A New York Magazine article about “hooking up” when you’re an “anti-rape activist” is making the rounds on Twitter today.
One of the women interviewed, Chrissy Keenan of the University of California Los Angeles, “animatedly” told the magazine a story about a man she met on the dating/hook-up app Tinder and who she was preparing to meet for a date.
“One time, I agreed to meet with this guy at 8 or 9 at night. Before we met, I said to him, ‘This is the work I do, I know the chief of police … so, don’t try and get creepy; I know all my rights.’ And five minutes later, he was like, ‘Actually, I’m really not OK with how you just assume I’m a bad guy. And I get very bad vibes from that, so we shouldn’t hang out anymore.'”
“I was in a rage,” Keenan added. “He was a total f—boy about consent.”
The quote above casts Keenan in a negative light, and given the rest of the quotes in the article, I figured there had to be more to the story than what was reported. I reached out to Keenan for clarification, and she provided more details.
She said the man in the story invited her to meet him at an empty house he was house-sitting for a friend. In an article in Cosmopolitan, Keenan was described as a sexual assault victim, but even if she hadn’t been, most girls wouldn’t be eager to meet a stranger from Tinder at an unknown, empty house.
Keenan says she meant the “chief of police” comment as “an intentional exaggeration.” She said she works with some members of the police department but doesn’t actually know the chief.
“Additionally, I had said something very similar to other men on Tinder who actually responded very positively,” Keenan said. “For example, one of them had said, ‘I totally understand why you would say that actually.'”
Keenan said it was “probably best” for both she and the man in the story that they didn’t meet, as his reaction via text led her to believe he might have “said other comments I would have disliked regarding my sexual violence prevention efforts, etc. in person.”
She also disagreed with the way her final quote was presented.
“I did say: ‘He was a total f—boy,'” she said. “The ‘about consent’ part is something I do not think I added at the end of that statement, but this interview did occur a month ago.”
“The reason I find the addition of these last two words relevant is because I described him as being a f—boy because he was quick to get defensive, assumed that I was saying this ‘line’ because of him personally (even though I did not know him) and not because of the context of the situation (i.e., meeting someone in an empty house late at night), and then proceeded to condescendingly tell me I shouldn’t be so abrasive and I need to think more positively in life and trust people,” Keenan added. “I had not explicitly described consent to him, I had more so demanded respect of myself and my boundaries.”
It is easy to misinterpret text messages. Both sides here might have misinterpreted what the other was saying. Ultimately, as Keenan said, it was best they didn’t meet up — no harm, no foul. But it is another example of the importance of openly questioning what is being presented in the media, as even though New York Magazine was trying to write a positive story about these women, this quote still came across much differently than Keenan intended.
Just another reminder that there is always more to the story.
