Her Voice

When I was fifteen, I was a child in a woman’s body.

This thought scrolls through my brain, a truth that seems suddenly terrible since I heard the news about a gang rape in Richmond, California, my home state. The rape occurred over a span of two and a half hours, on a high school campus at night after a homecoming game, with bystanders clutching their cell phones, texting friends to come watch the show.

She’d apparently drunk a lot of alcohol, which was the go-ahead signal for a gathering of young men to beat and use her like a dehumanized doll for hours, and for the rest of the crowd to enjoy and promote it like live theatre. I suppose it was live theatre, but not the variety I envisioned for the world in which I hope to grow old.

When I was fifteen, it was 1968, and I was a child in a woman’s body. I know I was, and so were girls who were more sexually advanced. They were simply children in bodies more experienced than mine. We grew up in the days of sexual revolution; that’s what we called it when a girl could choose to have sex before marriage without being branded a harlot for possessing the same urges boys had. It was the first time in our country’s Puritanical history a young woman could do so and discuss it freely with her peers without being publicly derided if word leaked out. I remember having such discussions, the sheer heady rapture of them, even if I wasn’t sure I wanted to participate in the game. Having that choice was the purview of an individual female in my generation, and rape was something cavemen chose, in theory, at least. In practice? Rape did not disappear. Rape has never disappeared, despite our hard won steps toward enlightenment and equality.

There are cavemen still among us, but it’s difficult to fathom why or how. So much has transpired since the dawn of our kind: language, literature, art, music, science, medicine, hygiene, philosophy, psychology, civil rights and equal opportunity legislation. Why would young men act so flagrantly against the cultural and intellectual advances of our species? What would drive them to violate bodies that are the bearers of human life?

I asked the smartest man I know, respect and love, and he thinks the internet, its bottomless grab-bag of pornography, revitalized the myth my generation sought to eradicate, of women as objects for the taking, and sex as something procured. The net has supplied a lightning bolt for the prostrate monster of misogyny. It was almost on its way out, folks, but now, it’s alive! Alive with sadism, masochism, bondage, domination, rough sex, violent sex, snuff videos, bored and belligerent spouses looking for more excitement than marriage provides, singles staying that way because the fantasies are limitless, teenagers writhing in parochial school uniforms, and, lest we forget, bestiality is there, too. Those animals don’t have the brainpower we supposedly do, and I am loath to imagine them victimized, without having intelligible voices to raise against savages.

The victim of the crime in Richmond was fifteen years old, a child in a woman’s body. I wonder what she will say when she finds her voice, when she finally recovers—and I pray that she does—from the savagery visited upon her.

And what about those of us horrified at the image of young men huddled over cell phones, feverishly texting news and photographs of a gang rape in progress, and not one of them calling for help? What shall we say with our voices?