A Longreads Member Exclusive: 
Call It Rape, by Margot Singer

Members, you can download this Exclusive as an ebook—just scroll to the end of this email for the link and Member password. 

If you're not a Longreads Member,  join for $3 per month to receive the full story and ebook. 

***

This week's Longreads Member Exclusive comes from Margot Singer, whose essay "Call It Rape" was published in the Fall 2012 issue of The Normal School.  Jeffery Gleaves, an editorial assistant for the magazine, writes: 

"Located at California State University at Fresno, The Normal School is a biannual magazine of literary intrigue that is distributed throughout the U.S. and Canada. Through etymological and personal history, Margot Singer's 'Call it Rape' examines the very complicated position of living in a world where gender power dynamics seem to pervade every part of our lives. The essay seems to tangle, more than untangle, sex and violence. It messes with your head and leaves you feeling something real, something complicated and messy. Good essays are fueled by the contradictions of everyday living; and essays like 'Call it Rape' threaten to stick with you and unsettle you, to keep you awake at night."

Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she directs the Creative Writing program.

You can learn more about The Normal School here.

Call It RapeMargot Singer | The Normal School | Fall 2012 | 23 minutes (5,711 words)Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Still life with man and gun
Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high school dorm. It's near midnight on a Saturday in early autumn, the leaves not yet fallen, the darkness thick. A man steps out of the woods. He is wearing a black ski mask, a hooded jacket, leather gloves. He has a gun. He tells the girls to follow him, that if they make a noise or run he'll shoot. He makes them lie face down on the ground. He rapes first one and then the others. He walks away.
 
It is September, 1978. Two of the girls are my classmates; the third is a friend of theirs, visiting for the weekend. As a day student, I hear the news on Monday morning. I am fifteen and, like most of us—good girls at an all-girls boarding school—my experience of sex so far consists of sweaty slow dances and a few nights of awkward groping and beery kisses with boys I never see again. At the special all-school meeting convened that morning, the headmistress informs us of the security guard that has been hired, the safety lights that soon will be installed. Another woman, a cop or counselor, steps up to the microphone. "Rape is a crime of violence, not sex," she says. She repeats it, like a mantra, to make sure we understand.
 
I try to picture the girls out there in that ravine behind the dorm, dead leaves and pine needles and dirt cold against their skin. The porch light shining dimly through the trees. The man, the mask and gloves and gun. But there the tableau freezes. I simply can't imagine it: the logistics of it, the lying there, the terrible anticipation, and then. Wasn't there something they could have done, I can't help thinking, three-on-one like that?
 
Still, The Incident does not make me fearful. I'm not afraid to be home alone in my parents' house, just a few miles down the road. I'm not afraid to walk home from my music lessons along the wooded path that winds around the pond behind my house or to take the T into Boston by myself. I don't believe that what happened to those girls could happen to me. More precisely, it doesn't even occur to me that it could. I can't make any of it touch me: the powerlessness, the fear, the shame.
 
A few weeks after the rapes, a man is arrested, a tennis pro from a respected local family. Everyone is shocked, relieved. The girls stay in school. They get over it, or so we all believe.

Originally published in The Normal School, fall 2012.

To read the rest of this story—and get more exclusives like this—become a Longreads Member. It's just $3 a month or $30 a year. 

***
Share an excerpt from this Exclusive.