Dating : “You know I could rape you right now and no one would hear you scream,” he told me on our first…

“You know I could rape you right now and no one would hear you scream,” he told me on our first date. He was smiling.’

Heather, those two first sentences are so ominous they send chills down the back of my neck, and yet they sound so familiar. I can hear them and see it all happening now. I think — know — a lot of women will relate to the seething violence in this piece, the spoken, and sometimes unspoken, threat. And the fact that sometimes when the men who do or say these things — because sometimes they just say such things without following up with a physical assault — they think it’s funny. I can hear them laughing now. And the violence within that is the veiled threat, the promise that ‘I could do this to you, if I wanted to; if I chose it. It’s up to me and there’s nothing you could do about it. No one would hear you scream.’

I like to read pieces that surprise me. Not necessarily in terms of what happens — I mean it’s great if I’m reading something I’m entirely unfamiliar with. I like that — but in terms of the way it’s said. Even more, I like to read something that is familiar to me in terms of experience, or relatability, even if it hasn’t happened to me, but that is original in terms of the way it is expressed. Your writing has that. It grabs my attention and shakes me up and yet it all rings true.

This is an important piece for young girls and the boys they date, will date, to read, and it’s an important piece for men and women to read, for different reasons. The first to educate them about what not to do, the second to commune about the things that happened in the past, that happen now, and that need to happen no longer.

Am glad I read this piece. A good choice for a read. Even better that you wrote it. Thank you for the incisive nature of your writing.

(On a separate note, you now, I meant to respond to you about that ‘trolling on the internet’ piece, but I never got to. Yes, it might have been a troll. It seemed like an angry, racist misogynist who hated the idea of interracial dating , but you never know. He/she could have been any or all of those things, or maybe just a hateful person who had their own warped view of interracial dating and just wants a person of the opposite race to crap on. Hopefully they fade into the twilight or at least keep their hate out of your space. And then again, sometimes we need to see it, read it, so we can confront it and shed a little light on the ignorance.)

Thanks again for this excellent piece.