Aaron P. Taylor Did Not Rape You. He Deserves a Cookie!

Yes, it's true: if you are reading this, Aaron P. Taylor of UnCommoN SENSE ("a Blog on Deciphering the Enigma that is Life") probably did not rape you. (If he did: my apologies. You can put away the baking sheet now.) In fact, Aaron P. Taylor cares so much about rape, and your safety from it, that he put together a little blog post, entitled "Advice 4 Women: How Not to Get a 'Deserved' Raping."

Ha ha, well, too late for me, I guess! If only I'd found Aaron P. Taylor earlier. Aaron P. Taylor: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE? That is what I would like to know!

Let's get down to business. Aaron P. Taylor - born on January 7, 1982, in Petersburg, VA, where he did not rape you - begins by laying down a little slice of the enigma that is his life, so as to decipher it. Here, he finds himself at a club in Atlanta, GA, where he has been living for the past several years while not raping you:

We got on the dance floor, and started dancing. At first it was no-touch dancing, with both of us dancing in front of each other doing the best two-steps we could. After the first dance session, she went away for a while, and I proceeded to continue dancing by myself.

A few minutes later, she came over again, and wanted to dance to another song. Once again, I agreed.

This time, though, the dancing she did was more suggestive...

The next time we danced, our faces were touching again. Me, being the guy I am, decided to go in for a light kiss. I puckered up my lips, tilted my head to the side, and…

BOOM! She turned her face and I got the cheek!

BOOM! Aaron P. Taylor got the cheek! POW! That girl did not want a sexing from Aaron P. Taylor! ZAP! Aaron P. Taylor is ugly! (Seriously, look at the picture. Is that a lazy eye?)

Anyway, Aaron P. Taylor, who graduated from Hampton University with a degree in Fine and Performing Arts that he earned by studying hard and not raping you, was inspired by this curious incident to write a little bit about what he could have done, had he not chosen to engage in the fine gentlemanly not-raping-you type of behavior which Aaron P. Taylor always strives to uphold:

Had I been a less-than-understanding guy (i.e., a forceful-type of guy who always “gets what he wants by any means necessary”), I could have just as easily forced a kiss on her, or worse - waited until after the club let out to follow her to her car, then followed her to her house. And, when she got out her car, I could have been right there ready to pounce on her, saying: “I think you owe me something, lady!!”

My goodness, Aaron P. Taylor! That is a very active and suspiciously detailed fantasy life you've got going on there! On the other hands, it is certainly nice that you are including these super helpful "Tips for the Rapey" in your anti-rape article: it shows that you don't take sides.

So, we've established that Aaron P. Taylor did not rape you, because Aaron P. Taylor is not a less-than-understanding guy. (He certainly understands how to stalk and rape someone! NOT THAT HE EVER WOULD.) Here are some other things that Aaron P. Taylor did not do:

• Aaron P. Taylor did not did not videotape himself throwing a puppy over a cliff while serving a term of military service; he also did not post the subsequent video on YouTube.
• Aaron P. Taylor did not commit the Zodiac murders; he also did not taunt various individuals with cryptic messages pertaining to said murders.
• Aaron P. Taylor did not start the popular internet practice of "Rick Rolling."
• Aaron P. Taylor did not conspire to conceal the location of Osama bin Laden following the attacks of 9/11.
• Aaron P. Taylor's favorite American Idol contestant was not Sanjaya; he was not moved to hysterical tears by Sanjaya's performances, and he did not vote for him repeatedly.
• Aaron P. Taylor did not boil a rabbit belonging to Michael Douglas following the end of their affair, thereby exposing his deep rage and mental instability; close examination reveals this to be a scene from the movie Fatal Attraction.
• Aaron P. Taylor was not present at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ; at the crucifixion, when given the choice to free one man, he did not shout "Barabbas! Give us Barabbas!"
• After substantial investigation, we have concluded that Aaron P. Taylor did not assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, thereby triggering the first World War.

There are so many terrible things that Aaron P. Taylor has not done! Through not doing terrible things, he has gained the wisdom that comes with not doing them. Wisdom like this:

In short, ladies: if you don’t want a guy to rape you, don’t do stuff intentionally that you know will make him want to jump your bones. You may think doing these sorts of things is “cute” and “just being a girl,” but it’s dangerous, and can get you hurt. Teasing a guy with soft whispers, body groping, or any other type of enticing maneuver is wrong if you don’t plan on following through.

You heard him right, ladies: if you want to stay safe from Aaron P. Taylor, do not flirt with him, touch him, speak to him, or show him any kind of sexual or friendly attention, lest he be enticed, lose control, and accidentally follow you to a deserted location and give you a raping. What sound advice! I think we can all agree that no woman should ever interact with Aaron P. Taylor again for the rest of his life, can't we?

