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Bethany Blackwell recently released her debut single “I Choose the Bear,” which is now available on Spotify, iTunes and most places you get music. Here’s why she decided to release it now.

Why Now?

I wrote “I Choose the Bear” two years ago, in about a day and a half, on a yellow legal pad. I put the legal pad in a kitchen drawer and left it there. Brian knew. That’s my husband. You know him as Ragnar, and you’ll hear from him soon enough. Anyway, nobody said much about it. We played bars and I sang the songs I was willing to sing in front of two hundred people who came for the beer. I’d been doing this long enough to know which songs those were. I sang about women. I sang about men. I did not sing about me. If you’d asked me back then, I’d have told you that was a rule, and I’d have been proud of it.

I should tell you what I do when I’m not on a stage. It explains how I read things. I keep the books for four mechanic shops; two transmission places, a body shop, and a man who mostly does brakes and tells everybody he does everything. I’ve done it long enough that I can tell you which one is lying about cash before I open the envelope. That’s the job. People hand you paper and you find out what actually happened.

I don’t read the news the way Brian does. He reads a headline and he’s already got a sermon. I read a headline and I want the receipts.

So when the Cornell story came across my phone a few weeks ago, I read it like a deposit slip. Twenty-year-old girl. Fraternity house. Seven boys. Ketamine. Happened back in 2024, and no charges. The district attorney said she described it as voluntary.

I put the phone face down on the counter and finished up the payroll I was working on. I forgot about her by supper. I had a rule about what was my business, and a girl at a college a long way from here is not my business. I called it minding my own business. It was a wall. I’m good at building walls.

The thing about this case is that it came out in pieces. It sat for two years with nobody outside Ithaca knowing a thing about it; then it all came loose at once. There was a new piece every couple of days, each worse than the last.

First it was that word: voluntary. The DA had said it two years ago and nobody had heard him. I don’t trust a headline to quote anybody right, so I went and found the DA’s actual statement. There it was in his own mouth. She’d taken the drug voluntarily, so what came after wasn’t a crime he could charge. I read that three times. I know what the law in New York says. I looked it up. If you’re conscious and you got yourself drunk or high, a man can do what he wants with you and the state calls it a conversation you had. That’s the statute. He wasn’t lying. That was almost the worst part.

Then it was the messages. The lawsuit came out, and in it were the Snapchats. I’m going to say what they said. Nobody else in my life seemed to want to say it out loud. They called her free pussy. They sent the message around the house like a coupon. Come on down.

Then it was the essays. The school shut the fraternity down and threw two of them out, and the other five got put through what they call a disciplinary process, and some of those boys got their punishment reduced after they wrote an essay about it. I’ve got two grown kids. I know what a college essay is worth. I’ve read a few. I’d have hated to see the one that got a boy his semester back.

Then it was the names. The students got tired of waiting and published all seven. Some man out in Hollywood started building a website with their faces on it, and everybody argued about whether that was justice or a lynch mob. I noticed nobody was arguing about her anymore.

And then, a couple of weeks after all that, the DA reopened it. Something changed his mind. I’d guess it was the names.

I don’t know how it happened. None of us do. But I’ve been a woman for forty-three years and a girl for twenty of those. I have an idea or two about how I think that night went:

She went there to meet a boy she liked. He asked if she’d be with him and his friend, both of them, and she said yes. I want to stop right there, because this is where everybody else starts to look at the floor. She said yes to two. On purpose. Wanting it. A twenty-year-old woman wanted two men and said so. Good for her. That is the entire list of things she did.

Then somebody in that house looked at a girl who was game for two and figured out that if she was high enough she’d be game for anybody, and he got on his phone.

She knew when the door opened. She knew when the third one came in, and then the fourth. She got under the covers and pushed hands off her. Somebody put something in front of her face and told her it would make it easier, so she took it. After that she doesn’t remember, and after that the count went up. There was a boy passed out on a couch who got a blow job while he was out cold. Nobody wrote an essay about him. So it was the house. It was how the house worked.

I was doing the books for a transmission company the day the DA reopened the case. Dale, who owns the place, was reading the story on his phone, and he said, to me, right there sitting at his desk with his bank statements, “Well, she went over there for it.”

