I apologize. I had my priorities mixed up. It’s not Egypt that’s a terrible place to be a woman. It’s the United States of America.

I am now in Boston. It’s Good Friday, and I am in an empty hotel bar, looking over the Charles River. A drunk girl totters towards my group and peers at a nearby table, recently vacated by an even drunker couple. The girl is a teenager, wearing a tiny white Ace bandage of a dress, holding stiletto shoes in her hand.

“Did you see where these guys went?” she asks us.

“They left a little while ago.”

“Ugh! They have all my stuff! Oh well, I’m going to finish their champagne!" She picks up the abandoned bottle and sloppily downs the remainder.

Well, she seems like she’s going to be a good time. We invite her to come hang with us while waiting for her friends to remember she exists.

She’s a first-year at Boston University, and she had been at the hotel for a fraternity’s formal dance. Her date ditched her hours ago. In a drunken "funny stories about sex!” kind of way, she describes how she ended up with this crummy date: she was only with him to get revenge on a different frat boy, who had hooked up with another girl in front of her in order to get revenge on her for having hooked up with another guy while they were on a break, blah blah college sex drama. Then she mentioned that he’d broken up with her in the first place because she didn’t reach orgasm when they had sex. We start listening.



“These guys are assholes,” we say. “Why are you hooking up with any of them?”

“Oh it’s no big deal, I can handle it, I’m a big girl. I don’t get attached to anyone I have sex with. There was one who was kind of okay, but no, not really, I don’t like any of them, so it’s fine. It just pisses me off when they have sex with me while I’m blacked out.”



This is about a half hour into the conversation, if that.



“Don’t black out, ladies!” she says, the 19-year-old passing on sage wisdom. “I used to do it a lot, and then I woke up naked next to a guy I didn’t know, and so I learned my lesson! Haha!" She told us how she woke up and rolled over on to a condom wrapper. She found her clothes on a nearby chair. They had been neatly folded.

In a novel or screenplay, details like this make a scene really work. In real life, when someone is telling you about her rapist neatly folding her clothes, you want to vomit.



But she had no conception of this as rape. To her, she just did something stupid. We ask what happened to the guy, if she was able to identify him and such. "Oh yeah, he’s one of the frat brothers. But don’t worry, I’m totally not speaking to him."



She goes on to talk about her "count”, which in the six months she’s been sexually active is now at five - “including the one where I was blacked out, because I have to count that, right?” she asks, looking at us as though she expects us to nod and say “yep, gotta count him! bummer!" Why are you worrying about your count, we ask. Because guys want to know, she says, and they’ll judge her if it’s too high.

And they’ll judge her if she doesn’t enjoy having sex with them. And they’ll rape her if she’s unconscious.



It’s now 3 am and none of her friends have reappeared to see if she had a way to get home. We spend 45 minutes trying to talk her into accepting a ride with us. But despite her cavalier acceptance of assault as a way of life, she will not take a ride home because, I swear to God she actually said this, ”you’re not supposed to get in a car with strangers.“ She was taught this 1980s conceptualization of the world as being full of stranger-danger, but if you want to have a social life in college you have to engage in binge drinking and accept assault and have sex you don’t enjoy and act like it’s totally cool to have no emotions attached to sex, because an empowered woman is one who takes her pants off without feeling a thing. Emotionally or physically.



I’ve heard stories like this a million times, of course. A devastatingly significant number of the women in my life have been assaulted or raped - and that’s just the ones who have spoken about it. I have been so, so lucky - partially because I spent a very long time being excessively cautious, in direct response to everyone else’s misery, but also because I was privileged to attend one of the few American universities with a proactive attitude towards assault. It doesn’t stop people from getting assaulted, but I think it does help them to conceptualize it in a somewhat healthier manner and to seek professional assistance. But, depressingly, Boston University is far more typical - a huge, impersonal school churning out vile frat boys and maladjusted women who are so in need of a safe outlet that they describe painfully vivid memories of assault to strangers in a hotel bar.



I’ve never spent so long talking with a girl who had such a defeated, self-hating, forced-casual, psychologically-poisonous attitude towards the boundaries of her own body. But it’s one she learned from our media, from our party culture, and from our cultural expectations: about what men should want, and what women should expect.



These are the stories the Muslim world hears about the West. Their response is not good. But America’s got no response at all.

Sorry, Egypt. Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.