Hasta La Gadget!

In recent days, media outlets of every description have been engaged in a long-overdue conversation about rape and sexual assault. The explosion of allegations against Bill Cosby, as more and more women have come forward to speak out against the long-beloved entertainer, has spawned thousands and thousands of words of commentary. And all the while, other stories of rape and sexual assault have come to light — including Sabrina Rubin Eardley’s searing account of unprosecuted gang rapes on UVA’s campus.

There has been no shortage of backlash, too, against Cosby’s alleged victims — and not just the infuriatingly predictable skepticism of conservative commentators. In that weird, ubiquitous and often vitriolic public square of the Internet, the anonymous comments board, the same questions are repeated over and over: Why now? Why did these women wait so long to publicly accuse Bill Cosby (instead of attacking him at the height of his prestige, fame and power)? (Never mind that the allegations have been public knowledge for a decade; never mind that, until now, they went unheard.)

And in the same breath, commenters comfortably couched in digital anonymity engage in conspiracy theories: They are lying; they are doing this for the money (there is no money to be had); they are greedy for fame or jealous of his; where’s the proof? where are the fingerprints, the semen (though 20 years or 30 years or more have elapsed by now)? Don Lemon asked: Why didn’t you bite him? and Whoopi Goldberg asked: Where is the rape kit?

This all-too-familiar combination — recrimination for delays in coming forward, coupled with doubt and vitriol — comes along with the same tired scrutiny of their every action (why did she go to his hotel room? Why did she take a drink, and pills, that he offered her?). The statistics that have surfaced again and again — that only 26% of sexual assaults are ever reported to authorities, that only 3 out of every 100 rapes will result in a conviction — are as disheartening and familiar as ever. And as I, like millions of other Americans, watched the evidence against a beloved public figure accumulate, I remembered — a jolt from a past self — that I was part of that statistic. That I, too, had never reported my sexual assault when it happened to me.

I was not sexually assaulted by a famous man. I had no sterling international reputation to fight against. But when it happened five years ago, I never spoke up. And until today, in a lifetime of compulsive writing, I have never written a word about what happened to me that night in college.

Here is what it feels like to write about a sexual assault — the way I felt when preparing to write this post: I felt guilt. I felt shame. I remembered other things said to me, other things done to me over the years. I relived the pain and humiliation of the experience, and steeled myself to open it up for scrutiny. I also realized I felt — feel — lucky: I have never been raped. I have been very lucky to have only had a few of my boundaries ignored. This is what luck feels like.

Here is the short version of what happened to me: Throughout my time at Harvard, I was part of a small, tight-knit stand up comedy club. It was wonderful and strange, thrillingly creative; I got to get onstage and pretend to be, say, a Russian clairvoyant who only gave depressing predictions, or a carnival barker; I got to read long lists of horrible puns without getting booed offstage. The club was mostly male, but I never worried about that; from high school debate onwards, I was used to being outnumbered. And then one night in my sophomore year, after a show, most of the club and a few hangers-on gathered to party.

We drank heavily; the party wound up in my room. My boyfriend of two years wasn’t there, and I wanted to quit partying after awhile. I was far from sober, stumble-drunk and giggly, but in my own room, with a group mostly consisting of friends I trusted. One guy, let’s call him Chris, whom I knew vaguely from the wider campus comedy scene, had made a few suggestive remarks to me that night, largely based around the short red dress I’d chosen to wear for the show. Everyone else left (one guy making a few snide remarks about how we “probably wanted to be alone” because Chris was “totally into me”), but Chris stayed.

He tried to kiss me, right away. I said no.

He tried again. I said no.

He pulled me down next to him on my futon. I wriggled away. I said no.

I left my room. He followed me and pinned me to the wall of a landing in the stairwell. He was a foot taller than me. He held me by the shoulders. I turned my face away and said no, no, no.

He left only when a male friend of his came to pick him up. When I confronted him about it the next day, he said he didn’t remember any of what happened.

But I did. I still do. I only wound up telling one person in my beloved campus comedy club — the only other female member — and I asked her to make the parties feel safer. “Can we just look out for each other, and make sure we’re not alone with drunk guys?” I asked her.

Looking back over those Gchats years later, I can see the resistance even I felt to acknowledging that this had happened: “Of course I trust everyone in the club,” I said, reassuring her, and myself, that my chosen community was still safe for me. But I asked for precautions anyway, I asked to feel safer, because that day in April 2010, I remember the feeling of learning to trust people less.

