Moe Tkacik: Why I Didn't Report My Date Rape

The day that Double X launched, Linda Hirshman wrote an essay [2] in which she rehashed a much-maligned interview I did last summer as part of a show called "Thinking and Drinking." On that show, I talked about not reporting my college date rape, and Hirshman took me to task: "How can writers who justify not reporting rape criticize the military for not controlling ... rape?"

I am a business journalist who was driven by financial necessity into the Hobbesian field of stay-at-home punditry known as professional blogging. Hirshman, a celebrated author, lawyer, and philosophy professor, used my date-rape non-reportage as part of a larger indictment of the current state of feminism, and the website I used to blog for, Jezebel.com [3]. That someone with my resume would be capable of (almost completely inadvertently) capturing the interest of someone like Linda is one of the few perks of submitting oneself to the draining, malodorous conditions of the blogging industry. I should be totally stoked to have gotten myself into a flame war with a person of such distinction. And in any other case, over any other issue, I am sure I would be.

I do not know how exactly I wound up agreeing to appear on "Thinking and Drinking," a small New York comedy production hosted by comedian and political satirist Lizz Winstead under the rubric of something aptly called "Shoot The Messenger Productions [4]." The thing was mostly coordinated by my friend and Jezebel colleague Tracie Egan, who is also named in Hirshman's condemnation of Jezebel. One producer, a daily reader of Jezebel, told us she and Winstead felt the site represented a new class of emerging media outlets that "got it," and wanted to interview us about sex, pop culture, and politics. Tracie said the latter was my beat, and the two of us agreed to handle the show together.

I showed up skittish after a day at the blog, was handed two beers and instructed to get drunk, and imbibed them while watching a political comedy show and waiting anxiously for Tracie to arrive. Before long we were onstage joking about sex. Winstead asked Tracie if she believed abortion was an ideal form of contraception; Tracie said the pullout method was a lot less painful; Winstead offered that she'd had a sufficient number of abortions to be warrant the pet name "Terminator 3" and reminisced about a more promiscuous era during which she offered sex to men as a quid pro quo for their assistance moving boxes in the morning.

Suddenly Winstead wanted to know how we balanced our "sexual freedom" with the fact that "it's not always safe to just have a free, 100 percent total sexual life."

That's when I offered that during a more promiscuous era, I had gone home with a guy when I'd been locked out of my house and gotten date-raped. Winstead refilled our wine cups a few more times and demanded to know why I hadn't reported the incident to police, and in a clumsy and drink-addled attempt to inject humor back into the conversation, I replied that I'd had "better things to do, like drinking more," a comment that Winstead would highlight in a furious post on her Huffington Post blog [5] the next week.

From there my statements would go on to scandalize pundits right and left, professional and amateur. On the PBS program "To The Contrary," the Heritage Foundation's Genevieve Wood would concur with Women's Campaign Forum President Ilana Goldman's assessment that my performance "reflect[ed] badly on women as a class." Subdued but never vanquished by such competing memes as the collapse of the global financial system, the conflict would flare up again in December, when New York magazine would use it to peg a trend piece on women and drinking in a passage Leonard Lopate would repeat, aghast [6], on his eponymous radio show later that month.

I called into Lopate's show, and I asked him, what do you think I meant when I talked about why I didn't report a date rape in college? Did it strike you as serious? "It sounded awful to me, I gotta tell you Moe," he said. "It said to me ‘I'm willing to put myself in a dangerous situation again.'"

But then I repeated some contextual details: A comedy show. Called "Thinking and Drinking." A disarmingly serious question. About something that had happened 10 years earlier. To a younger, former self. The New York writer offered that she felt it was "tongue-in-cheek."

Suddenly Lopate got it. "It was in the same kind of spirit that when people used to ask me when I was a smoker if I knew about cancer, and I would say, 'please don't make me nervous, I'm going to need another cigarette,' and I thought that was witty at the time," he said. Yes, exactly!

"Now I think I was being an idiot, but that's a whole other matter."

Suddenly drawn to the pack of Parliaments on my coffee table, I said, "People make short-term decisions all the time that counteract their long-term interests ... I mean, that is just life ..."

Next caller.

Which is, of course, part of the answer to Hirshman's (rhetorical?) question: "How can women supposedly acting freely and powerfully keep turning up tales of vulnerability—repulsive sexual partners, pregnancy, STDs, even rape?" Yes, drinking is fun, and sex feels better without a condom. Our long-term and short-term desires are locked in permanent conflict with one another, and then you die.

In truth I didn't report my date rapists for a whole slew of reasons. Because I remembered events only well enough to find them more insulting than traumatizing. Namely, because I chewed him out in the morning and told everyone I knew. And after I chewed him out and things calmed down, he asked me about my job at the local newspaper, where at the time I covered murders and drug busts and violent, non-date rapes committed by sociopathic serial rapists who preyed on crack addicted hookers whose mangled bodies eventually turned up in state parks.

That was another thing I was busy with that summer, logging enough hours in various outposts of the Philadelphia criminal justice system to know much better than my date rapist the odds that a case against him would hold up in grand jury: absolute zero [7].

I could have said that to Winstead, and added that there are probably more productive ways to shame douchebag frat boys than volunteering to testify in court about something rather unmemorable that happened while you were passed out drunk. The problem with my date rapist seemed to be fundamentally less a deliberate act than a sin of omission, a disregard of the lives or desires of anyone but himself.

So I told him about this housewife I knew who ministered to junkies in the worst slums of the cities, and how American drug policy is so totally fucked up it is willing to pay three or four times the cost of rehab to incarcerate addicts and petty drug criminals when the white collar fraudsters like Michael Milken had school buildings named after them. And I lit up a cigarette, and he told me not to smoke because his father had had lung cancer.

In retrospect it is funny that he would castigate me for smoking so soon after "victimizing" me. But my first impulse, and maybe this is a woman thing, was to feel lucky for my own dad's good health and remember how shit happens to everyone, and how much worse it could be. I never ended up quitting, though. Maybe Hirshman can get a column out of that.

Photograph of Maureen Tkacik courtesy of the author.

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