#WhenIGotIt
I’ve been seeing a lot of calls for men who support Dr. Ford to do something, and quite rightly so. To that end, I think sharing our own learning experiences as to what women have to live with might be a good place to start. With any luck, it might make other men think about some things they’ve seen and heard, and what those things really mean.
If the above sounds to you like I’m trying to make it all about men, or all about me, all I can say is, that’s not my intention at all. Quite the contrary. What I do want to do is make other men take a good look at what their fellow human beings have had to live with for a very long time. When did you get it? If you haven’t got it yet, could it be you just didn’t want to?
Right, then. My story.
I spent most of the summer I was 14 at my grandparents’ place. Those of you who know me, know I have something approaching a self-taught PhD in rock and roll history. That summer was when that all began for me, when I discovered the Saturday night oldies show on WFEA back in Manchester. (Like the audiophile in making that I was, I heard dozens of classics for the first time through headphones on the AM station – the closest an eighties kid could get to listening under the cover on a transistor radio back when those songs were new!) Suddenly my head was swimming in all this wonderful music, and I wanted to learn everything I could about it all.
Not knowing if I’d be able to get any decent stations in rural Pennsylvania, I taped half a dozen or so cassettes with new-to-me oldies to tide me over during the trip. (I was right to think that would be a concern: I remember playing with my radio in my bedroom – which had once been my dad’s room – and finding nothing I liked much.)
One of the songs I taped was “Where the Boys Are” by Connie Francis. Utterly of its aggressively innocent time, saccharine as could be, just the sort of thing generations of teenage boys have loved to hate…naturally, I loved it. I can still remember lying in bed at night and listening to that tape in the dark – because that’s what there is to do at night in Mt. Pocono when you’re not old enough to drink – and imagining how wonderful it would be to have someone pining for me like that.
“Till he holds me, I’ll wait impatiently…” Having just finished the trial of ordeal that was (and I’m sure still is) junior high school, I was feeling pretty impatient for something that sweet an innocent myself. I can’t recall if I knew then that such innocence was just as mythical in 1960 as it was in my own time – quite possibly not, and I don’t suppose it was very healthy to wish for something that could never be. But given some of the awful stuff I’d seen my friends from school getting into when they were barely through puberty, the idea of a more innocent time was as irresistible as it was unattainable. I still don’t know anyone who has positive memories of junior high, if it comes to that.
Remember what I said above about wanting to learn all about my new favorite songs and the people behind them? Back home at the end of the summer, I was off to the library and the bookstore to do just that. From there, it didn’t take long for me to learn exactly what my fellow rock history buffs have been screaming at me through their computer screens for the past two paragraphs: in 1974, Connie Francis became one of the world’s most famous rape victims.
I still remember standing there in the aisle of the bookstore with Fred Bronson’s Book of #1 Hits, disbelieving such a thing could have happened. Now, what I thought next was problematic at best and sexist at worst, but please remember I was only fourteen years old: “How could anyone do that to the voice of such beauty and innocence?” I see now how messed up that attitude was – rape is rape no matter what the victim’s lifestyle is or how un-innocent s/he is, and it’s never okay. What I saw then was the very embodiment of all things nice, and someone somewhere out there was “bound and determined to destroy all the gentle” (as a more recent musical hero of mine once put it).
Why?
There was no way I or anyone could answer that. What I did know from that moment on was that rape can happen to anyone, anywhere. Not a nice thing to learn, but as long as it’s a reality that women have to live with every day, I’m glad I learned it relatively early in life.
And yes, I now know the movie Where the Boys Are – for which the song was written – has a rape in it (not to mention that the rapist was a Yalie). There was no IMDB or Wikipedia in 1987 for me to read all about a generation-old teen movie that wasn’t even highly regarded in its own time.
So, guys? When did you get it? How can you help other men get it? Let’s talk.