So was Pete really reaching out to me to let me know I was still a member of the Trojan Family, with no hard feelings for my defense of the young women on our campus? Sadly, no. It was an email automatically generated for all of the previous season-ticket holders who’ve not yet renewed. Coach Carroll wasn’t really sitting at a computer somewhere sending me, or anyone else, a personal message. And I’ve not yet renewed, for I’ve renounced the team at this point in protest over what I perceive to be a climate hostile to females perpetuated not only by the sports teams but the Greek system and, sadly, members of the administration who fail to act to curb the excesses of these two patriarchal institutions entrenched at USC.

At the end of the editorial I asked glibly if anyone else was interested in these tickets since I no longer was. Enter the Ernest Young Men. They began calling and emailing even before the hard copy of the Trojan hit the streets, asking me to please pass mine along to them. So they read a polemic designed to incite anger over how commonplace rape and other forms of harassment are here at this institution of higher learning and what they hear is “hey I might score some season tickets”? Huh. Guess maybe I should have been a tad more adamant about my point….

Compared to other emails of course these guys are my best friends. Others less interested in admission to the Coliseum come Fall are more interested in what we learned in dog training to call “administering a correction.” To me. For daring to challenge male privilege. The grounds that they used were inevitably my lack of knowledge, about how women make fake rape charges, about how I don’t know what that term “cock blocker” means, about how I should not assume someone is guilty until proven innocent.

I’m ignorant? People also file false accident reports, but that doesn’t mean that when someone negligently crashes into you, your leg didn’t really get ripped off. And I learned that definition of the term “cock blocker,” as in stopping someone who is about to put his penis in a person too drunk to know what is happening, from a man at Take Back the Night. And I know more about the recent rape charges than I wish I did. And I know more about what happens to young women on this campus, in their dorm rooms, at parties, on the row, than I wish I did.

The key term here is knowledge. I know more than the men who want so badly to prove me wrong in order to renounce their complicity for sexism and the resultant abuses, which range from our daily self hatred to our being tortured and killed. Just because we are women. Feminist theorists debate whether or not people on the margins have a privileged epistemological position, in other words possessing knowledge that those in the mainstream lack. Every single email I’ve received this week taking me to task for my supposed ignorance of reality has demonstrated unerringly the veracity of this tenet. It’s not the “whining feminist” who has no clue. It’s the furious men. Good thing I didn’t also point out that all we white people are responsible for racism. Shitstorm alert!