Standard Disclaimer
: All characters involved in naughtiness are over 18. The writing is dubious because I am lazy and editing this is weird at Mom's house at Christmas
.
It wasn't my fault, I say to myself crawling into bed beside Joel who is pretending to already be asleep.
I admit I may have taken things a bit too far but I wasn't the one who insisted on bringing up the outrage du jour and ruined his annual pre-Christmas dinner party. If it had been anyone but a bunch of academics, the whole thing would have been laughed off but that's not how things work around here, apparently.
It started over cocktails as these things often do. Carl, a brilliant but socially inept professor of physics, accepted his second Manhattan with a cheeky 'say, what's in this drink?' after someone mentioned that the local radio station had gone back to playing 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' (in spite of lingering indignation from the fashionably offended).
"I'm glad you can make so light of the very real fear a women face every day just by setting foot outside her front door" said Brianna, the iron haired head of Gender Studies. "I wonder why your department has the least number of women of any on campus." She fixed him with a stern eye doing a spot on impression of a maiden aunt who's 'mind is vicious'
At first Carl thought she was joking but his tentative smile quickly faded. "I'm sorry. I guess I was a bit out of line." He looked so sad and uncomfortable I wanted to go over and give him a hug. Like most science nerds, he was shy and awkward, probably at the tail end of one of those spectrums. A childhood's worth of bullying had made groveling in these situations his default state.
Too little too late. Brianna refused to be mollified. Not when an opportunity to lecture presented itself. She went off on a tirade about consent, rape culture and even that tired clichΓ©, The Patriarchy, that not even a glass of wine quickly proffered by Joel could extinguish.
"How do you expect boys to act like gentleman when girls refuse to act like ladies?" Lilian, interjected with a condescending smile when the monologue had swung around to drunken frat parties and rape accusations. "Women have always been the gatekeepers of sex, this is why we need to make sure we don't lose control of our feminine power. The sexual revolution has not been our friend." Lilian was known for the four inch stilettos she taught in and her controversial research into evolutionary biology. Her smug nostalgia for what amounted to, under the gloss of scholarship, 1950s gender roles irritated me almost as much as Brianna's grim sexlessness.
"Blaming the victim as always, I see," Brianna countered bitterly. And the debate went on.
For the next hour, we listened to Brianna and Lilian each try to outdo the other at marching us all back to the Victorian era. I silently dug into Joel's excellent boeuf en daube, annoyed it wasn't getting the attention it deserved. All the men around the table were looking down at their plates in shame not daring to do more than pick at their food. All except Lilian's husband Sergei, but then he's Russian.
"What do you think?" Brianna turned to me. I guess since I owned a successful business and out-earned Joel by a health margin I was expected to side with her.
I looked over at Carl who was doing his best to become part of the furniture.
"Did you know rape baiting is a thing?" I just wanted her to shut up so we could all go back to slagging Donald Trump and maybe enjoy some tiramisu and brandy. "Look it up. Just the other day some girl on the Internet was talking about going to a bar, pretending to be drunk and teasing some guy into losing control."
Everyone looked up in stunned silence as if I had just confessed to murder.
"Really?" Lilian leaned in a little, ostensibly shocked but obviously salivating. She probably had a stack of cheesy bodice rippers hiding in her underwear drawer in spite of her intellectual pretensions.
"We all know that rape is an extremely popular fantasy for women. I believe over fifty percent admit to having them which makes me suspect the actual number is much higher. Maybe it's some women's version of climbing mountains or jumping out of planes"
"That's absurd," Brianna huffed. "Are you trying to tell me women are asking for it?"
"I don't think it's that easy to rape someone who's determined not to be raped." I shrugged. Of course I knew this wasn't entirely true. Not by a long shot. But I wasn't thinking of some poor girl in a third world village somewhere or a knife wielding psycho's victim. We were talking drunken college boys barely able to find their half finished beers let alone their zippers, hardly life threatening situations. Even the 'rough' online porn I've hunted down on occasion was usually pretty tame. In almost all the cases the girl had to help her assailant along by 'accidentally' moving aside her panties or maneuvering herself into that choke hold. Most men, from what I've seen, are reluctant and inept rapists.
"First of all," I explained, not really knowing where I was going with this but forced to continue by the shocked silence of our guests, "you have to hold the rapee down while getting her pants off. Then you have to get your pants off. All the while forcing her legs apart and making sure she doesn't wiggle out of your grasp. It seems like a lot of work for something so freely offered in these permissive times. That's all I'm saying."
"That's utter bullshit," Brianna puffed out her dumpling of a chest in outrage. She was bound and determined to prove women were weak and stupid.
If someone had said something, if Joel had told me to shut up and go get dessert or had laughed it off as 'that's my crazy wife', I would have stopped right there. But everyone was staring at me, mouths more or less hanging open. There was nothing to do but plunge down the rabbit hole.
"Ok, how about I prove it." Angry now, I downed the last of my wine and stood up. "I'll bet the bottle of Lagavulin 1996 Distillers Edition sitting in our liquor cabinet that not one man at this table can get access to my...ahem...lady parts...without my consent."
Now I'd done it. Joel glared at me like an angry cat and all the other men looked helplessly at their wives for instructions on how to act. The evening was about as uncomfortable as a social event was ever going to get.
"Come on. Who's up for it?" I challenged because it was too late to back down and the not very nice, spiteful me did not want to.