The #MeToo hashtag has exploded rape hysteria from the cesspool of academia into the entertainment and general populations. A bevy of fulsome feminist men, liberal Hollywood actors like Kevin Spacey, scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and even President George H.W. Bush have found themselves choking on the bitter effluvia of overwrought harpies for alleged evil doings of decades past.
And I fear the storm is headed my way.
Accordingly, it is time for “me too” to come clean about my own sordid past. The story is not pretty but I take full responsibility for what happened. What follows is my recollection of events as they took place 31 years ago in a small Texas college town..
It takes two to tango, they say, and that is how it goes when you are in a ballroom dance class.
Some context will help show the full extent of my crime. A project manager, “Gail Ann”, at my employer – a tech company – taught a ballroom dance class that met on Thursday evenings over an eight week course from mid September to November in 1986. The class was oversubscribed by two people, both women. Ballroom dancing gender roles of that era were very specific, meaning the two extra women needed male partners to take part in the class.
Gail Ann knew from my job interview that I was a lifelong student of dance, so she asked me if I could partner with one of the extra women. At the time I was single; my girlfriend had died in an accident a few months earlier and I was still mourning her passing. I agreed to Gail Ann’s request, thinking I would be paired with some older land whale but at least I would look like a team player to my boss, and it would get me out of the house in a town where there was little else to do culturally.
My partner, Ginny, was more than a pleasant surprise – early 20’s, girl-next-door pretty, and grateful that I was filling in as her partner. How was this charming girl possibly single? It turns out, she wasn’t – she was married but her husband was working overseas in a country where women led highly controlled lives. Ginny was lonely and looking for a diversion. Me.
The chemistry between us was electric and obvious to everyone – Gail Ann, who had set all this up, wondered out loud and on more than one occasion if we were “an item”, the lingo of that era for “hooking up” or just “shipped”. Other class members expressed the same thought and even invited us out as a couple to other activities.
But we were not having an affair – Ginny was married and I was mourning. My denials just stoked outside interest in us. It did not help matters that Ginny never flaked on a class and wore increasingly daring outfits as the weeks went by. She seemed to find the attention flattering after her time as a lonely wife of an absent husband. I found all this mildly annoying but Ginny was good company and a fair dancer; I knew the dance class course was just 8 weeks and out.
And so it was – Ginny and I never met outside of class and once the class concluded I never saw Ginny again. So what was the nature of my crime?
A sex-positive feminist of that era might well argue that by failing to seek a sexual relationship with the obviously willing Ginny I was displaying misogyny – leading her on cruelly with no intention of servicing a lonely, empowered woman. Every feminist I knew back then was having an affair – and now they are accusing the men of that era with sex crimes.
Of course, had I made even the gentlest of sexual overtures, or had I just let things escalate naturally, a feminist of the current era might well castigate me for “toxic masculinity” as a “sexual predator”.
A blue-pilled man or a pickup artist might shame me for wasting an obvious sexual opportunity.
A fat-positive feminist would certainly rip me for appreciating Ginny’s trim body as well as my helping Ginny perform calorie-burning dance routines. A gender-queer feminist would scream hopelessly at the sky over ballroom dance having clear gender roles.
An intersectional feminist would slam me for dancing with a white woman.
Lists of assorted crimes pushed by feminists can be quite unintentionally hilarious as well as ironic, especially given women’s traditional reluctance to make the first sexual move, a responsibility, like all responsibilities, happily and passive-aggressively ceded by women to men.
But I care about none of that – none of those social justice apostasies was my #MeToo felony.
My crime is that I left myself open to being accused of a crime. By socializing with a woman in a dance class and frustrating Ginny’s sexual presenting, I left myself open to whatever trendy and wild accusation she might scheme up three decades later.
THAT was stupid of me. I should have just left her to her own vibrating devices.
Ginny is perhaps a grandmother now, and I hope she has forgotten me for a happy life of diapers and junior soccer leagues. I hope she never remembers how I failed to validate her as a sexually attractive woman in her youth, especially now that the bloom is off the rose.
Avoid the trap, guys. Let women fester in the bitter prison of their own creation. The dance is not worth the pittance to the piper any more.
Go monk.
