One really hard thing to do, I think for a lot of writers, is to go back and see what one said years ago. I want to do just that. I wrote this piece…

What was on my mind the Summer of 1996, which was my Junior year at Michigan.

…just a hair less than twenty years ago. Half my lifetime. I suppose I could wait until it actually turns 20 to critique it, but it’s on my mind tonight, because we finally have the time to watch The Hunting Ground, an important recent documentary about #RapeCulture. And this is what I was thinking about, just as I was old enough to legally drink, while I walked the streets of one of the college campuses discussed in the film, and if I was “lucky” not to have been a victim, this was the world I lived in, nonetheless.

It needs to be watched. It needs to be shared.

A lot of things change in twenty years. I don’t want to put myself on trial. I just want to be honest with myself – and to get a better idea of how my thinking has evolved over time. So, I dug in and read what I had to say, back then.

Going back and reading something I wrote, particularly on a topic like sexual violence, sounded (and was, to some extent), cringeworthy. The backstory is that, at the time, I was briefly the Editor-in-Chief of a libertarian news magazine. Four years earlier, I had done one of my high school volunteering projects supporting Bill Clinton’s campaign. But my position was Libertarian, at that time.

I defend elsewhere, ironically the last time I went and found something I wrote twenty years ago, why I had and in some sense still have a relationship with libertarian philosophy. But I mentioned that I was briefly Editor-in-Chief. My tenure was very short, precisely because of the huge divide between classical liberals and social conservatives, and the fact that the paper was losing all its classical liberals, one by one, and all the replacements showing up were social conservatives. I have never – even in those days – liked social conservatism, although then and now, I am friends with social conservatives. Anyway, I continued to be liked and actually supported in not being a social conservative. I wasn’t kicked out. I stepped aside graciously in recognition that they had a groundswell and “we” did not.

I was actually relieved. I was not a total jackass in those days. Although I continue to emphasize my statement that men needed to be included in the movement to stop rape, I understand this in a much more nuanced way, today, and now I get the need both for safe spaces and that far from being an “anti-male” issue, men needed to be included precisely because we women need them to, well, clean their shit up. I will have to own some internalized misogyny – I was not then the female chauvinist I am now. I hadn’t been ready to acknowledge the obviousness of marriage equality. Although I was aware of the issue, and in a backhanded sort of way, I applauded them for talking about sexual violence inside the LGBT community, I wasn’t a supporter of marriage equality, yet, in those days. That did change, obviously. So I will have to admit to some internalized queerphobia, too. I am proud that I was beginning to understand intersectionally – I was paying particular attention to conversations on the intersections between race and poverty and sexual violence. And at a much more basic level, when sisters were saying that rape was a violent crime (in those days, there were a lot more people who thought about it in a primarily sexual way), I was paying attention. I am embarrassed, however, that I thought in those days that the Contract with America or any of the other GOP proposals to “reform welfare” had anything to do with addressing the issue of poverty.

And these days, although I am functionally somewhere in between Christian and “spiritual but not religious,” I probably would be way more likely to lead a prayer to Artemis than object to it. Because, you know, I love my female role models.

I will have to settle for not having been a total jerk.

Flash forward to today, and I am sure I am still fairly full of internalized misogyny. There is work, yet to be done. I hope that I am a better listener to women who’ve had experiences different than mine. I hope I advocate alongside them in a better, more trusting, and more supportive way.

And of course, twenty years later, rape on campus has not been addressed. Take Back the Night has emphatically not lost its relevance. And, in my imperfect way, I will continue to bear witness. I will help these stories get known, help these experiences get talked about, and help these changes get made.