mİsho

“Fast-forward to 1988: I am raped by an acquaintance the night before my graduation from college. The next morning, before donning cap and gown, I stumble into the University Health Services building to report the crime. I’m advised not to press charges. “They’ll smear you,” I’m told by the female psychologist assigned to my case. I don’t want to be smeared. I’ve got a life to live. Twenty-five years later, while watching CNN lament the effects of the Steubenville rape on two promising lives—the rapists’, not the victim’s—I’ll hold two competing thoughts: nothing has changed; I wish I’d been braver. I decide to Google my rapist’s name, something I’ve never done in the quarter-century since the crime. His promise, I note, has been duly fulfilled. He’s successful. He’s married—to a woman who recently spoke on a “Lean In” panel with Sheryl Sandberg.”

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“Don’t forget,” said the writer, his face more and more agitated, “it was in Rourou that I first rode a bike. Yes, I tell about it in detail in my book. And you all know what the bicycle signifies in my work. It’s a symbol. For me, the bicycle is the first step taken by humanity out of the patriarchal world and into the world of civilization. The first flirtation with civilization. The flirtation of a virgin before her first kiss. Still virginity and already sin.”

“That’s true,” said Joujou. “Tanaka, a girl I worked with, had her first orgasm riding a bicycle when she was still a virgin.”

Everyone started discussing Tanaka’s orgasm, and Tamina asked Bibi: “May I make a telephone call?”