That Rapist Feeling

At some point in time, I suppose that I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that I am a rapist. No, this is not some kind of very strange Internet confession of a crime, and I have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever sexually assaulted anyone. If you are an officer of the law and are reading this thinking “We got one!,” you’re likely to be disappointed. Rather, it seems to me that I send off some kind of invisible signal, perhaps some kind of rapist scent, that flags me as a potential threat to women.

A short while back over this long winter break, I was crossing the street to Albertsons, and a young woman was standing at the crosswalk with me. This is usually the part of my day that I would have thought nothing about. However, as the two of us were crossing the street, the young woman started moving with a quicker pace, and then went around the rear of a car out of the cross walk. She was determined to go the long way. Now, at first, I would assume that she did this to maybe shortcut her way to the Starbucks on the far corner or some other valid, non-fear-for-her-life reason. However, the cynic in me quickly chimed in that I would see her again at the Albertsons when I arrived. And as I arrived at the entrance and looked to my right at the other entrance, there she was entering the Albertsons at the exact same time. She had chosen to go the long way around, through the parking lot, in the rain, in order to avoid me.

Kyle Bishop Abides, But Doesn't Rape

Truth be told, I wasn’t looking my best that day. It was in fact raining and dark out. And since I had just stepped out to grab something quick from the store, I wore my cheapest flip-flops. I was unshaven, and if I had pajamas on I would have probably looked a little something like a version of The Dude. I also came down my usual way, sliding down the side of a small hill from my building so I’m sure I appeared suddenly and unexpectedly on the sidewalk. However, flip-flops are hardly the optimal raping shoe in a rain storm. Aside from being not groomed and proper, I hardly thought as I walked out the door that I might raise the red flag of paranoid women everywhere.

And then, for added strangeness, I had to see this woman constantly while in the grocery store. It was a grocery store after all, and as I grabbed a sinful package of Twinkies while she was at the other end of the same isle I had to wonder if buying Twinkies raised or lowered my rapist score to her. Every part of my overactive imagination was trying to get inside this woman’s mind to see where the rationalization had come from to step far out of her way to avoid me. Perhaps, I should have shrugged of this incident as mere coincidence, or the act of a single frightened woman on a rainy night. I would have done that, however this instance was not singular. At times in the full sun when I have been (at least to my low standards) dressed to the nines, women have at this same crosswalk and other similar occasions, walked with their greatest strength to avoid me. The only way they could make their evasion more obvious would be to take one look at me, and run at full speed in the other direction while desperately attempting to dial 911 or at least post “Help! Rapist!” on Facebook.

I must assume that, at some point, all the women that I’ve met and befriended must have gone through some similar process. Each one in turn going through an inner monologue of  ”Well, he seems like a rapist… I could mace him just to be safe…” and then finally breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t waste perfectly good mace on someone who wasn’t a rapist. How any of them are able to overcome their own intuitive fear of rape and spend time with me must just be a tribute to the strength of my friendly nature. Though, to be fair, I’m sure they check their drinks for roofies when I’m not looking, just to be safe. Who would blame them?

I also wonder how I obtained the rape scent. Perhaps back in Humboldt county, where prevalent rape and assault of women is the little secret that nobody has ever talked about or dealt with, I picked up some of the scent. Here in Irvine, rape is relatively uncommon per capita (along with most other crimes), so maybe the noses of women’s intuition are not desensitized to the scent as they were back in Humboldt. If it’s not some kind of scent, then what could it be? Perhaps some way in which my face is structured, or the way I walk. It’s extraordinarily hard to tell what particular trait of mine women must find so instinctually appalling. Women do seem to have some kind of sixth sense for danger, and I do not fault them for using it. However, it seems such a sense has backfired when someone like myself gets avoided.

The truth of the matter is that most men are not rapists. Most men are not dangerous. I am, in fact, about as far from a rapist as one can possibly be. Alexis de Tocqueville once observed, “The legislators of the United States [...] still make rape a capital offense, and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion.  This may be accounted for; as the Americans can conceive nothing more previous than a woman’s honor and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence, they hold that no punishment is too severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will.” I am certainly within the camp of men that believes we perhaps made a mistake when we demoted rape as a crime and claimed it to no longer be a capital offense. I have a long history of supporting and considering the plight of victims of sexual assault. If women are somehow flagging me as even a remote threat, then my concern shifts to an old one that I have complained about many times before. Women, in an attempt to defend themselves from crimes of this nature, often throw the baby out with the bathwater. As a people, we spend so much time afraid that we forget to separate our enemies and the people out there that intend to do us real harm from the regular Joes who are just out to buy a couple frozen pizzas and a beer and go back to bed. Perhaps, women’s intuition, which worked wonderfully when humans were animals on the lookout for predators, needs to be trusted a little less, so that fear of our neighbors does not get in the way of meaningful human interaction.

Or maybe, I just need a really good cologne to mask the scent.

In Which Kyle Commits His Social Suicide And Quits Facebook

Over the past quarter at UCI, Facebook has become a pervasive tool in my social existence here. I’ve been a member of Facebook for quite some time, but never really used Facebook to its full intended potential until I had the active social group that I have now. I have decided, after some thought, that since I think I now understand the entirety of what Facebook has to offer, I will leave Facebook. I don’t make this decision in what might be considered the usual way of rejecting Facebook. Rather, I do so after considering that there are significant benefits to the social networking site that will be forgone in leaving. I also do not think that my rationale for leaving will necessarily be exemplary of any more widespread social movement to leave Facebook, though I confess I would certainly get a small bit of satisfaction if I turn out to be correct not just personally, but generally.

