once you’ve crossed that line, no matter how justified you think you probably were, there really is no turning back.
