I STAND ACCUSED…..AND RESPOND.

After my recent article in Communities Magazine, entitled “Agreements and Individuality, The Farm’s ‘Multistery’, and My Shotgun Wedding,” the editor received this letter:

In his article in the summer issue, Martin Holsinger writes: “I didn’t realize that I had bought into a belief system that increasingly resulted in my committing what we now call sexual assault and date rape.” After making that statement, he never goes on to apologize to the women that he assaulted or raped. I found it offensive for him to blame his behavior on “the culture around me” when, in fact, he still remembered that his mother had told him “make sure your partner is having a good time,” which is a pretty good definition of consent, for that era. Just because what he was doing might not have been called sexual assault or rape at that time doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong and harmful to the women involved. The President of the Royal Spanish Football Federation is losing his job over a forced kiss. It sounds like Martin Holsinger has gotten away with much more. I call on Martin Holsinger to publish an apology in these pages to the women he assaulted or raped. I’m sure they have never forgotten.

I wrote a short response for publication, and promised a longer response on my blog, and here it is. If you want the short version, you can find it in the comments at my recent post, “My Shotgun Wedding.”

Dear Ms. C

Thank you for your concern. I’d like to begin by clarifying what I meant when I wrote “what we now call sexual assault and date rape.” It has to do with the change in what is meant by “consent” over the last fifty-five years. In the sixties, “consent” meant “not saying no,” while these days it means “explicitly saying yes.” I think this is a great improvement in many ways, and helps lessen the likelihood of unpleasant surprises when two people are in an extremely open and vulnerable mode.

I should also make it clear that whenever I got a verbal or behavioral “no,” I respected it, but, as we both are aware, sometimes people will not say “no,” when they would like to, and the truth only emerges after the fact. That was what I was referring to in my article. I certainly never forced anybody to kiss me, much less anything more intimate. After the intervention I described, I reached out to as many of the women I felt I had been pushy with as I could find, and apologized. They numbered about a half-dozen, including the ones I couldn’t find It was the sixties. People didn’t have email addresses or phones–it was “Mary Doe, General Delivery, Smalltown, California,” and you had no idea if they were still there or ever stopped by the post office. I thought I made it clear from the rest of what I wrote that I repented, but I can’t control what those who read my writings read into, or fail to understand, in them. I will say that, fifty-five years after these events, my memories of them are still wince-worthy. Perhaps I should have included all that in the article, but it was already long by Communities Magazine standards.

In spite of the hit-or-miss nature of communication back then, I did hear back from some of the women to whom I was apologizing,, mostly along the lines of “NOW you’re saying you’re sorry!!??,” but also one who said she didn’t know what I was talking about, as she remembered our encounter quite warmly.

I mentioned what my mother told me about sex. I didn’t mention what my father told me about sex, because my father never told me anything about sex, how to treat women, or what it means to be a man. I should also mention that my parents’ marriage, and thus my very existence, are the result of their failure to communicate before becoming sexually involved. My mother grew up in radical Jewish circles in New York City, and my father was a Protestant from a small, deeply conservative town in Ohio. To my mother, sex was something friends could enjoy together. To my father, a woman opening herself to a man meant she wanted to marry him, and thus my father felt honor-bound to ask my mother to marry him once they had Done The Deed. Their marriage only lasted ten years, and was clearly in big trouble after only five. In his privately circulated autobiography, my father called marrying my mother   “the biggest mistake I made in my life.” Thanks, Dad, for your honesty, if not your blessing.

My father’s failure to communicate with me about values and behavior is not just about one conservative Midwesterner who didn’t want to talk about such things, and maybe didn’t know what to say. Behind that lies the oft-remarked fact that our culture has no serious rites of passage into adulthood, as all “primitive” cultures do, and that we are spiritually impoverished by that lack. Australian aborigines ritually and ceremonially mutilated their pubescent boys and sent them off into the desert to make it on their own until they were fully healed from the mutilation. In pre-Christian Europe, young men were sent into the forest to “live like wolves,” sleeping outside and eating only raw meat, for a year. Young teenagers in some New Guinea tribes have, or perhaps at this point had, to give blow jobs to older boys–and swallow, so as to absorb their manliness. Tribal people all over the world have, or in most cases these days, had, some kind of ordeal that young men had to survive in order to be considered men.