There has always been in my mind a creeping dissatisfaction with Facebook that I have never been able to pinpoint exactly. Even now, in attempting to fully outline my reasons, I find myself both bothered and comforted by Facebook in a very ethereal way. In fact, I would not really be considering leaving if it were not for my putting leaving in the context of a larger social experiment in which I wish to engage. I desire to become more proactively engaged with my own social existence. In this context, I have concluded that the primary fault of Facebook is that it provides a passive and empty substitute for social interaction. The few (or often more than few) minutes spent on Facebook satiate human desire to be social, but do not fulfill such desire. Facebook is the Splenda of social interaction; it can be consumed ad infinitum, but it does not ultimately provide anything to its consumer. It is the equivalent of social pornography. If pornography acts as a substitute for sexual desire, then Facebook likewise acts in the same way for social desire. Therefore, continued usage of Facebook should be considered incompatible with a proactive social existence.

Since I tend to take an economic perspective on most things, I think one must first consider the opportunity cost of time spent on Facebook.  Every moment spent on Facebook, doing what are essentially trivial things, could be spent in the kitchen, at the Go board, working on this blog, or any variety of things. All of these things contribute in a way to my social goals, but in much more subtle ways, and with much more distant returns.  As an example, take the purpose of this blog compared to the similar purpose of Facebook. I want to be able to have a place to have long form thoughts on a variety of topics, and make them public in hopes that they promote further discussion among my peers, current or future. On this blog, I am unrestrained in the discussion and thinking aspect, though do not have the advantage of a somewhat large captive audience in the form of Facebook. Which is more important though? Do I value more the writing of these posts in terms of thinking in the long form or the pushing of my ideas out into the public forum? This blog emphasizes the first idea, Facebook emphasizes the second idea. However, if I think of myself as having a social existence that places the most value on direct interactions, then the blog should really be introduced in direct discussion with people as a place where interested people may go to get even more depth on some particular idea that I have been musing on. It’s a more difficult way to promote my ideas, but it is in many ways a much more active and healthy way to attract people to my work. Rather than have people come to something that I’ve done or thought because it flashed across some news feed on their wall, I would much rather cultivate direct relationships with people that actually have the potential of involving them.

This leads to another deficit of Facebook. A great number of the interactions on Facebook take place through the mechanism of wall posts. The topics of these wall posts range a great deal from person to person, but for myself the process tends to go as follows. I tend to have what I consider to be an interesting thought or observation, which is then followed by a desire to share this thought with another person. I satiate this desire by broadcasting on Facebook. I will then be satisfied by people “liking” said post, or posting a comment of their own. However, in truth these wall posts are transforming social interactions and the spread of ideas into no more than shadows on a Facebook wall. I feel satisfied, but still feel empty, when I engage in this type of behavior. Furthermore, in the context of living a proactive social life, every “like” of some post or photo is a missed opportunity to engage in a real social experience. I am forced to wonder how many conversations or more personal interactions are lost because one can simply “like” the wall post of another, and never have to actually engage that person. If I admit to having a goal of building relationships with other people, Facebook provides only an illusion of achieving this goal and diverts my attention from the fact that the goal might not actually be progressing as much as I would wish.

Likewise, in terms of building relationships with individuals, the use of the Facebook profile to learn about the interests of friends is also deceptive in its ability to undermine that goal. At first glance, the Facebook profile seems like a novel way to learn about new friends, or keep track of old friends. This is entirely true. One can learn a great deal about new friends using Facebook profiles, and can do so in an entirely neutral environment. In fact, Facebook takes this concept beyond a neutral environment. The person you are interested in will never in fact know that you were interested in them. They will never know that you were probing their interests. This is again where the Facebook idea breaks down. The trade made in exchange for all this new information is an almost complete loss of the discovery mechanism. Learning about a person’s interests doesn’t just serve the purpose of knowing how similar or dissimilar a person is from yourself, but it serves also to build trust and understanding. A person can go on to my profile and learn that I enjoy playing Go, but may never act on that information. However, imagine what a profound difference would be made if people were put in a position where they spent time personally exploring the interests of their friends and acquaintances. Not knowing something about a friend turns suddenly into an opportunity to attempt to learn more. This is an opportunity that I am certainly guilty of not exploiting to its fullest.

Furthermore, to the extent that the Facebook profile is a way of revealing information about one’s self, the Facebook profile provides a very censored view into the life of a person. In a New York Times article, Peggy Orenstein quotes M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle as saying, “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are. But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” In other words, your virtual self is manufactured to please the likewise manufactured virtual avatars of your friends. The presentation of self in Facebook is both passive and fake. If one is to be fully conscious of a social existence, that consciousness has to be free from things that will substitute for real social interactions.

In writing this post, I have certainly left out a great deal of the benefits of being a part of Facebook. I have also likely left out several more justifications for abandoning Facebook. However, I feel the need to emphasize that I in no way know if my particular approach is the correct one. As a social scientist, I feel some amount of obligation to put myself on the line to see if a particular theory about human interaction may be true or not. However, I am fairly certain that their exists a conflict between my own value system and Facebook. Hopefully, by engaging in this particular experiment the nature of this conflict will be revealed to me in its fullest form. I invite anyone that may stumble across this to comment on their own relationship to Facebook and how social networking defines social and interpersonal existence. I also hope to follow up later on this idea of living a more proactive social life. As I have said, I am hoping that leaving Facebook will be the first step in trying to consciously engage with my social self.