In Asher Roth's hit single "I Love College", the 24 year-old rapper warns "Don't leave the house 'til the booze is gone/ And don't have sex if she's too gone ". Let's talk about alcoholism some other time. I found myself listening to this song approvingly the other day, and then felt like Tipper Gore. Forgetting, for just a few seconds, my ardent support for free speech, I thought how great it would be if college men were only allowed to listen to this song, and forbidden to see Observe and Report, the new movie starring Seth Rogen, until they were fathers of small daughters.
I had a massive crush on Seth Rogen until two weeks ago. I'm one of the only girls I know who thought Superbad was heartwarming. I urged random people I met at parties to give him my number. (I forgot about the girlfriend.) I envisioned a lifetime of happiness in which he took massive hits from a bong before joining me for long jogs on the beach. But my love evaporated when I read a quote from a promotional interview for his new film, Observe and Report, in which he defends the most controversial scene in the movie, where his character, an idiot with a bullying problem, has sex with a passed-out woman played by Anna Faris. He told the Washington City Paper, "You can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the (expletive) are they going to make this OK? Like what can possibly be said or done that I'm not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next 30 seconds? And then she says, like the one thing that makes it all OK." The one thing, it seems, that would make this OK, is for the quasi-conscious woman to command "Did I tell you to stop, motherf-----?"
Courtney E. Martin got it right over at feministing.com when she wrote that "I think about all the women I know who have been raped, sitting in the theater, thinking they are getting a funny little respite from their serious lives, only to see an experience they've had depicted as a big joke...will be traumatized."
Because it's not OK. And I'll tell you why. It's not OK because girls are date raped at frat parties across the country every weekend, and people, from college counselors to Camille Paglia, still tell them they were asking for it. It's not OK because 25-year old women wake up and don't remember how they got home the night before, and they are convinced it's their own fault. It's not OK because according to a 2006 survey, 29 percent of young women who had been in a relationship said they had been pressured to have sex or to engage in sexual activity they did not want. It's not OK because Afghanistan just almost passed a law saying men could rape their wives, and we didn't all immediately take to the streets. It's not OK because as murder-suicides increase by the week, the first victims are always wives. And it's just not OK.
So right now Seth Rogen's on my bad side, even though I've loved him since Freaks and Geeks. But I like this Asher Roth guy. Because somehow I think, I hope, that some night soon, late at a frat party, it will run through some dumb drunk kid's head that you can't "have sex when she's too gone."