Want To Go For An After Midnight Ride in my Van?

Want To Go For An After Midnight Ride in my Van?

I don’t think there is a woman on this planet who could resist such an offer.

“Hey I’m a strange man who approached you after midnight, even though you had a very definite leave me alone vibe. I ignored it because it didn’t apply to me too. I’m a bad boy with a charming smile. Works every time on the ladies… ladies, ‘scuse me while I chuckle at that! They say they want a nice guy but they’re bitches who always want the opposite of what they say they want just like my mother. I invited you for a dark ride. How can you resist? I like a bit of resistance because I like to impose my will on those who oppose it, but if you do refuse I’ll get offended and make you feel my hurt pride. Just look at my van with it’s dirty illegible license plates and the blacked out windows. It’s brand new and everything! A state of the art rape machine with possible murder afterwards! Your answer is yes, right, because I don’t take no for an answer as it’s not an answer I want to hear.”

There’s a comedienne who did a sketch – Ever Mainard – Here’s Your Rape. It’s so politically incorrect, yet so spot on.

Men just don’t get it. Men get raped too, but they don’t talk about it. Usually it is by other men. Women rarely rape men. It can happen, but it is less of an everyday threat. So, they just don’t get it.

Men do not feel as vulnerable in society as women do. Maybe sometime in the future… I doubt if women will ever feel as safe as men do, but perhaps men will feel as vulnerable as women do. Not the ideal, but sometimes the ideal is too good to ever be true. Want to know why women are so angry at men, that’s one of the reasons. Because it always ends up being our fault that something awful happened to us, even if we took every precaution for it not to happen to us. Even if society now knows intellectually that it wasn’t our fault, even if therapists (okay why are therapists called that? The rapists!?!) tell us that it wasn’t our fault, it was the fault of the person who turned us into a victim, and part of that process is making us believe that we brought it onto ourselves… we still think that it’s our fault, and society and therapists agree, but don’t admit it openly anymore, unless you catch them offguard.

Even if you’re openly lesbian, well you meet men who think you’re only a lesbian because you haven’t been with the right man, a real man. How many women think the same thing about a homosexual man? Oh, he’s only gay because he hasn’t been with the right woman, a real woman. Sex with the right person as a cure for… what exactly?

It was a warm Wintry night in Florida. It was the night of my birthday. My friends had organised a surprise party because apparently telling them that I never celebrated my birthday was me saying no when I meant yes. I said no because I meant no. I eluded the surprise party and went for a walk on my own, along the seafront, in darkness. A woman alone at midnight. A woman alone at midnight sitting on a bench gazing out to sea, thinking about this and that. Of course I wanted to be approached by a complete stranger and forced into conversation. Conversation which had one objective, to get me to say yes and to act on my yes, of going for a ride with a man I didn’t know in his brand new van.

I knew instinctively that saying no, and fuck off, leave me alone, I’m in a bad mood and your presence is making it worse, would be too hard for his ears to handle. When women feel threatened they play nice. When I feel threatened I take nice to a creepy extreme. The sort of creepy extreme which scares the fuck out of men. My aim is not to run from the threat, but to get the threat to run away from me.

I scare people even when I’m not trying to scare them, so scaring them when I want to is a natural talent amplified.

I told this man that I couldn’t go for a ride with him because my friends were waiting for me to show up at my surprise birthday party, but I liked him, in fact I might actually marry him, so why didn’t he come to the party, meet my friends and my mother. She was there and I’m sure she’d love him. For some reason he didn’t accept the invitation. I told him I understood and then I told him where I was staying – because that was a crazy thing to do, it was exactly the right thing to do. I invited him to drop by the following day and we’d go out on a date. I thought he was great! I wanted to know more about him. He had mentioned his father. I said bring him along, he sounds great too.

The man couldn’t get away from me quickly enough. Odd that.

He never turned up the following day for our date. He stood me up. Why?

I’ve often thought back to that incident. I don’t know if he was a rapist or rapist/murderer, or serial killer or just a guy who saw a girl he liked and made a move. Maybe he was a nice guy who just was nice in a creepy way. I like to think of that moment as the time I evaded being raped and murdered by a serial killer. Whether that’s true or not… I’m glad I never found out.

I’m glad I watched that cowboys and indians movie when I was a child where some cowboy said that the only way he managed to get safely through Apache territory was by pretending he was crazy, because Apaches thought it was bad luck of some sort to attack a crazy white settler. I kind of absorbed that and applied to my life. When faced with danger, make danger want to avoid you because you’re fucking mental and you’ll cramp its style and curse it.

I’m also glad I read that Flashman novel where Flashman was raped by a woman. It empowered me in a perverse way.

Anything you can do, I can do too, and make it more mental than you. Or at least that’s how I think when faced with the threat of danger. It seems to work… for now. When It stops working, I’ll change my game.

I wonder if that man thinks back to that night as the moment he escaped being trapped into marriage with a psycho bitch from hell? Ah, the one that got away!

And that’s my story, believe it or not, for today’s cheerful, still trying to profile its users, The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt.