(Names have been change)
Throughout my journey I have encountered many different people from many different walks of life whose lives up until that point had shaped their viewpoints on countless topics. Most of the time the interactions don’t go much deeper than “What are you doing or where are you biking from/to”, but every now and then I spend a few days or a week in a place and start to really get to know who I am sharing this space with and our conversations go from the superficial to a more thorough, thoughtful, and sometimes adversarial as seen by some. One of these occasions happened when I was staying at a hostel in Puerto Vallarta, México in March of 2018.
It was a Friday and I had already been there for two days now and was pretty familiar with the regular crowd hanging at this particular hostel; it wasn’t hard as it was a small crowd. In the mid afternoon there were four of us hanging out in the shade passing a joint and sipping beer, two guys Mark and Paul along with the owner of the hostel Juan and myself and somehow we got onto the topic of rape culture; what it is, does it exist, and who it all affects. You know, pretty light conversation for people just chilling and getting high. But it was actually a very productive and informative talk and by the end I had the hostel owner not only aware of its existence now but looking back at his past behavior thinking about his previous actions and how he would act differently in the future. While I can call that a success the other two guys who were hanging out with us at the beginning had departed in the middle after trying to make light of it with a few jokes.
That night while the guys went out partying on the town and on the beach when something happened. Around noon the following day when the party people had finally woken up I hear Paul talking quite loudly downstairs to a small group of our hostel-mates. It seems Paul had been walking along the beach around 0400 when two police came up to him and less than politely asked for all the money in his wallet. Being drunk and probably high on a few things he had no choice but to hand over around $2000MEX (roughly $105USD) to the police. For a while I stayed in the periphery just listening to him talk about how it was unfair and not his fault and many other exclamations and expletives until the gears in my brain started turning and had the idea to turn this into a teachable moment. After another round of Paul saying “It’s fucking bullshit, this isn’t fair, and why me” I decided now was the right moment and started asking asking him similar questions that society asks to victims of sexual assault and rape in the hopes that relating Paul’s current situation to something far too many women experience in their lives.
The conversation between us continued in the ebbs and flows, each person trying to argue their point to hopefully change the mind of the other or at the very least give them something to think about. Being drunk on a beach in the middle of the night in México does not excuse the police in any way from the fact that they robbed Paul in the same way that a woman wearing a tank top and skirt to a party does not mean she was asking for it. The focus should not be on what Paul could have done differently to try and prevent his money from being stolen from him but on what the police should have done which is not be thieves. Later that day Paul came up to me an apologized to me for making jokes about it the day before saying that he never had thought about rape culture and victim blaming in that way. I told him it was alright, and thanked him for listening now and hopefully it helps him be more respectful in the future. I am in no way advocating going up to every guy who has been robbed and start preaching to them, but in my case it was just the confluence of the right circumstances that allowed me to take this approach. For the count, that’s two guys down and some odd millions to go.
The change to stop wider society from blaming victims will not happen over night. It’s going to be difficult emotionally for people of all genders, because this topic forces us to look honestly at ourselves, our weaknesses and flaws and recognize them. But only in doing that can we begin to grow past it. We need to teach the children of the world to respect others and that the words, wishes, and bodies of women and non-binary people are just as important as those of cisgender men. Until this shift happens we will continue to live in a world where the gender of a person will either add or subtract from the power of that person. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”, I too want to live there but I also want to live in a world where we will not be judged by the gender with that we identify.