I was reading my news feed and went to fact check some data and stumbled upon this piece by Kate Clancy on the Science on Pregnancy and Rape from August 20, 2012 in Scientific American. It reminded me of a story from my past that I had practically forgotten about, but in retrospect had a significant impact on me.
It was when one of my friends had told a group of us a supposedly cool story about how his best friend had offered to drive a girl home from a party.
He told the story in the way that you could tell he really looked up to his best friend and his exploits in this story. The story goes that the best friend said he had to make a brief stop at his (a third) friend's house, he didn't come out, and when the girl eventually came in the two of them gave her some roofies and had their way with her. I remember how my friend, who was not in the story himself, finished the story with an emphatic "isn't that cool?"
According to him, I was missing something and not really getting the point of the story. Apparently I was taking the whole thing too seriously.
Meanwhile I was so disgusted that I eventually proclaimed to the group of friends that I could not be friends with someone who would brag about their friend raping someone. I think I was hoping he would somehow repent, but I was drawing a line in the sand.
He did not repent and it led to the deterioration of our group of friends, at least for me. Even the people that agreed with me weren't willing to sacrifice the friendship for it. He later confronted me about the whole thing explaining that to him being a friend meant sticking by your friend no matter what.
That was a defining moment for me. Even though I was in my twenties at the time, I think I was pretty immature in a lot of ways. However, even then this notion of unconditional friendship just didn't work for me. It didn't matter that these were *the* people I hung out with all that time. You had to draw the line somewhere, didn't you? I don't know how much my willingness to cut the cord was based on my previous experiences, or how much this incident framed my future ethics. Maybe a bit of both.
Where do you draw the line?
