Today I was reminded of an incident back when I was attending a Lutheran college in the Midwest (go ahead and guess which one; I went to three). I was in an English Literature class. The teacher was a very pleasant woman. She was openly liberal, and liked to season her lectures with provocative ideas to challenge her students’ beliefs, but she wasn’t a hostile person.

I remember her describing a story she’d read that was “controversial.” But it was a very good story (she said) one that raised important questions. I don’t recall the title or the author. I don’t recall whether it was a short story, a novel, or even a play.

She said the dominant character in this story was a remarkably difficult woman. Other characters tried various methods for coexisting with her, and she frustrated every one of them. “In the end,” my instructor said (and I’m quoting her exact words here) “there was nothing you could do about this woman except rape her.”

I sat there listening to this, and I immediately rejected it. I felt very provincial and callow in doing so, of course, because I knew I lacked my instructor’s sophistication. But I couldn’t think of any circumstance in which rape would be appropriate. I’d just have to accept, as I had many times before, that I was an unsophisticated hick from the farm.

Years have passed, more than 40 of them, and if that instructor is still alive, I suspect she’s changed her opinion of that story. Sophisticated people no longer consider rape an edgy, taboo subject to be explored. Rape is evil, the foul fruit of male social domination.

My point is that I didn’t have to wait for fashionable opinions to change in order to see rape as categorically wrong. My liberal instructor did.

I was following the North Star. She was listening to voices in the dark.