I grew up in Darien, CT in the 70s and 80s. Darien is as white-bread as it comes; it’s the home of The Preppy Handbook, a bedroom town; it’s Cheever. Alex Kelly was one of my contemporaries; he was part of a crowd of teenagers I fell in and out of. He’s recently gotten out of prison after serving 10 years of a 16-year sentence for rape, two rapes actually. When I got home from work last night and put on the TV, there he was -- a feature story of one of the sensation-mucking shows; he was back in his parents’ yard raking leaves and the voice-over report was something like “he wears glasses and has gray in his hair now but there’s no mistaking his boyish good looks.” 

Yes, we in the we of groups then, popular or trying to be, insiders or trying to be, thought him appealing. We thought him fascinating. He managed to be a star athlete, a fair student, and a badass; that is, he did drugs, went out of his way to get them and share them; there were tales of breaking and entering, of the women (girls; we were girls) he’d had; he frightened us all but still won the hard matches and pleased the necessary authority figures – teachers, coaches, parents. He could be alarmingly nice at times, alarmingly disarming -- he could leave safety and respectability behind and then reclaim it, like that -- but this daring of his, his genetics, hormones, and the hothouse of social games/competition cursed him as much as it blessed him. We were all running at breakneck speed after sex and abandon and what we thought it was to be free. The boys especially; the parties we all lined up for were their court and stage, maybe their coliseum; and the girls, we girls, were often the quarry. 
 

My father will say it is ever thus. He refuses to believe things are getting worse; he thinks that the province of old men; he believes in cycles. Now, with Bush and this war most of us do not want, we are in the murk. We are all as Americans wondering about our national identity, if we can restore to it some lightness, some pride, a right to claim our maverick pioneer days, a shred of idealism. My father feels sure we’ll redeem ourselves. Maybe. But bullies can’t claim the higher ground, no matter the context. Things cannot be taken back, and some things simply cannot be forgiven.
 
In Rape: Sex, Violence, History (just out in November) the author Joanna Bourke contends the act “is a form of social performance. It is highly ritualized. It varies between countries; it changes over time. There is nothing timeless or random about it. Indeed, meaning has not been stripped bare from deeds of brutality, but has been generously bestowed. For perpetrators of sexual violence, it is never enough to merely inflict suffering: those causing injury insist that even victims give meaning to their anguish.” Bourke goes on to argue against the notion that “sexually violent behavior… can be traced back to our most distant ancestors and can even be located within (male) genes… On the contrary, rape and sexual violence are deeply rooted in specific political, economic and cultural environments.”  

I was not there when the assaults took place. It was 1986. My parents thought it time to send me to private school and take me out of the local high-stakes race to fit in. I remember talking about it, asking people who were there at the parties from which Alex drove those women home what they thought happened. People joked, disparaged the girls making the accusations. We were all sick with entitlement and youth and privilege. I do not much keep in touch with the people with whom I grew up, but if their lives have been anything like mine, they’ll have known some loss, have been outside rather than in, have been humbled or that’s my hope. They can try to measure the distance between what was and what is now; that Alex excited us – that once we cheered him both for his perversions and his prowess -- and that today his neighbors are calling their state senator to see if he can be removed, forced from, our town.