Warning: You probably do not want to read this.
I am writing about my own rape for several reasons:
> to share my story with other victims
> to speak out about a subject that is usually ignored
> because I have all these words in my head, and that’s why I started a blog in the first place
Once upon a time there was me. I met this guy a couple of times, found that we had similar sexual interests, and started hooking up. We were open about the fact that both of us were seeing other people as well. I was leaving the country for several months soon, so I just wanted to have some fun. Mostly what I liked about this guy was fooling around, and that we always got dressed up fancy when we went out. I overlooked his frequent exaggerations and name-dropping. Since he was generally nice, I ignored my friends’ warnings and his creepy vibes. If you were unclear on what I meant by “hooking up,” I meant being sexually intimate without vaginal or anal sex. I had a whole conversation with the guy about it, and—after being mad—conceded that he didn’t “even like vaginal sex much.” I told him that if he wanted vaginal or anal sex, then it would be fine if he wanted to seek it elsewhere.
One Sunday morning we woke up and fooled around. I hadn’t slept well since he had only put out one pillow and a small blanket, forcing me to lay uncomfortably close to him. We were spooning, but at a distance. We had both gotten off, so I wasn’t really sure where things were going when he stuck his fingers in my butt. I didn’t really care, either. Now, several guys before this one have ventured where even I dare not go, and to be honest, it never actually felt like much. It’s a little weird, or a lot weird, depending on your hang-ups. He seemed to be enjoying it, so I let him continue. “Hey,” I thought, “if he gets off without me having to do anything, it’s win-win.” He asked if he could fuck my ass. I said no. Perhaps as an enticement he offered “even with protection?” I was somewhat horrified that he would even consider unprotected sex, especially since he was having sex with someone else, and he suspected me of the same. I said no again. After a few more minutes of his moaning and rubbing his wiener between my legs while making friends with my colon, I noticed that his hand was on my hip, which meant that something else was in my butt. I sat up and turned around to see his dick slide out of my butt. Oh, no.
My thought process went something like this: “Was he just having sex with me? Is there any way that he could have not just been having sex with me? I think I just got raped. Should I kill him? If I start screaming, will he actually rape me way worse? Does this mean we’re not getting waffles?” I sat there, horrified, until he said I was starting to scare him. I said there was a word for what he just did, and then he got real scared. But I’m pretty sure he was just being dramatic. He has a propensity for melodrama. So I got dressed and went home. I cried. I called my best friend. I took a shower. I considered going to the police or hospital, but there would be no evidence. I was mildly annoyed at having a lover stick his fingers in my butt, but there was no way I could handle getting swabbed or whatever by some technician or clinician or nurse. I just wanted it to have not happened. And I was sad about not getting waffles.
Later that day he proffered several explanations for his behavior, all of which creeped me out: he thought I was into it (as if I’m subtle about it when I’m “into it”), he didn’t understand why I didn’t want to have sex. Even if I thought having sex would result in me getting abducted by aliens, you still have to respect it! I went to collect my belongings from him the next day, which he handed to me folded and stacked in a paper bag. We politely discussed yesterday’s events, and I highlighted how his behavior constituted rape, and was generally unsafe for someone with multiple partners (he was sharing sex toys between me and at least one other girl.) He seemed to admit that a mistake had been made, and that I was hurt, but not that he had put his sexual organ inside my body against my explicit and repeated request.
I then entered a period of general fucked-uped-ness. The main issue was that someone I generally liked thought that I was so worthless that I didn’t even have the right to determine whose dicks enter my orifices. He seemed like a reasonable guy before, so maybe he was right on this one. I didn’t know him that well, so I sought more information. I had a meeting with his 3 previous ex-girlfriends. None of them had been raped by him, but they all had highly creepy stories, which I will spare you here. None of them were at all surprised. I felt validated. I left the country.
A little over a year after I last saw him, we attended the same concert. I was with several of my friends, all of whom knew what had happened. And apparently while I was gone people had been speaking about it. I hid for most of the show. I thought about what to do. I just wanted to leave. But I kept thinking, “HE’S the one who should leave!” After the band we had both come to see, I decided to say something to him. I was shaking. I thought I was going to crap my pants. I went up to him and said something along the lines of “Listen you rapist piece of shit, I don’t want to see you ever again. Do you understand? Never again!” He said OK and looked scared. I’ve come to love that look. It felt great! I went to my car and sobbed hysterically for half an hour. Yep, totally great. I haven’t seen him again.
