@broadwaybabyto "well of course I personally am not the problem", I told myself. "Why, if I ever encountered a rapist..." I imagined myself meting out violence for violence.
The men around me would echo such sentiments. Rape was an unthinkably horrific crime, we told each other, and it was unthinkable that any of us would commit it.
It wasn't until many years later that a friend told me that she had been raped. By a man who at one point I had counted as one of my best friends.
It was easy to believe her. By the time she told me this, he had devolved into a visibly horrible person, an anti-feminist incel with a bitter streak a mile wide. I'd blocked him ages ago on all social media.
But back then, what were the signs? A "dark sense of humour" that came out when he'd had a few pints. A suspiciously young girlfriend. And a slowly increasing list of women who would refuse to be at the same parties as him.
I enabled this asshole. I put in good words for him, told people he was "trying to be better". My naive, well-meaning awkwardness he used as camouflage for his ill intent.
I was the problem, after all. Exactly because rape was unthinkable to me.
Here is the sobering truth: there is no social group in which women and people of marginalised genders do not have to worry about rapists. Guys, if you want to be part of the solution and not the problem, match their vigilance with your own. Think the unthinkable.