Friday, June 8, 2007 at 1:01am
Rape starts with a thought
Column: Interesting Times
Since last fall there have been 10 reported rapes in Santa Fe. Last week a woman was raped in a downtown hotel parking lot, another in her home. Police seem to not have a clue, but the city now gives free taxi rides to women going home alone and escorts to and from darkened parking lots. Therapists in the city say the rapes are at the forefront of consciousness in all their women patients.
Stay with me here while I tell a small personal story and trace a thought about rape.
The story: Over a year ago, as I was minding my own business in the corner of the last pew of church, a man slipped in beside me and asked if I would share the printed Bible text readings with him. Of course. Then, after church in the parking lot, he asked me if I was going to be around for Christmas, winked at me and said he would call. I found the wink untoward — I had neither a "conspiracy" nor an understanding with him. Later I asked someone in the congregation what the name of the man was and heard that his wife had passed on six weeks earlier. Poor lost soul, I thought. I know what grief and loss are like, the feeling of being scattered, adrift and desperately needing some human contact. My son, my son had died.
So when the man, let's call him C.A., did call and ask me to dinner, I said yes as a "do unto others." But before that dinner he sent me a book of Browning love poems. "A bit forward, inappropriate, don't you think?" said Masami. "What?" said Hannah. "Look at the inscription," said Kristin. In ink, it said: "To lover, friend, life-partner, and The Big Guy is on our side." All from sitting next to him for one hour on a church pew? Hmmmmmmmm. "Who still calls God 'The Big Guy'?" was one thing that crossed my mind, and the other — a rebuke to myself to be charitable and kind to those of differing styles. Maybe he was a man of integrity and meant it all?
We did have dinner, and it was clear to me, even on the drive to the restaurant when he called me "his girl," that this was someone so involved with self and appearances that all the air was sucked out of the car. Fine. I could bear to be friendly and charitable until he saw his way out of the grief. Until he started phoning me at 6 or 7 in the morning with: "You are lucky I don't come over there right now and jump in bed with you." The first time he did this, I was so shocked I said nothing. The second time, I wondered how to be kind but get rid of him. The third time, I told him not to call me, that I felt intruded upon, violated by those calls.
Fast Forward: After some time of what I considered a mitzvah — half a dozen dinners scattered over a few months and a horseback ride — I exited from any contact as gracefully as I could. It wasn't that he had had three wives, that for him there was no global warming, only a liberal plot, that he drove a Cadillac. He was a narcissist and only able to talk about and turn the conversation to himself. I was relieved when he said he would be gone on business for a long time, that he had to "work on building his estate" as he had no money to take a wife. He could "save face," and I was relieved of any possible fear that I would be a heartbreaker. Spared and Good Deed done.
It had been a long, long time since I had seen or talked to him, and I had forgotten about him. Then, this week, a letter. Six pages on Crane's stationery, black ink, all the trappings of respectability. He had been ill, he said, male problems, but was better. He was writing to tell me he didn't think he could marry me because "I like hiking and the outdoors and you read books." Would I go out with him this Saturday?
I didn't sleep all night. Anger, confusion, frustration, discord, the list of presumptuous things he assumed his right, how could I have not made it clear that I was offering religious agape, while he was thinking in body image. I went through it all in a sleepless night, but about 3 a.m., or "the dark night of the soul," it dawned on me. C.A., the "respectable, church-going" businessman, had exactly the same thoughts as the rapists — intruding on a woman alone at home, projecting his sexual fantasies and alleged needs on another. While the "respectable, church-going" man in the Brooks Brothers suit could use the phone, could slip in and out of society as "desirable," the rapist with the black ski mask slipped in and out of homes and parking lots.
Thoughts roam around the globe. Things are thoughts. The thoughts of C.A. (and whatever other men find themselves in the same category) find expression in the acts of the masked rapist roaming through the city. Do men like C.A. ever think their thoughts are criminal — that their thoughts will find a home in a vagrant thought?
I screen my calls. Will he screen his thoughts and make Santa Fe a safer place?
