[Plug: my blog is here.]
Late October 2001: It was early in my freshman year that I noticed the change. Friends, especially female, began avoiding me. Certain people wouldn’t make eye contact with me. At first I thought I was imagining this, or that the rapidly chilling weather was souring peoples’ moods. Some people suddenly became aloof or flat-out refused to talk to me. I received a couple of threatening but vague emails. Through all of this, I had no idea what was going on, or why so many people I’d never even met hated me. I’d arrive at a party and my name would be shouted by someone I’d never met. It’s HIM! What was I famous for? Not until later would I find out.
This story goes back to September of that year, around the first week of classes. The woman at the start of this saga is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, and she’s in no way responsible for what transpired. We started hanging out. We became close quickly, but I didn’t want to start dating her (or anyone) at the time. I’d only been in college for one month! So, I got to a point where I had to turn her away from going any further. She fades from the story at this point. Her insane roommate does not. The crazy roommate enters with force.
Livid that her roommate and new “best friend” could be rejected, she decides to bring revenge upon me, a man she’s never met. What kind of monster could reject such a sweet girl? She decides to spread a rumor. Rape. At this time, I’m an 18-year-old virgin and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have even known how to rape anyone. Anyway, there are three things any false rape rumor needs: a time, a place, and a victim. Time? A specific October evening, around 1:00 am. Place? A large and notorious annual off-campus party where many drunken hookups occurred. Victim? This is where my adversary had to work the hardest. No one who hasn’t been raped would volunteer for a rape kit. However, the court of small-college gossip has more relaxed standards for evidence than a court of law, so this girl could just plain make shit up. My “victim” was an unnamed friend of hers, visiting from another college over the weekend.
The rumor spread quickly, even reaching the Dean of Students through an RA. The Dean knew I couldn’t have done it, and here’s why: the weekend over which the event supposedly transpired, I was out-of-town on a college bowl trip, and the coach of the team was a friend of the Dean. I had an airtight alibi. The Dean came down hard on this girl, telling her to stop spreading such rumors, and I’m thankful that he did. Rape is a severe crime for which men should be punished harshly, but false rape accusations cheapen this grave allegation, and dilute the legitimate grievances of those who actually have been raped.
She did shut up. About rape, that is. Fast forward three months to January 2002, when she’s even angrier about being told by the Dean not to do something. Did I tell on her? (No. Actually, I was just beginning to figure out what was going on, as no one would tell me why people weren’t talking to me.) For supposedly “tattling” on her, a few of her friends hated me. I didn’t know them. To tell the truth, I knew very few people. I’d not been able to establish myself, socially speaking, with all the bizarre bullshit going around about me. This woman, who opened with the rape rumor, decided to step back to something more believable: “stalking”. I had stalked… whom? There was a girl I had asked out on her floor, early that winter. I called her room once, was rejected, and never spoke to her again. On the rumor mill, that became three calls– at 2:00 in the morning. Then “persistent” calls. Then “stalking”. Logical progression, right?
No, not right. Stalking is a serious crime. Asking a girl out, even ineptly– and knowing myself at that age, there’s no doubt in my mind that I was socially inept about it– is not “stalking”. In truth, persistently spreading rumors about someone, enlisting one’s friends to do the same, having those friends make threatening calls to his room at odd hours throughout sophomore year, and creating accounts in his name on disturbing BDSM sites is a LOT closer to stalking than asking a girl out, being turned down by her, and going away.
Rape didn’t stick. Neither did “stalking”, which by spring had fallen to the sawdust heap at the end of the rumor mill. Yet like a virus adapting to its host’s immune system, the rumor mutated into a form that was more believable. I was sketchy. What does that mean? Eight years later, I’m still not sure. When I was in college, it was a label similar to “creepy”, but even more amorphously defined. No facts are needed to back it up, a major advantage of that label for the sort of relationally aggressive, socially powerful, competitive “hyperfemale” inclined to spread rumors– facts and logic never were such a creature’s strong point. To call a man “sketchy” is to label him as socially undesirable, but with the force of “fact”. I mean, he’s sketchy! Can’t you see? Are you not with it?
This continues into sophomore year. My original assailant had calmed down, but her friends were at work. By fall of 2002, all of the (provably false) concrete rumors had fallen by the wayside. I’m not a rapist; that’s good to know. On the other hand, I’m still “sketchy”, or so I’m told. The “great” thing about the “sketchy” label is that it enabled every low-self-esteem girl I encountered to claim to have been “hit on” by me, even if we had only exchanged the most trivial pleasantries. Once I asked a student cafeteria worker, at 7:15 on a Sunday morning, where the coffee was– that was literally my only interaction with her. Three months later, her roommate came at me for “stalking” this girl; clearly, this woman had misrepresented the interaction for her own social benefit. Her motive? Well, many negative adjectives describe me, and many more did when I was younger, but “unintelligent” has never been among them. At 19, I was publishing in a number of literary magazines and active in a lot of student activities, and I wasn’t great at understating my talents. A little bit of humility on my part would’ve gone a long way. At a small elite college, being visibly smart is a reason for a woman to want the image of having been desired by a man. An unsavory reputation is, also, a reason for a woman not to date him. What do women do when they are proud of being desired by a man, but don’t want to date him? They make a big-ass fucking deal about being “hit on” by him, even if that’s a monstrous exaggeration or an outright lie.