Saying no and having it ignored is a terrible feeling. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a powerful piece for The Atlantic, describes “the humiliation of being unable to protect my body, which is all I am, from predators” — he calls it “the loss of your body,” though he was describing being assaulted physically, not sexually.

That night in 2010 was not the first time I had experienced the loss of my body. But it was the first time I lost my voice. What I said that night did not matter; it did not matter what I wanted to have happen to my body, or what I expressed about that desire, because it could be ignored completely. At 20, and thoroughly naïve, I had never even imagined encountering that situation. I thought: the world is not supposed to be this way. I could not believe it was happening; I could not believe it had happened.

Besides my boyfriend and two female friends, I did not tell anyone about it, even my family. I did not go to any school authority. Because I was too busy leveling all the questions that get asked to people who come forward about sexual assault at myself.

Why didn’t I walk away? Why didn’t I leave faster?

Why was I drunk that night at all?

Why did I wear that dress? (I never wore it again.)

Why did I think I could get intoxicated in public, even around a group of people I had adored and trusted completely?

When I was sexually assaulted again years later — by a rural election commissioner, while observing the 2012 parliamentary elections in Ukraine — I finally told my mother. She told me to be more careful. Told me that I shouldn’t get myself into those situations.

What we are really asking when we ask sexual assault victims why they stayed, why they drank, why they took the pills, is Why did you allow yourself to become prey?

It feels terrible to admit that you have been preyed upon. That something frightening has been done to you, because you did not have any say that counted in the matter. You have lost your voice, and your body, and your sovereignty over your self, which is all you are.

There is a way to regain some of that sovereignty over your own voice: to speak out, and to be believed. It has taken decades too long, but the court of popular opinion has finally — mostly — turned against Bill Cosby. With each woman who comes forward, and opens herself to public scrutiny and criticism in the process, another toll is taken on Cosby’s legacy.

Here is what Janice Dickinson said: I believe the other women.
Here is what Barbara Bowman said about her decision to testify against Bill Cosby in 2004, in support of Andrea Constand: I believed her. I knew she was telling the truth.

“I believe you” is a tremendously powerful statement. To tell your hidden story — and I believe that most of us have these hidden stories, these secret shames — and to hear someone say: I believe you, and maybe: That must have been terrible, feels like regaining sovereignty over yourself. What was taken from you is incrementally returned. Even if you could not defend your own body then — even if your “no” did not change what happened to you — your voice matters. You can define what happened to your body, even if you could not control it when it happened.

Even now, I cannot unlearn that there have been times when my “no” has no worth, no impact. I cannot stop fearing that it will happen again. But I chose to write this to answer, from my own experience, the reasons — so filled with fear, and shame, and self-recrimination — why sexual assaults go unreported.

Andrea Constand, Tamara Green, Barbara Bowman, Janice Dickinson, Therese Serignese, Carla Ferrigno, Angela Leslie: I believe you. Like you, I believe all the other women, too.

I believe you because you are owed the power of your own voice. Because you are owed sovereignty over your body. Because with every added voice in the chorus of belief, a piece of what was taken is restored.

Taylor Swift made a splash this week by appearing simultaneously on two national magazine covers at the tender age of 24. As it turns out, the journalist who penned the young star’s Time cover story is also a bit of a wunderkind, albeit in his his own field.

At the New York Daily News Innovation Lab’s “Conversation Series,” Time.com managing editor Edward Felsenthal discussed how Jack Dickey, 24 (nine months Swift’s junior), nabbed an interview with the major star.

“Jack Dickey, who we hired right out of Columbia, wrote our most recent cover story on Taylor Swift,” he said. “He is younger than Taylor Swift. First week he walked in with the idea, and said he refused to write it until he had access to Taylor Swift. With the perseverance of someone of more experience than he actually has, he got to her and broke news in his cover story and wrote beautiful 2,000 word piece.”

Dickey has indeed achieved acclaim at an early age. He co-authored the Deadpin story breaking the Mabti Te’o dead-girlfriend hoax while still a senior at Columbia. Speaking to The Post Game after the article was published, in 2013, however, Dickey did not appear to be letting the success go to his head.

“Ha, I haven’t met too many jealous classmates,” he said. “Everyone else has some sort of niche at which they’ve excelled far more than I have. So, whatever success I’ve had with sportswriting is easily dwarfed by what some other student is doing with his tech startup or with her cello or whatever.”

For more, check out the full Innovation Lab panel.