— — —
Lynne Bundesen is the author of five books on religion, of which "The Feminine Spirit: Recapturing the Heart of Scripture" is the latest. Her email address is {email lynnebundesen@hotmail.com}lynnebundesen@hotmail.com{/email}. © copyright 2007 by Lynne Bundesen.
Stay with me here while I tell a small personal story and trace a thought about rape.
The story: Over a year ago, as I was minding my own business in the corner of the last pew of church, a man slipped in beside me and asked if I would share the printed Bible text readings with him. Of course. Then, after church in the parking lot, he asked me if I was going to be around for Christmas, winked at me and said he would call. I found the wink untoward — I had neither a "conspiracy" nor an understanding with him. Later I asked someone in the congregation what the name of the man was and heard that his wife had passed on six weeks earlier. Poor lost soul, I thought. I know what grief and loss are like, the feeling of being scattered, adrift and desperately needing some human contact. My son, my son had died.
So when the man, let's call him C.A., did call and ask me to dinner, I said yes as a "do unto others." But before that dinner he sent me a book of Browning love poems. "A bit forward, inappropriate, don't you think?" said Masami. "What?" said Hannah. "Look at the inscription," said Kristin. In ink, it said: "To lover, friend, life-partner, and The Big Guy is on our side." All from sitting next to him for one hour on a church pew? Hmmmmmmmm. "Who still calls God 'The Big Guy'?" was one thing that crossed my mind, and the other — a rebuke to myself to be charitable and kind to those of differing styles. Maybe he was a man of integrity and meant it all?
We did have dinner, and it was clear to me, even on the drive to the restaurant when he called me "his girl," that this was someone so involved with self and appearances that all the air was sucked out of the car. Fine. I could bear to be friendly and charitable until he saw his way out of the grief. Until he started phoning me at 6 or 7 in the morning with: "You are lucky I don't come over there right now and jump in bed with you." The first time he did this, I was so shocked I said nothing. The second time, I wondered how to be kind but get rid of him. The third time, I told him not to call me, that I felt intruded upon, violated by those calls.
Fast Forward: After some time of what I considered a mitzvah — half a dozen dinners scattered over a few months and a horseback ride — I exited from any contact as gracefully as I could. It wasn't that he had had three wives, that for him there was no global warming, only a liberal plot, that he drove a Cadillac. He was a narcissist and only able to talk about and turn the conversation to himself. I was relieved when he said he would be gone on business for a long time, that he had to "work on building his estate" as he had no money to take a wife. He could "save face," and I was relieved of any possible fear that I would be a heartbreaker. Spared and Good Deed done.
It had been a long, long time since I had seen or talked to him, and I had forgotten about him. Then, this week, a letter. Six pages on Crane's stationery, black ink, all the trappings of respectability. He had been ill, he said, male problems, but was better. He was writing to tell me he didn't think he could marry me because "I like hiking and the outdoors and you read books." Would I go out with him this Saturday?
I didn't sleep all night. Anger, confusion, frustration, discord, the list of presumptuous things he assumed his right, how could I have not made it clear that I was offering religious agape, while he was thinking in body image. I went through it all in a sleepless night, but about 3 a.m., or "the dark night of the soul," it dawned on me. C.A., the "respectable, church-going" businessman, had exactly the same thoughts as the rapists — intruding on a woman alone at home, projecting his sexual fantasies and alleged needs on another. While the "respectable, church-going" man in the Brooks Brothers suit could use the phone, could slip in and out of society as "desirable," the rapist with the black ski mask slipped in and out of homes and parking lots.
Thoughts roam around the globe. Things are thoughts. The thoughts of C.A. (and whatever other men find themselves in the same category) find expression in the acts of the masked rapist roaming through the city. Do men like C.A. ever think their thoughts are criminal — that their thoughts will find a home in a vagrant thought?
I screen my calls. Will he screen his thoughts and make Santa Fe a safer place?
— — —
Lynne Bundesen is the author of five books on religion, of which "The Feminine Spirit: Recapturing the Heart of Scripture" is the latest. Her email address is {email lynnebundesen@hotmail.com}lynnebundesen@hotmail.com{/email}. © copyright 2007 by Lynne Bundesen.