Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [57]
One week later, when we got back to school, Abbie and I had sex for the first time the way everyone should have sex for the first time: we got drunk and forgot it ever happened.
It was clunky and awkward. But we were in love.
• • •
Abbie didn’t believe in marriage. She was a Women’s Studies minor and she believed that marriage was a social construct designed by a patriarchy that oppresses women. Thus, all ideas in this construct are null and void.
Abbie had a lot of theories like this. She would meet up with me after class and say things like “Starfishes are bisexual, and I think it’s safe to say that people are bisexual too.” And I would say, “I don’t know much about starfishes, but when I see a naked dude, I don’t get a boner.”
These discussions were so long and drawn out that finally I enrolled in a Women’s Studies class called Anthropological Perspectives on Gender. It was taught by a Professor Woods, who was very confused as to why I had enrolled in a class comprised entirely of women and two gay dudes. Little did she know that I was trying to build cunning arguments to use against my women’s studies girlfriend using the enemy’s own information.
We read books with titles like Women and Poverty and Fraternity Gang Rape, the kind of uplifting literature often overlooked by the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. I got pretty obsessed with it. I was like, “They’re right! This is bullshit! The male patriarchy is keeping us down!”
I would read all the recent feminist articles and occasionally there’d be one in the school paper. I remember one time one of the standout students in this department wrote a really explicit article in the school paper about how she’d been harassed by some guys on campus and how the school had ignored it. It really affected me. I thought, That girl is awesome. She’s so brave. I should tell her.
Occasionally I would see this brave writer around campus and I’d try to build up the confidence to tell her how much I appreciated her piece in the paper. Then I’d get shy and wouldn’t say anything. Late one night toward the end of the year I was walking home to my dorm and I saw her on a secluded path. I got up the nerve to say something. And there was no one around, and I knew it would be kind of awkward, but I thought, She’s graduating. I shouldn’t hold in a compliment. This may be my only chance.
I stopped her and said, “I know you don’t know me, but that whole piece you wrote about you being harassed by all those guys, it really meant a lot to me, and—”
And she said, “That wasn’t me.”
And I said, “All right, cool. See you around.”
The girl who actually wrote the article did graduate and I never told her how much I liked her piece. But the girl who I thought wrote it had a few more college years in her, and I would see her around every now and then. We had that special bond two people have when they’ve encountered one another once and one of them has told the other inaccurately that he admired her bravery in regards to being harassed by a group of men.
As a result of my association with Abbie I became a feminist activist. There was an event on campus called “Take Back the Date,” which was this conservative group’s response to “Take Back the Night,” an internationally held march against rape and violence against women. “Take Back the Date” didn’t have much of a leg to stand on, parodying a group whose only goal was to raise awareness about violence against women. Their unofficial position on date rape was, “It doesn’t happen on every date!” Their platform was that we needed to end the era of “hooking up” and go back to the good old days of “dating.” “Remember the good old days when women were subservient but sassy?” Who