I’m not “alpha”. My social skills are solidly average but, at this trying time of my life, were distinctly below. Admittedly, I made a number of errors that, in hindsight, made my situation worse than it had to be. Then again, not that much good could have been made of it. I had an enemy that was literally impossible to fight: a cloudy but negative reputation, a mile out ahead of me, that would be confirmed even by simple, neutral actions on my part. “Sketchy” can’t be proven or refuted, and any denial of the label would only acknowledge it. This cloud of rumor persisted throughout my four years of college.
What were its effects? All told, I did manage to have a pretty good college experience. I learned a lot, took great classes, and excelled academically. I can’t complain about the professors, academics, campus, or even 90% of the student body. I made a lot of very good friends. In fact, my colorful reputation made it easier to meet new people– but mostly men, and women only as friends. However, I’d always had some enemies and, on a small college campus with a ludicrously conformist dating scene, struggled with women. I was LJBF’d very quickly. I would have a first and second date go very well, only to have her attraction killed immediately by others’ nasty mutterings. Preselection’s a bitch, and if a woman gets the slightest inkling that you’ve been rejected by another girl, well… she’s likely to lose interest. It’s wrong, and in a better world, women would form their own opinions of a man rather than relying on the hens, but that’s the way that 95% of girls actually work.
In my senior year, I’d developed some confidence and experience outside of college, so I was able to surmount this social obstacle, even turning it into an advantage. I played the “sketchy” character up and used it to make people laugh, because things that are ridiculous are usually funny. I managed to get a girlfriend– for about a month. She was attracted to me because of my salacious reputation. She thought I might be “badass” and dangerous. She found excitement in the threat she imagined I might pose to her. When I turned out to be a normal, relatively well-mannered and non-dangerous guy, she lost interest. I’m just not very rapey; I’m sorry, but I’m not.
In the end, I lost four years– the four years with the best mate-finding potential– of my dating and relationship-forming life to a bunch of ill-constructed rumors too ludicrous to be true. It’s not even the original rumormonger that I’ve found myself hating so much. She was a psychologically damaged person, and ended up performing very poorly in college. She’s made nothing of herself, so I now feel a bit of pity for her. Nor do I harbor a strong dislike for her silly, malevolent friends. My greatest rage, then and now, is toward the bystanders: those who believed and spread rumors about an innocent man because they had nothing better to do.
The obvious lesson to take from this is that one shouldn’t believe salacious stories just because they’re more interesting than whatever else is going on in one’s life, but everyone reading this knows that already. Another important point is that in a he-said/she-said dispute, the “she” is not to be believed reflexively. Women have been abusing this privilege for decades in order to push out some incredible lies. Luckily, the carte blanche that college women have to destroy a man’s reputation is rapidly losing its edge, as people become aware of the fact that not all women are innocent flowers, and that some are psychotic bitches.
Finally, fuck preselection. Fuck it, fuck the horse it rode in on, and fuck the day it was invented so hard that every calendar printed over the next 20 years has a smoldering hole on that date. It’s one of the worst traits of women. When a man has no need for them, they provide themselves abundantly– when I’m in a relationship and find such attention to be an obnoxious irritation, I’m hit on constantly– but they love to kick a man when he’s down. Most of them are capricious and lack any sense of justice. If a woman’s attraction to a man fades as soon as she hears that he’s “sketchy”, or that he might have been rejected by another girl (gasp!), then she’s a pretty useless person. Everyone is going to face misfortune and disaster at some point, and too many women are fair-weather friends who flee at the first sign of declining status. Fuck that. Think for yourselves, ladies!
Ending on a perverse side note: frankly, I would have been better off, during my college experience, if the original rape rumor had stuck, instead of the “sketchy” label. First, I can truthfully deny it– it’s a matter of objective fact that I’ve never raped anyone– whereas I don’t even know what it means to be “sketchy”. Am I sketchy? How the fuck would I know? Also, rape (despite being an execrable crime I’d never commit) is pretty “alpha”. It’s a million times more badass than whatever shifty things “sketchy” men do. “Sketchy” is the more disadvantageous label, as women are much more immediately turned off by the possibly-slightly-socially-undesirable than by the violent, dangerous, and evil.
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