My Lady’s Assault Dream and a Critical Conversation for Women and Men

This is for everyone, of any gender. And this is because, as with other important topics like national security and corporate effectiveness and personal relations among individuals, we must hold ourselves to a much higher standard to be honest, authentic, and effective.

Gender: Yes, it absolutely exists — AND, experiences may vary

We need to learn to communicate with respect on every important conversation, defending the dignity of everyone involved, if we want to move beyond destructive, childish bickering. Everything breaks if we do not. America is breaking because we do not want to have these conversations like adults. Multiple things can be true.

1.    There are men and there are women

Gender is real. There really are men, and there really are women. Boys and girls always have existed and always will (until we blow ourselves up). It is absurd (and ridiculous, and confusing to the young) if we all do mental gymnastics to try to reframe this fundamental reality, trying to believe that gender is exclusively some “psychological social construct” —  which some of the loudest and unreasonable minority voices are insisting.

2.    There are ALSO human beings who identify differently

The basic fact that genders obviously exist does not eliminate the equally valid reality that some equally valid human beings do not feel aligned with their “gender assigned at birth.” And there are those who, biologically, are born “both.”

If there are any outliers, no matter how uncommon, it is irresponsible and inhumane to try to lump together everyone into the commonly held understanding that every person is one or the other because that happens to be our personal worldview.

3.    And there are human beings who are MIS-identified by others

We just saw a huge dust up with the Paris Olympics, in which female Tunisian boxer Imani Khelif — assigned female at birth and who has never varied from that identity — was bullied and abused on a global scale by small minds at high levels who assumed they knew more than the experts (and sadly and unsurprisingly, who were motivated primarily by their own limited expectations of “female” appearance…as well as their eagerness to be outraged).

This issue was made urgent to me by my partner’s dream

My wife-to-be, Amy, had an unusual and frightening “woman” dream last night. Two dreams, actually. She had the same dream, twice — one version with me as a total stranger, and a replay as occurring after we were married.

I have her permission to share this experience.

In this dream, Amy found herself flying into another Iraqi “FOB,” or Forward Operating Base, as she did in real life for multiple trips in the early days of the Iraq war as an information systems specialist. (When the soldiers broke a tech system they needed, Washington sent her to fix it.)

She noticed in the dream that she was the only female on the compound, and then was assigned billeting in an open-bay, all-male barracks. She told the staff person this was not acceptable, because it was very unsafe, and that she would instead accept one of the single rooms in the SEALs’ building, where she knew the guys would watch over her and she could have privacy.

The constant nightmare for women, which men cannot comprehend

The dream continued: working late one night on the tech systems with an intel sergeant, she finally headed back to her room after midnight. The guy followed her, not stopping his incessant chatter and not taking the hint that she was going to her room to sleep.

Approaching her door, she told him point-blank: I’m going in alone, and I’m going to sleep.As she turned toward her door, she felt a knife point at the small of her back.

“I want to bond with you,” the rapist said.

Thinking quickly, Amy pretended to be at the wrong room and shifted to the next door, hoping it would contain one of the SEALs residing in that building.

She bumped the door (like a knock) while apparently trying to unlock it, and the door opened. It was me (but she didn’t know me).

Indicating the guy behind her, she said to this unknown SEAL before her, “He wants to bond,” and shifted her eyes down to the right, indicating the sergeant’s hand that was holding the knife.

The SEAL (me) took the hint, seized her wrist to fling her inside past himself and away from the threat, disarmed the rapist, and proceeded to administer a full measure of immediate natural consequences. The rapist was left in a physical condition appropriate to the level of violence he had been threatening.

The “replay” nightmare she had was nearly identical

In Amy’s second dream, the details were all the same except that she and I were married, she went to my door and knocked with a knife to her back, and said “Hey, babe. He wants to bond.”

According to Amy, what followed was the same as in version one, except that as her husband I was apparently motivated to make the consequences more…personal, and memorable, for the rapist.

The situation is dire, should we forget that men and women are different.

Although I like to inject a little humor into the described consequences we all want to see for the scum who prey on the vulnerable, this very real and very frightening dream is no laughing matter for billions of women and the men who love them.

As described above, it is possible for two things to be true at the same time: women and men do exist as separate groups, and some human beings honestly do not identify as belonging to the group indicated by their anatomy.

We can only be effective as a society when both facts are acknowledged.

We can only find a productive way ahead as one race — the human one — when we acknowledge the “other” perspective. A battle will never be won by A) either rejecting women’s distinct vulnerability to predators like this OR by B) rejecting those fellow humans among us who exist in a different context from the “typical,” and who deserve to live in a just place in a just society.

Amy’s experience of life as a woman is common to many

It can be complicated to talk about this because every individual is unique, and every woman has a different perspective and experiences about feeling safe or unsafe and ways she will take measures to protect herself from the threat posed by human predators.

I’m not saying that every woman needs a man to protect her.

God forbid I open that narrow-minded can of worms, which has been used throughout history to justify the oppression of women, in some cases.

But in our context of relationship, the one between Rob and Amy, she wants to know she can count on me to be there if something like this too-real scenario occurs.

And when I’m available, or not, she will make social plans to be sure there enough other women, or trusted male and female friends, to reduce the potential for this to occur.

I never have to think about things like that!

Besides my general consciousness to never walk down dark alleys with my head in my iPhone, the potential for harm — of this nature — is negligible in my day-to-day life.

If an obtuse intel sergeant follows me back to my barracks in Iraq, it’s only because he’s obtuse and couldn’t take a hint that talk time is done.

THIS is why we need to be aware of the realities of genders

Guys don’t (generally) think to walk male co-workers to their cars at the office after dark. Guys don’t necessarily call their bro to make sure they got home okay.

Guys don’t generally comprehend most of this type of danger…but we need to.

A final thought on a woman’s experience of vulnerability

One final thing hit me hard from Amy’s account of this dream:

She told me she that in the dream she “felt bad” for “inconveniencing” me with “her” problem.

Think about that for a moment.

This woman was in the middle of being the victimized in a violent criminal act, one for which she was very reasonably unprepared (I wouldn’t deal well with a knife up against my back, either), and her first thought was embarrassment and self-doubt about involving someone who could be better suited to manage it.

Worse, to me: she was questioning whether she had brought it on herself.

Again — this is one person, in one situation, having thoughts and feelings in a dream…but it raises the immense concern for me that women may not be fully empowered and appropriately encouraged by all the rest of us in society to know they are right to involve others in their protection, and to never have to wonder whether they “brought it on themselves.”

Victim shaming is something we must no longer abide.

Let us honor the realities of every human being, learn about the things we don’t understand, and find a way to be better — together. Respect and dignity will take us far.

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