Don't get her wrong. Chrissie Hynde says she's not defending rape. But she's sent the internet outrage cycle into a spin by taking "full responsibility" for being sexually assaulted by a biker gang in Ohio in the 1970s. She's only talking sense when she says it's not a good idea for vulnerable individuals "to f**k around with people, especially people who wear 'On Your Knees' badges."She was only 21 at the time: an art school graduate from a conventional, suburban home with an eye for the bad boys and a burgeoning appetite for the drugs that would kill half of her Pretenders bandmates within four years of the band's formation.Here's what happened. She bumped into a group of the heavy bikers while visiting an ex-lover at the Cleveland Municipal Jail."This," she writes in her appropriately named memoir, Reckless, "was the sort of place I got dressed up for. Lawbreakers - right on!"She was jamming mandrax down her throat and thought the bikers looked "regal" in their rotting leathers. They invited her to a "party" and she only twigged that she might not be destined to have fun when she arrived at "a white slum that had 'Jeffrey Dahmer' written all over it ... The tattooed love boys methodically unchained a series of padlocks to reveal a dark and noticeably empty house before shoving me into a dank den. I was led upstairs to another dark room with the smell of the dissection table. A party of one."She was ordered to strip.Hynde is never preachy and most of her book reads like a cautionary tale about the drink and drugs her generation believed would open their hearts and minds but ended up shutting them down. On this occasion, drugs got her into a terrifying position but they also helped her to survive it."The good thing about the [mandrax]: I wasn't duly perturbed. I was getting experience."Later that afternoon she sketched the group's portraits and went on to date the one who dropped her at home.The story makes a shocking read for those of us who grew up admiring Hynde's ability to stand up and be counted in the Boys' Club of rock 'n' roll. It's unsettling to read what she felt she was required to tolerate to be accepted.She'd sit up front on tour buses on insomniac nights while her bandmates partied in the back with groupies in their dirty brown polyester-sheeted beds.Hynde sympathises with the groupies: they gave their hearts to guys who'd forgotten them before reaching the next town.She thinks the contraceptive pill did little for the sexual liberation of her gender: "Women weren't in control of their bodies, the drug was. Taking procreation out of the equation was turning women into sex toys. No one seemed to mind."Her first kiss is thrust upon her against her wishes, by soul singer Jackie Wilson. She'd gone to a concert with a friend and found herself lifted from her seat "like a sacrificial lamb, too paralysed with embarrassment to protest".Much later, as a successful artist in her own right, she is thrilled to wake up in bed with a naked Iggy Pop. "I directed my eyes into his, a sea of green with a bloodshot sun rising. I'd won the Big Daddy jackpot!"He let me come back to his hotel room before the show but made it perfectly clear that if I wanted to hang around I would have to keep my mouth shut." ..