Ticked-Off Tuesday: Torrington

When I was 12 years old, a college student gave me my first beer. I was sleeping over at a friend's house on New Year's Eve. Her parents were out and her older brother and his friend were getting ready to do the same. I thought the friend was cute. Even though he was legally an adult. Hell, he may have been legally able to buy the beer, I have no idea. What do I remember is that he was older and nice to a couple of 12 year olds and let us have two of his beers before they left.

I thought he was the cutest boy ever. He gave the beers after we begged him to take us to the party he was going to. We had no idea what a party full of high school and college students would be like (we had not yet seen Sixteen Candles) or that, "Take us with you!" could be seen as a come on. Lucky for us, he said no. Giving us a couple of beers, sure. Taking us around a bunch of drunk teenagers? No. Taking advantage of our obvious crushes? No.

I haven't thought about that crush, or my first beer, in years. But when I heard the story about the 13 year old girls from Torrington and the 18 year old football players, I remembered.

That is a child, people. 

I feel like sending him a thank you letter. 

I don't know what happened to those girls in Torrington - whether they consented or not. Even if they did consent, they were not fucking old enough to do so. But I do know that they don't deserve all the victim blaming they're getting. When people say, "Why were they hanging around with 18 year old guys?" I want to scream. 

I was lucky that the 18 year old guys I knew at 12, 13 and 14 - the ones I had crushes on, the ones that maybe could have persuaded me to do things I had no business doing - were not rapists. 

Why isn't everyone asking, "Why were those 18 year olds hanging around 13 year olds?" What kind of guys do that? 

But once again, teenagers are so brainwashed that they're defending the rapists and attacking the victims. 

WTF?

I think it's time to overhaul our sexual education curricula. 

Ticked Off Tuesday: A Douchebag Dad

Last year, our Y sponsored a "Healthy Kids" Day. We went because it was free and the weather was crappy. The kids had a great time - there was an obstacle course and a climbing wall and a dance party. Also, there was hardly anyone there. The kids went around and around the obstacle course and the boys were total stars on the dance floor.

I don't know who took over media relations for the Y, but whoever it was did a much better job promoting this year's event. It was packed. Which made it kind of suck.

We had to wait in a huge line for the obstacle course. The group in front of us, which doubled in size while we waited, was an assortment of parents and kids. Two of the boys wrestled each other, which the parents ignored.

During the wrestling, they knocked into Ironflower. I didn't see it, distracted by the mom behind us, whose daughter had gone to preschool with Lovebug and whose name I can never remember until five hours after I see her (FYI, yes, I remember it now).

Instead of apologizing, one of them bumped her again. Hot Guy looked at the Dad, who said, "He's a hockey player, that's what he does." For real. No apology. Hot Guy exhibited massive self-control and did not demand an apology, thereby avoiding a fight in the middle of the Y.

I mean, I suppose the guy thought that explaining that his son was a hockey player was an apology.

So, maybe, if I ran over him with my car, I could tell him that I'm a racecar driver? Or maybe I should have let Hot Guy punch him, and then explained that Hot Guy is a boxer?

And we wonder why high school athletes can turn out to be entitled assholes. I mean, this kid was no more than 8 and he was already being trained that other people don't count. When Hot Guy updated me on the whole situation, it was all I could do not to start yelling at the Dad myself. Lovebug has friends who play hockey and their parents would NEVER let them knock into someone else without apologizing, unless they were ACTUALLY playing hockey at that moment.

Of course, I shouldn't be surprised - the dad was wearing basketball shorts, despite the fact that it was 36 degrees outside. His sweatshirt and baseball cap matched. He never spoke to his daughter. He might as well have had a sign saying "Douchebag" around his neck.

If I could, I would let him know that many hockey players are perfectly polite people off the ice. That they don't go around checking people, especially people who are just standing there minding their own business. That the hockey players I knew in college - some of whom won medals in the Olympics and some of whom played professionally - did things like apologize when they bumped into you.

I have never dealt with a parent like Douchebag Dad before. Even when I taught in schools where the  parents didn't flinch when you told them their kid had called you a bitch or threatened another student, they still made their kids apologize. Even when I had parents who were totally drunk or high, they would make their kids apologize for knocking into other people. Even at schools where the kids told me their parents would sue me for making them miss recess, I never saw a parent just let their kid act like that toward other kids.

GRRRRR.

Ticked Off Tuesday: Angry

If you are friends with me on Facebook, you might have noticed that I've been posting a lot about the Steubenville case. Or rather, the world's reaction to it.

I am angry.

