Accountability.

The thing that frustrated me most about Brinn's prose was the scene that the girl was flirting with the boys. The adolescent boys could not have been much older than the protagonists, and recalling adolescence i certainly can understand that reckless desperate romanticism. Most probably when the boy lumbered in he was drunk or high, yet his intentions were good in mind. I did not register more than an unnamed pang of indignation every subsequent time that i heard Brinn deliver the bicycle scene that fore shadowed the climax. Now i have understood its meaning: the girl was flirting because she enjoyed the attention. At least that was how Brinnlinson depicted her.

Sartre said that we create one hundred per cent of our circumstances. I would qualify that that seems a bit too optimystic, but then his point in its radicalism is an enduring challenge, especially when in an age of conformity and a society of privilege (and it IS an entire society, no scape goat of it) we are more tempted than ever to pass the torch of responsibility rather than running with it.

It was tragic that the boy had miss read her advances. But then what was he to do? Communication is absurd; the only hope that humans have of communicating rests in that we are Free to interpret signals and cues as we so choose. When he described 'the way [she] look[ed]', he was noting the same subjective phenomenological observation that we all ways make, consciously or unconsciously. This was where I felt that Brinn (and Perkin)'s interpretation of the text became abusive: that the male was depicted as aggressive and stupid where as the female was depicted as a totally power less damosel in distress as though to make us forget her actions from earlier. An adolescent boy might easily and reasonably have taken her flirtation for a pass. What did he mean by 'the way she looked'? Was it her dress, where in she had flirted with him, ostensibly trying (as I know that at least one adolescent girl I knew had done frequently) to attract him in previously? Was it her intentionality? None of that is specified in the text. Brinn in her brilliance (and between her and Perkins i do not know how to apportion the blame, which all so spares me that responsibility) twisted the piece a bit to fit a feminist ideology -- feminist not in the sense of equalism, accountability, and self-empowerment, but in the same sense as masculinism: preferring one gender to another.

Dm.A.A.