Some Guys Lie

Many girls who are strictly brought up are sheltered from some of the great unpleasantnesses of the world and are therefore unprotected when they venture out to college or the workforce or even just to summer camp.

One of the things that strict parents ought to tell their daughters, but don't, is that some guys will do whatever it takes to get you into bed. They will try to drug you, which is why you always watch your drink. They will try to get you drunk, which is why you never get tipsy around men without a strict friend, your brother or a responsible chaperone. They will tell you the most outrageous yet strangely convincing lies to make you feel it's all okay and even necessary that you have sex with them. The first guy I dated more than twice actually told me that you can't get pregnant "the first time." He actually told me that. However, he was from Afghanistan and possibly misread "virginal" as "completely ignorant." Yes, I dumped his ass.

I thought of impure men and their outrageous lies the other day when I read Piers Paul Read's Knights of the Cross. It has spicy sex scenes, but it is a literary treat for any tradition-loving Catholic who can read (or skip over) spicy sex scenes without them becoming occasions for sin. There is a chapter with a married ex-Jesuit which I found screamingly funny, probably because all my Jesuit friends are as yet neither ex- nor married.

In this novel, a somewhat seedy young German countess confesses how she became the slapper she is, and it all started out with a horrific lie. (Incidentally, if you are German or Jewish, you might want to steel yourself before reading further.)

Babi was silent for a moment, as if considering carefully the words she should use. "Take the case of a German girl who, aged nineteen, goes to the Free University of Berlin. There she meets an American student who is Jewish. He tells her that his grandparents died in Auschwitz. Her grandparents, of course, fought for Hitler during the war. The past weighs heavily on both the German girl and the American. He makes little distinction between the German Army and Himmler's SS. However, rather than being repelled by the German race, the American is strongly drawn to the female of the species, particularly one with blonde hair and long legs. He wants to sleep with the girl. She does not want to sleep with him, but eventually she decides that it is the least thing she can do to make up for the Germans' monstrous crimes."

"But that is ridiculous."

Babi flushed. "Easy for you to say that, Father. Men can be remarkably persistent, and women easily confused. The girl in my story came to feel that to refuse the American student would be taken by him to mean that she was prejudiced against Jews.

"Did he accuse her of that?"

"Oh, yes."

"And was she?"

"Prejudiced? How could she know? He was the first Jew she had ever met. There were things about him that she did not like. She found him physically unattractive, but she went to bed with him all the same, just to prove to him and herself that she was not prejudiced."

"Did she grow to love him?"

"Oh..." She waved her hand dismissively. "You know how it is with girls at that age. She persuaded herself that if she was sleeping with him, it must mean that she loved him, until she found out that he was doing the rounds of her blonde-haired, long-legged German friends."

"Was she upset?"

Babi shrugged. "Not especially. At least she had proved to him and to herself that she was not anti-Semitic. But then others came who had to be persuaded."

"She had affairs with other Jewish students?"

"Yes. With two or three of his American friends."

"It is pernicious," I said, "to feel obliged to sleep with someone one does not love."

"And there is an ironic twist in her story," said Babi. "She subsequently discovered that none of them was in fact a Jew, but they had learned that pretending to be Jewish was a fail-safe method of getting German girls into bed."

--Piers Paul Read, Knights of the Cross.

So that is the most horrifying thing I have read in a month of Sundays. I comfort myself that it is fiction, although I can see it happening, and I counsel any girl in Germany fed the same crap to say, "If you hate the Germans so much, what the **** are you doing in Germany?"

I strongly believe you are allowed to, nay, encouraged, to use the F-bomb at men who are trying to get you into bed. Save it up, and use it then. Or practise saying "How DARE you!" in a tone of utter outrage and disgust. Repeat after me. "How DARE you!?"

In high school, a girl confessed to me that she had had sex with her permanently wheelchair-bound boyfriend, and afterwards he cruelly verbally abused her and accused her of having it off with his brother, etc. She was from a traditional Catholic background, and I can just imagine how Mr. Wheelchair may have played on her feelings of sympathy to get her to have sex with him in the same place. I have never forgotten how she wept.

Now, as then, I have no idea why she told me, since I was not a friend of hers. Perhaps she was inspired by the Holy Spirit to tell me so 20 years later I could tell you to scare you out of wrongheaded sexual self-sacrifice to men in wheelchairs. The number of times I have heard of women doing sexual stuff they didn't want to do out of a bizarre sense of political correctness! It makes me furious. Listen up, ladies. You're women. Woman trumps everything. Woman trumps wheelchair, race, poverty, everything--everything except "baby", whose special protection is our job. Once again, repeat after me, "No! How DARE you!?" (Then walk out.)

Uh oh. I am getting into a "men suck" mood, which means it is time for me to start chanting "bless his little heart" whenever I see one. Obviously most men are as good as most women. But there are some men (just as I imagine there are some women) who would do or say ANYTHING to get sex from the current object of their lust, and I feel it my auntly duty today to warn you and train you in the fine art of "No! How DARE you!" (Then walk out.)

P.S. No, it's not okay if you love him. It's not okay unless you're wearing a wedding ring, the guy involved gave you that wedding ring, and you feel like doing it. Kickin' it old-school, peeps. (Um... Did I say that right?)