Picture it … Fire Island, 1990-something …

My friends and I rented a house for the summer. Late one afternoon, before getting ready to go out for the evening, my girlfriends and I decided to stop at a party where we knew some of the guys renting the house. The brother of one of our friends we knew pretty well offered to get me a beer, I said yes. I can still picture him making his way through the crowd with that open Heineken bottle. I also remember it tasting extra good because it was really hot that day. I chugged it down in a few minutes. My friends and I decided we should leave soon after so we could get ready to go out for the night. Maybe 20 minutes after drinking that 1 beer, I was walking down the sidewalk back to our house and felt extremely drunk. Then I collapsed on the sidewalk. Helping me up, my friends laughed at me because they thought I was wasted. I laughed too. Maybe I hadn’t eaten enough that day and the heat got to me. But then when we got back to the house, I collapsed 2 more times in the shower and had to sit out on the bathroom floor. Something was definitely wrong. Being young and naive, we didn’t put 2 + 2 together, so my friends put me to bed so I could sleep it off.

Later that night, when everyone had come back from the bars, the guy that handed me the Heineken, who never came around before, showed up. Luckily I was safe in that moment and not passed out alone in a bedroom, because us dunderheads finally came to the conclusion that he roofied me and came back because he was probably going to rape me. Who knows, maybe it’s because he had a guilty conscience and wanted to see if he killed me.

This story is 100% true.

A few weeks later we went to a friend’s house on Long Island. My 1 friend had 1 drink while she was there and my other friend and I did not. When we left and were driving, my friend kept passing out in the back seat. We thought it was funny until we realized she had gotten roofied at our friends house. She had to stick her head out of the car door a few times to puke and then she’d pass out again until she was ok a few hours later.

This story is 100% true.

On Fire Island that same year, a big, male friend didn’t like the way my friend and I were teasing him so he hid in the bushes as I rode by with my friend on the handlebars of a bike. He jumped out of the bushes and clotheslined her so that we both fell off the bike and got bloodied. He walked off laughing.

We were sure that when we told our male friends what their friend had done, they would kick his ass. They did not. They did not say anything because those guys stuck together. That hurt us more than the actual attack.

This story is 100% true.

When I went to a Hole concert, my friend got punched in the face by a man in the crowd.

This story is 100% true.

In the ‘90s I went to the St. Cyril’s Fair in Deer Park, Long Island. A man in the crowd grabbed my friend by the crotch, or to quote our former President who thinks this behavior is not only acceptable but suave and cool – he grabbed her by the pussy. We learned that there was, in fact, a man walking around doing that. It was a well-known thing. Never heard of him facing any charges though. Guess everyone thought it was funny? I don’t know.

This story is 100% true.

I’m not willing to accept the behavior of men who prove with their words or actions that they would be ok with any of the things I mentioned above. I won’t accept anyone defending them either.

You can hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her politics, but to say she is lying about how she felt the day a bunch of lunatic QAnon cult members stormed the Capitol, you’re just a fucking misogynist. And if you’re a woman calling her a liar by speaking out about how she felt that day – after she already gets death threats every day already – you’re just a sad, pathetic excuse for a woman. Get your head out of all the men’s asses that have been telling you how to think your whole life and stick up for your own rights, you fucking idiot.