I rode my bike to work today with a lot on my mind, so I wasn’t seeing much but the traffic around me as I zipped up St. Charles. Today’s class was about sexual violence. This is always a tough class because so many of us have such intimate experiences of violence. It’s really an epidemic, especially among college-age students. I want students to move outside of a simple victim/perpetrator model where each sexual assault or rape is seen as divorced from the social realities that normalize the objectification of women and the equation of masculinity with sexualized violence. I want students to see how sexual violence is the logical conclusion of sexism, of racism, of the many ways people are reduced to objects in our contemporary culture. But when it happens to you, those critical viewpoints don’t matter, at least not right away. It’s always challenging to talk about these issues in the classroom, and it’s also always incredibly sad. Because the classroom is always home to people with personal and traumatic experiences. These words don’t mean much, but it just isn’t fair. On my ride home I thought about this and wondered if I’ll ever get to teach a class where sexual violence is more a historical fact and less a present emergency. Tonight my bike ride was less about seeing things and more about getting my body in a steady rhythmic cadence so I could think. I stopped on my way home for some Chinese takeout, because sometimes takeout and a beer is pretty much all you can do.