STANFORD, Calif. (RNS) An atheist, a humanist and an agnostic walk into a restaurant.

The hostess says, “Table for one?”

An old joke, yes, but its essence lies at the heart of “Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-First Century,” a new book by Lex Bayer and John Figdor.

Bayer, 36, is a Stanford grad and longtime humanist, and Figdor, 30, is the new humanist chaplain at Stanford University. The two met when Bayer, a venture capitalist and engineer, wrote a news story about Figdor’s arrival at Stanford. The two soon discovered they liked hashing out difficult ideas about the way people live.

They began meeting regularly for coffee, brought along their computers and were soon on their way to drafting a book — a kind of philosophical roadmap to essential beliefs for nonbelievers.

“There are lots of books out there about why you should not believe in God,” Bayer said. “But there aren’t any about what do secular people believe in. I think that’s the question John and I felt hadn’t been adequately addressed.”

In exploring that, the two men — both whom have studied philosophy and logic — came up with 10 essentials. For the extra-nerdy, there’s even “a theorem of belief” in the appendix that looks like something a mathematician might scribble.

The result is 10 “non-commandments” — the authors’ irreducible statements of atheist and humanist belief.

First up: “The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.”

No. 2 on the list: “We can perceive the world only through our human senses.”

Halfway through, at No. 5, the authors conclude: “There is no God.” Once over that hurdle, the non-commandments become less controversial — an ethical society is good, as is moral behavior.

But it is the last non-commandment that makes these maxims very different from the biblical version: All of the above is “subject to change in the face of new evidence.” They are, quite literally, not written in stone.

The goal of the book, the authors say, is to encourage atheists and humanists to define what they believe so they can articulate it better, both to themselves and to a broader society that often regards atheists as immoral and untrustworthy.

“We want to show people who may have a false view of the atheist community as this sour group of people who want to prove there is no God and sit in a basement all day and argue about that,” Figdor said. “But we want to show them it is actually full of happy, empathetic and compassionate people whose lives are full of meaning and value.”

What’s also different is that these non-commandments are intended to be interactive. Included in the book is a worksheet where readers can craft their own list of non-commandments. They can share these commandments on a website the authors set up for just such an exchange.

Some of the submissions read like prescriptions for happiness: “Be happy,” “Do not fear death,” and “Keep your sense of humor.” And some are commandments of the biblical kind: “Do not kill,” “Do not steal” and “Be truthful.” Others express a sense of hope that abiding by them could lead to a better world.

“Treat yourself, others and the planet with compassion and reverence,” Leslie Heil submitted.

Figdor and Bayer are delighted by the range — about 1,600 responses submitted so far.

To encourage more, they’ve established a “ReThink Prize” — $10,000 to be distributed among 10 winners whose submissions receive the most votes. The contest runs through Nov. 30, and all the submissions will be available online for discussion and inspiration.

The book has been received warmly by atheist and humanist reviewers. David Niose, president of the Secular Coalition for America, called it “a wonderful exploration of life as a skeptic.”

And some in the religious world have lauded it, too. Dudley Rose, associate dean for ministry studies at Harvard Divinity School, where Figdor was a student, wrote a supportive blurb for the book.

“Living rightly with one another is at the heart of these non-commandments,” Rose said in a telephone interview. “That is very similar to the way in which I view how those of us in religious communities think of our commandments and our lives with one another and everyone else in the world.”

The Ten Non-Commandments:

I. The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.
II. We can perceive the world only through our human senses.
III. We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.
IV. All truth is proportional to the evidence.
V. There is no God.
VI. We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.
VII. There is no universal moral truth. Our experiences and preferences shape our sense of how to behave.
VIII. We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy.
IX. We benefit from living in, and supporting, an ethical society.
X. All our beliefs are subject to change in the face of new evidence, including these.

While vehicles like Toyota’s fuel-cell powered Mirai are leading the charge to a future less reliant on fossil fuels, Germany’s Sunfire GmbH may have a way to bridge the gap with its method of producing synthetic fuel from water and carbon dioxide. By using two of the world’s most abundant elements to create hydrocarbon fuel, a much great efficiency over … Continue reading

Thanksgiving is meant to be a time of reflection and solemn appreciation of the joyful bounties that our lives have bestowed upon us—or, more likely, a time to gorge on football marathons and good food. But who wants to spend every waking turkey day hour over a hot stove? Not you. Here’s how you can cook an entire Thanksgiving feast using nothing but your microwave.

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