Not so much at the rapists. I mean, I am no more angry at them than I am at any other rapist. What they did was terrible, but unfortunately, it is not all that uncommon. (Don't want to believe me? Read this post. Or this one. Or this one. I'm not going to keep going, though I so easily could.)

A lot of us were drunk when we were raped.

So the takeaway (the victim-blaming) is that women, especially young women, shouldn't drink. Especially at parties where young men are around.

I find this interesting, because I used to get drunk a lot. Working it out mathematically, it seems that I was raped far less than one percent of the times I was drunk. Something like 1 in 800 times. Which is far less than my chances of dying in a car accident or a fall, but no one is saying that people shouldn't drive cars or stand up.

The other thing we should note is that while some people are raped while drunk, not every person who is raped is drunk. Plenty of sober people get raped too. In fact, the National Institutes of Health say one half of the people who are raped are sober.

So even if young women never got drunk at parties, there would still be rapes.

But it would be so much harder to blame the victim if every victim was sober, wouldn't it?

Do you know what EVERY SINGLE RAPE VICTIM* has in common? Sober or drunk?

Being around a rapist.

The tragedy for those young men of Steubenville is not that they got caught committing a crime. It is not that their futures are ruined. It's not that their families are sad.

It's that these young men with good grades and sports abilities and other blessings thought it was okay to rape someone. They thought that raping a drunk girl was funny. The tragedy is that they were so completely able to dehumanize another human being, not that they can't play college football.

I am angry.

I am angry that we are not telling our sons, maybe you shouldn't drink, because then you might dehumanize another person. Why are we not emphasizing that not only does no mean no, but that silence means no? Drunk means no. "I'm not sure" means no.

I am angry at every person who says, "Well, those boys were drunk too." As I mentioned before, I've been drunk a lot. I have done stupid things while drunk. But I never killed anybody, much as my drunk self may have wanted to, because I knew that was wrong. I knew that in the marrow of my bones. I never robbed a bank while drunk, or even stole easily accessible money. Even when I was drunk and broke. Because I knew it my bones that it was wrong.

Why didn't these boys know in their bones that raping this girl was wrong?

Why didn't anyone else around them?

I am angry.

I am angry that we still have to talk about this in 2013. I am angry that victim blaming is so pervasive, other young women are threatening her. I am angry that we live in a country where people think anyone ASKS to be raped.

Are people with cars asking to be carjacked? Are people with wallets asking to be mugged? Are people who own things asking to be robbed? Are people who talk asking to get punched by people who disagree with them?

I am angry that the supposedly liberal media is more worried about the rapists than the victim*.



*Hey media folks, did you know that when something bad happens to someone, that person is a victim? People who get mugged are not "assault accusers". People whose homes get flooded are not "flood accusers". People who get raped are VICTIMS (and survivors), not accusers. 

Ticked Off Tuesday: Stomach Virus, The Sequel

Approximately a month ago, we got a stomach virus. Everyone had it, everyone felt like shit (heh) for like two days. I thought I would never stop doing the laundry. Or taking out garbage bags of ick. But I remember (naively) thinking, "Well, at least that's over for this year." I mean, our living room - despite my mad cleaning - smelled like vomit for like a week.

Was that too much information?

Who wants to come over?

Anyway, guess what happened on Saturday? Ironflower got a stomach virus. Poor kid threw up in the car because Hot Guy and I are terrible parents and didn't take her seriously. Also, we wanted to bring her to Super Science Saturday, which was held at my old high school.

That was weird.

What happened instead was that we took her to my parents' house, cleaned out the car and then just took the boys to the science thing. I highly recommend Super Science Saturday, but not as much if you are an RHS alum. Because it's weird. They changed things. And yet you'll still know your way around. And there might be kids doing lights and whatnot in the theater and you'll wander in and want to spend time in there instead of the science thing but you won't because you're an adult now, dammit.

Lego motor thingies. Junior robotics? 

Lovebug got to set off one of the rockets. He really wanted his sister to see it. 

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, the fucking stomach virus picking on my little girl. She's not throwing up anymore, but she's still not herself. She couldn't even sit up for her brother's birthday dinner Sunday! I mean, she refused cake. This sucks.

She just went through this a month ago, poor baby.

And usually when she gets sick, she bounces back the quickest. So if we do all get this? The rest of us will probably feel horrible for like a week at a time.

Die, stomach virus, die.

Ticked Off Tuesday: Freedom Edition

If you listen to conservatives these days, you hear a lot about freedom. And how the Obama administration is infringing upon it. And I want to ask them, how are you less free now than you were?

Can you still vote?

Marry the person you love? 

Wear what you want to wear?

Buy what you want to buy?

Target shoot?

Hunt? 

Drive what car you want to drive? 