So, Aaron P. Taylor: thank you for your insight into why women should run away from you, shrieking in terror, whenever you approach. Were I not so busy getting a restraining order against you, I would most definitely give you a cookie.

[Via.]

Satanic Incest Dinosaurs, or: How I Spent My Childhood

You know, we can spend all day talking about "recaps" versus "reviews," and adults reading YA lit, and nostalgia, and triviablogging, and whether those are good things or just a sign of how our generation has infantilized itself. OR - and this is the preferred option, here - we can just celebrate the fact that I was not making any of this up! 

I loved Christopher Pike's books when I was a pre-teen. I passed them around to all the girls that I knew, and they loved them, too. My mother was horrified. I was such a strong reader! Why was I wasting my intelligence? Were these books possibly Satanic? (Mom loves church. So much, Mom loves church. I'm actually thinking of handing out a brief pamphlet to everyone in my life to explain how I came to be, and it will read "CHURCH MOM + BOOZE DAD = THIS." The rest of it will just be pictures of naughty Catholic schoolgirls.) I didn't care. They were about sex, and death, and nobody was going to tell me anything about these subjects, so I had to find what I could.  

Most of my Christopher Pike memories concern reading in the backseat of a hot car, which paused periodically so that my brother could throw up (the boy had a legendarily bad relationship with motor transport; on long drives, we actually resorted to doping him until he fell asleep, so that he wouldn't leave a trail of spew everywhere we went). Something about the heat and the motion and the smell of puke made all of these memories feel hazy and indistinct, like fever dreams, and I could not ever be sure that I was remembering the books correctly. So it is actually reassuring, in many ways, to click through to a recap of Scavenger Hunt and read this: 

Cessy and Davey are actually part of an ancient race of dinosaurs that developed intelligence and found a way to gain immortality after surviving the dinosaur holocaust.

Yes! They were! Dinosaurs who fed on human sacrifice! They also re-animated a dude's dead best friend and disguised him as his teacher for purposes which remain unclear! They were also twins, and they made out! WITH EACH OTHER!!!!! God, I'm so glad I didn't just come up with this. 

There's actually a lot of incest in the Pike books, which I had mercifully forgotten. Also, lots of New Age stuff about ancient astronauts and interdimensional wisdom-bringing gurus (who are inevitably Indian, despite being interdimensional) and walk-ins. I was clicking around last night, and apparently it's kind of a big deal that no-one has ever seen a photo of Christopher Pike or learned anything about him, but I honestly think that, if he exists, he's one of those dudes who wears a quartz crystal around his neck and believes himself to be an alien. Which, if so, his higher wisdom would seem to be kind of incompatible with all the DIRTY TEEN SEX in his novels! 

Did you know that there is a Pike book (Die Softly) in which two cheerleaders have repeated threesomes with a quarterback and then kill him by forcing him to take cocaine? They tie him to a tree and shove it up his nose, I think! They are both super popular at school because they sell cocaine laced cookies at the bake sales. I blame this book for my long-held belief that (a) it was possible to take cocaine in cookie form, and (b) this was the only safe way to do it, because if you put it up your nose, you would instantly die. 

Anyway, I am thrilled to note that Like Pike will soon be covering Whisper of Death, which was the first Pike book I read, and is still in many ways my favorite. In Whisper of Death, a girl fools around with her boyfriend and quickly finds herself in need of a safe and legal abortion, but when she and her dude return from the clinic, they find that their pleasant bedroom community has been transformed into an eerie ghost town, from which there is no escape, and in which they (and the handful of randomly selected teenagers which comprise the town's entire population) have all been sentenced to die grisly coincidental deaths which mirror some unpopular chick's book of extremely violent fairy tales. This is because the unpopular chick died last year, because no-one liked her, and also she was reincarnated in the form of Abortion Chick's untimely fetus. I mean, damn, I sympathize, but don't you think people would have liked her better had she not been plotting to cut them in half via witchcraft? Anyway, the only way for the girl to save her friends is to travel back in time and die mid-abort. Because I guess having the witchcraft child wasn't an option. 

It occurs to me now that Whisper of Death was the first thing that got me and my friends talking about abortion. Yes, it was gory (the goriest Pike book I can remember, aside from Monster, in which space bacteria infested people's brains and made them into cannibals) but the thing that stuck with us was the pregnancy. It also occurs to me that we learned about abortion from a book which told us actually having one would sentence you to a deadly netherworld, but, you know. Sex ed is rarely perfect.