You're making an assumption again, I guess based on what you think you've heard me saying or what you think you know about me. The women who've responded to the polls, studies, and surveys I keep talking about are the people who've been to hell and back. That's why I keep telling you guys to do some research for yourselves and confirm that I know what I'm talking about. Or if you're not motivated enough to do that, just put yourself in the position of someone with a daughter or a sister in a train-running situation.
I'm 45 and have lived a good bit longer than most of y'all. Have I lived in the ghetto or been a street fighter or a brotha or a gangster? Nope. Was born into different circumstances than that. In my younger days, I was a fairly wild child. Underneath the suburban mom/medical student persona, I still am (my husband would confirm this for you). Do I go to parties now and run the train for folks? Nope. Didn't do that in my younger days, either. I've been lucky in that I value myself highly enough that I can be choosy about who I get intimate with. That's a very good thing.
As far as having been to hell and back, part of the reason I've volunteered for so long in a women's crisis center is because I had three friends in college, plus that young student I talked about earlier, who were raped at various times. I came close to having it happen myself in college but was strong enough to fight the guy off and get away. That was enough experience for me to have an interest in the subject and learn more about it than the average person. One in four women faces some type of abuse in her lifetime. Probably the real figure is closer to one in three. If you think that after 25 years of working with people who've been touched by the situations we've been talking about above I haven't gained some insight into hell, then you're not as smart as I thought you were.
You need to get off your tough-talking, I've-seen-real-life butt sometime and go volunteer for a day or two in a women's crisis center. Or better yet, ride out with a medic crew on an ambulance for a few years in a two-university city and see half the things I've seen in a single weekend. Once your real life experience begins to approach my own, you can come on back and tell me whether or not I've seen hell.