Attend the church the you want? 

Choose which medical procedures to undergo? 

Have Viagra covered by your insurance company?

Get a vasectomy without harassment? 

You see, freedom lovers, some people - some citizens of this very country that you claim to love - are not free to do these things. Gay citizens can't marry the people they love in most states. Female citizens can't wear what they want to wear without fear of harassment (racial if they cover up in a hijab, sexual if they dress however you assume "sluts" dress) or being blamed for their own rapes. Citizens without driver's licenses aren't allowed to vote in some areas. Citizens who don't believe in God have to swear on a Bible in court, see "God" on their money and hear it in their pledge of allegiance. Citizens who need birth control pills, which aren't even always for birth control, can't get them because of their insurance company or because they don't live near a Planned Parenthood. I could go on, but I'm hoping you get my point. 

You don't really give a shit about freedom, do you? You like to yell that Obama's a tyrant, but what you're really pissed off about is that he wants EVERYONE to feel free, not just you. 

You want to be free from things that make you uncomfortable, be they gay families, loud women, sexually empowered women, atheists, people of color who don't sound just like you and who knows what else. 

You love to talk about our Founding Fathers and what they wanted for this country. None of them could see into the future, so it's pretty hard to strictly interpret their intentions in a world with electricity, cars, the internet, nuclear weapons and Lena Dunham. 

One thing, though, that you need to remember about our Founding Fathers is that they were revolutionaries. Actual revolutionaries. Extraordinarily progressive for their time. 

Do you think they would have wanted the country to go backwards? Or stay exactly the same? Really? 

They talked this being a Christian nation because they literally didn't know anyone who wasn't a Christian. Can you say the same? 

They talked about (white) men being created equal because that was a COMPLETELY RADICAL notion at the time - it doesn't mean they meant for the country to stay for white men only. 

You hate the changes in our country and want to run to Glenn Beck's fortified town in Idaho? Go ahead. But don't pretend the Founding Fathers would have been proud of you, or that you're standing up for freedom in your walled city where the citizens are required to be armed. 

Ticked Off Tuesday 2

I don't have a rant for you this week. WTF, right? I'm sure something extremely ranty will happen after this posts, but right now I have nothing.

Well, not nothing. I'm still me, for the love of bacon. So instead of a rant, I give you a list. . .

1. Why does 30 Rock have to be over? Do the powers that be not understand how difficult it is to get Hot Guy to watch a comedy? Don't network execs understand that TV without Tina Fey is wrong?

2. Why is Buckwild always on when everything else is on commercials? It's like MTV is purposely fucking with me.

3. Hugmonkey needs to learn that if I'm letting him watch TV, he's supposed to be letting me work.

4. Fuck you, unnamed company that wanted only people born after 1980 for your stupid sponsored posts.

5. How can people still not understand how the school drop-off line works? I thought the ever-cool and classy principal was going to lose it the other morning. Do people really not understand that their actions affect others? Especially the others who are lined up behind them?

6. Freezing rain is the devil.

Ticked Off Tuesday*

So Elizabeth Banks said having two kids makes her feel like a real mom. You could just hear the whole internet going. . . .

Did that bitch just insult my choices? Is she implying I'm not a REAL MOM? Kill her!

Or something like that. I only read the article and skimmed the comments.

I think the "Kill her!" part was merely implied. By hundreds of people who were very upset that Ms. Banks seems to think that having only one child doesn't make you a real mom. Technically, I should be upset on behalf of my mother, who, despite having only one child, was definitely a real mother. Except that I don't think my mother would waste her time being bothered by this statement. She knows she was a real mother - ask her about all the times she had to take me to the pediatrician in an average year.

Totally real mother of one in this picture. Just look at those roots. 

It ticks me off that people are so insecure about motherhood that they can get insulted over anything.

I didn't FEEL like a real mother until Lovebug was two years old and I handled a supermarket meltdown calmly. I had been a real mother for more than 3 years at that point - nursing, getting up in the middle of the night, changing diapers, getting thrown up on - but it wasn't until then that I felt like one.

This is not to say that if I'd had only one child, I never would have felt like a real mother. I'm sure Ironflower would have provided me a moment to feel like a "real mother" eventually. My point is that when we ARE real mothers and when we FEEL like them are two different things. If it took Elizabeth Banks two kids and time without a nanny to feel it, why does it matter to the rest of us?






*I know that I rant a lot. I have decided to accept it instead of letting it boil up until it explodes with like ten rants in the space of a week. So welcome to my new weekly feature, "Ticked Off Tuesday." Feel free to put your own rant in the comments. I may have tried this before. I can't remember, so I'm assuming you can't either.