Dear Tell All: I’ve closely followed the #MeToo movement and the Brett Kavanaugh sexual-assault allegations, sharing the outrage of my wife and my female friends. Little did I suspect that I would be yet another man swept up in the controversy.
It started during the Kavanaugh confirmation process. On a Facebook group for my college class, a woman posted a story about something that happened during freshman year. She didn’t name the men involved, but I immediately knew that I was one of them.
We lived on a coed floor, and the males flirted with the females pretty aggressively. My guy friends and I thought it was funny, and the women basically enjoyed it, too. We were relentless about making suggestive comments, and they turned it back on us with relentlessly witty insults. All in good fun.
I admit that the incident cited on Facebook took our flirting to the limit. After a late night of drinking, a male friend and I came back to the floor and saw this woman heading down the hall to the bathroom. We noticed that she’d left her door open a crack, so on a whim we snuck into her room and got under her covers while her roommate slept in the top bunk. When she returned from the bathroom, we popped up in the dark and pulled her into the bed for a mock hookup — emphasis on “mock.” We were laughing and clearly intended no harm. She laughed too, if I remember correctly. The whole thing probably lasted 30 seconds before my buddy and I left for our own rooms.
That was the end of it. She never said anything to us about the incident, and we all remained friends. We certainly never heard a word from school authorities. But now, in this Facebook post, she claims she was violated and traumatized.
As sympathetic as I am to #MeToo, I can’t help but see this as a stretch. She knows the horseplay was part of a yearlong joke — a joke she participated in at the time. Now I’m terrified that she’ll get around to naming names. Word could get out that I’m a rapist, God forbid, with devastating consequences for my family and my career.
How can I avoid that injustice?
Innocent
Dear Innocent: You may be sympathetic to #MeToo, my friend, but you’re in denial about your college friend’s distress and your responsibility for it.
I’m sure she didn’t use words like “violated” and “trauma” lightly. Is it hard for you to imagine her terror when two drunk guys popped up in the dark and grabbed her? Is it hard for you to understand the social pressures that kept her from confronting you and going to school authorities?
I suspect you’re flattering yourself by thinking that your female dorm mates “basically enjoyed” your aggressive flirting. My guess is that the women put up with you and your buddies because they had no choice, deflecting your obnoxious behavior as best they could.
It’s telling that, even now, your only concern is for yourself and your reputation. I didn’t see a word in your letter indicating empathy for your female friend.
If I were you, Innocent, I’d contact her, apologize for what you did, and express sympathy for her suffering. If that’s not enough, and she decides to name names, you’ll have to deal with the consequences.
Finally.
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