Recently I stumbled across a video posted by a young man who drives for Lyft. In this video, he recounts an occasion where he responded to a ride request for an intoxicated and unconscious woman. In the video, he goes on to say that it actually wasn't the intoxicated woman that requested the Lyft, but her two sober friends. Her friends helped her into the car because she was unable to walk on her own and then handed this driver the keys to their friend's apartment and told him to "make sure she [got] in safe."
And things like this are what makes me feel like good friends are few between and hard to find.
The driver, having an ounce of common sense felt uncomfortable in this situation, not just for himself, but for the intoxicated woman. For his sake, why on earth would he put himself in a situation with a vulnerable woman where he could EASILY look like the bad guy? Now the woman's race was never disclosed, but could you imagine how it would look if this man, who was Black, got pulled over with an unconscious white woman, who probably had no clue who he was, in the back seat of his car? I'll tell you how it would have looked. BAD. This man would have been forced out of his car, probably beaten up, and probably killed. And God forbid this woman sobered up in this car with this strange man and freaked the fuck out.
For the woman's sake, what kind of friends stick you in a car with a strange man while you're in a compromised state? Thankfully, this driver wasn't a creep, but the fact that two women put their heads together and really thought this was a smart idea has me irate.
The story gets worse. The driver, rightfully so, refused to take the woman home unless one of her friends rode with them, and both friends decided that they didn't feel like taking the ride. Even after the driver offered to not to charge them for the return trip, the woman refused to take the trip with their unconscious "friend."
I wonder how this woman's friends would have felt had she been raped? If they turned on the evening news to see her picture up next to that of the Lyft driver next to a news presenter detailing her murder? How would they have felt?
If we lived in a perfect world, men just simply wouldn't rape or take advantage of women. But we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where women in clubs are taught to go in pairs to the bathroom and a man who suggests a home cooked meal at his home for a first date is a red flag. 1 in 5 women will be raped in her life time, and this statistic only takes into account the amount of rapes that are actually reported. In the U.S a rape is reported about every 6 minutes.
The point is, yes, the rapist the is criminal. But let us not put ourselves or those around us in preventable situations. In 2018, lets make common sense common again.