I’ve known Dale eleven years. He’s never been anything but decent to me. He fixed my daughter’s Civic for parts cost when she was broke. But he said that, he meant it, and he didn’t think he was saying anything about me. That’s the whole problem in one sentence. He doesn’t know which ones are the danger, either. He thinks he does. He thinks it’s the other guys.

I didn’t say anything to Dale. I finished his reconciliation and drove home. Somewhere on the drive the thing that finally took the wall down came together.

Those boys didn’t know who she was when this thing started getting loud.

Think about that. Seven boys in a room with one girl, and when people came asking, they couldn’t have told you her name. She was that interchangeable. Which means (so far as I can tell) she likely wasn’t the first girl they handed around that house, and it means that out there somewhere there may be others who never came forward. And if I’m right, that means that Snapchat was the house’s standard operating procedure.

I went to the kitchen, got the legal pad out, and sat at the table with it. I’m going to tell you why that cost me something. This is the part I’ve never said in front of anybody but Brian.

When I was twenty-three, I went to a motel in Lexington with two men from a band that had opened for my ex-boyfriend’s band. I was sober and I walked in on my own feet. I liked them both, I’d thought about it for most of the second set, and I decided. The details are mine, and that’s the point I’m making. In the morning, in the parking lot, I heard one of them say a word about me to the other one. He laughed and they got in their van.

I’ve thought about that room for twenty years and I’m fine with it. The parking lot is the part I’ve carried, and it took me a long time to figure out that the parking lot belonged to him. He decided that a woman who’d said yes to him was a woman he got to name. All I did was carry it to the car.

So I know what people are going to say about that girl. I’ve heard it said about me, by a man who’d been inside me not six hours before. She wanted it. She asked for it. She went over there for it.

Yes. She did. She went over there for two.

And here’s where the rule I was so proud of fell apart. I couldn’t sing that song as a woman who’d stayed out of it. The song’s got my mother in it. It’s got the keys between my fingers. It’s got every lesson I was ever handed about how to keep myself from being the girl in that room, and the plain fact is that I’ve been the girl in a room, by choice. The only difference between me and her is that the two I picked stayed two.

The only thing that separates us is that the men I picked never made a phone call. Call it whatever you want. I call it luck.

A woman gets to want. She gets to want one, or two, or nobody. She gets to say so and she gets to go to the house. Wanting is a yes to the thing she wanted, and that’s where it stops. A yes to two is a yes to two. The minute she’s too drunk or too high to count, the yes is gone. It’s gone for her, it’s gone for the boy on the couch, and it’s gone for anybody. Every man in that house knew that, but they got on their phones anyway. The mess of the night doesn’t change what got done in it. It just gives everybody something to point at so they don’t have to look at the thing itself.

That’s the measure now. I used to think doing right meant keeping my own story in the drawer with the song. I thought you could sing for women without being one in front of them. You can’t. I was a coward about it for two years and I’m done.

I showed Brian the legal pad that night. He’d read it before, the week I wrote it, but I showed him again, and I told him I was putting it out, and then I told him the rest, about Lexington, with the parking lot in it this time. I’d always left the parking lot out.

He didn’t say anything for a while. He’s loud on a stage but he’s not loud at the table. He asked me who the man was. I told him it didn’t matter. He said it mattered to him, and I said that was his problem to carry, not mine. He sat with that. Then he got up and went out to the garage, and I heard him out there for most of an hour. When he came back in he’d restrung my guitar, which didn’t need it. He set it against the table and went to bed.

In the morning he asked if I wanted him on the track. I said no. This one’s mine. He said he figured.

So that’s why now. It’s the same song it was on the legal pad, word for word, and if you’ve heard it you know it’s a blunt instrument. It’s out now because a girl in New York said yes to two and got handed to seven, a man I’ve trusted for eleven years said she went over there for it, and I realized that if I kept the wall up one more day I’d be agreeing with him.

I don’t know what happens to those boys next. I hope the DA means it this time. I hope she gets every dollar she’s asking for civilly, and even sees criminal charges come to light if they’re warranted. I hope one day she gets to be a woman who wanted two men and had them instead of a case file.

And if you listened to the song and it made you angry at me, I’d ask you to sit with the song a minute before you come looking. Everything in it, I learned from a man. Everything in it, a man taught me to be afraid of. I didn’t invent the fear. I just finally said who handed it to me.

I choose the bear. I’d choose him again tomorrow. And the day I don’t have to? Well, I’ll let you know…

Bethany