My Interview on “Raising America with Kyra Phillips” on Date Rape

I know three women whose first sexual experience was date rape.

Two of them were in high school at the time, and the last was a freshman in college.

I went to Italy looking for romance during spring break my junior year in college and ended up fighting off a boy I kissed on an empty beach at night.

I still partially blame myself for that encounter.

My family and I just came back from a trip to South Africa where, I was stunned to discover, there’s a rape epidemic.

Police statistics say a woman is raped every thirty-six seconds there. And there’s plenty amiss in the misogynistic culture that bred Steubenville.

The facts can be paralyzing at times.

I’m raising two daughters who are my raison d’être and any pain they feel, I feel two-fold.

Sometimes I bury my head in the sand and shut out all of the bad news because sometimes that’s the best thing to do.

I often consider changing my aol address, because every time I log on to check my mail, all of the worst news around the world comes flying at me like violence porn and I lose heart.

I rationally recognize there is only so much I can do to influence my daughters lives and then fate will take them where they will go.

This is the madness of becoming a parent.

No one can explain how profoundly vulnerable it will render you. You cannot know until you hold that child in your arms, and by then it’s too late.

What I do have control over are the things I tell my girls.

I err on the side of saying too much. I’ve never had much of a filter between my brain and my mouth. But I believe information is power.

Ideally we want to inform, not frighten. And sometimes we fall short of that ideal.

Here is my somewhat painful interview with Kyra Phillips on Raising America.

They gave me fabulous hair and make-up, but I felt a bit like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News, having hot flashes and cotton mouth when the red light lit up my camera telling me I was live on air.

I now revere broadcast journalists. In any case, I hope something in my nervous ramblings may be helpful: