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

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The day that Double X launched, Linda Hirshman wrote an essay 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. 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." 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 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, on his eponymous radio show later that month.