Up until this point, everyone I spoke to who knew this guy despised him. All of them believed me immediately when I told them what he’d done. There was just one person still in his ring—the girl he was dating at the same time as me, and was still dating a year later. I liked her the one or two times I’d met her. We got coffee. She herself had been majorly raped several times, although she said that she didn’t want to minimize my experience. She also seemed to believe me, though she also argued his same arguments—that somehow it wasn’t clear to him after our conversations and after he flat-out asked me and I had said no that I did not want sex. Anal sex. (Wouldn’t you make absolutely sure a girl was cool with it before you stuck your thing up her booty? Not necessarily to confirm consent, but out of incredulity. Like, “Are you serious? Girls always say no to this. This is the best day of my life!”) Like many before her, she was also duped by this guy’s charm. She said she always calls him out on his lies, but twice I corrected her understanding of events. Like when she said I had gone to his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Um, I have my own family, thankyouverymuch. The conversation started out OK, but mid-way through I felt she was CHANNELING him. She sounded just like him, and it totally wigged me out.
When I came back to the country half a year after getting raped, I went to Planned Parenthood to get on birth control. I told them what had happened (the third time I told a health worker), and they reported it to the police. After 3 hours in Planned Parenthood, I came home to see a cruiser parked outside my house. Keep in mind, I had been in America less than a week, I had a cold, and American food was upsetting my stomach every time I ate. So I was alone in a house with an armed man who I didn’t know. And I was telling him every nasty detail of one of the worst moments of my life. He’s asking me questions like “So he was digitally penetrating your anus?” Very uncomfortable. As is my usual style, I’m joking around and being offhand about it, and he’s having none of it. Do you know how uncomfortable it is when your jokes are getting no response? Try that when your jokes are about your own rape. I’m going to advise against that, actually. So this goes on for an hour, and the he wants to know where it happened. I didn’t want to tell the officer where he lives, because he was not being clear on what the consequences would be. And I hadn’t decided on what consequences I was OK with. What would happen to me if cops show up at his door? Eventually he got me to point on a map where it happened, and he said “that’s not in this town,” and headed for the door. It was three blocks from the police station. Apparently the police station is on the border. FML. So that was it. He suggested I go to Richmond’s police department. Hell no I’m not doing this again. A year after that I went to the police station to try to talk to them about how they handle taking accounts from alleged rape victims. Maybe don’t send a man? Maybe explain what the repercussions might be? Maybe show some facial affect? They didn’t have any document of a reported rape, so they didn’t feel there was anything to talk about. I left crying.
There have been some lingering side effects. One is that I have turned into a man-hater. I understand that this one guy’s mistake does not reflect all men. It was other men that pushed me over. I worked a very emotionally draining job (with violent disabled kids), so I took a day off. My dad came home and teased me for being so “tired” after my luxurious 3-day weekend. I hadn’t told him what happened (and still haven’t), but I was just a tad bit sensitive to belittling at the time. When I did go back to work, a male coworker asked why I was so glum. I didn’t say anything, but he took the liberty to offer some advise: “You gotta get inside his head.” Get inside his head?! “He raped me!” I shot back. I told one of the other guys I was seeing. I actually really cared for this guy for several years. His response was “Why didn’t you just get up?” Apparently because I could just “get up,” it didn’t count as rape to him. This was not helpful. We had several discussions on the matter, each of which made him seem more autistic. I tried hooking up with him, and he didn’t understand why I would want to “take it slow” after our previous passionate encounters. And he tried tickling my asshole. Normally I would have let the guy do his thing, but I was taking a crash course on putting up boundaries. High boundaries. Four-foot thick stone boundaries. I tried to talk to him about it more, but he just could not get it. He told me if it was really rape then I would have gone to the police, and since I hadn’t and wasn’t planning to, then it wasn’t rape. I no longer speak to him.
I gained some friends from all this. Some people who I was not close to before were extremely supportive when I told them. When I went to see the guy the next day to get my things, I had a friend sitting there in the car for an hour, watching out for me. One thing that was most helpful at the time was when people would tell me that what he did was not OK. Because for a while I wasn’t sure.
But I also lost a few friends, too. I lost that one guy I was dating, who I already mentioned. I lost one of my closest friends because she didn’t seem to realize that something bad had happened. She never mentioned it, never made any extra effort to be a friend. I don’t want to sound like I’m throwing myself a pity party, but there are just some times when you need your friends to act like friends. I now try to be more forgiving when people do or say the wrong thing after I’ve told them. I know it’s hard to know how to respond. I still don’t know how to respond when people tell me they’ve been raped.
And what happened to my sex life? It died. I don’t know if I can place the blame squarely on this event, but within four months I had absolutely no sex drive, which is depressing. Or maybe I was depressed and that killed my sex drive? Either way, it’s gone.
I think the one thing that helped me recover the most was realizing that it’s not just me. Rape is a very personal crime. It happens INSIDE your most intimate parts. I felt like I was the only person who had ever experienced sexual violation from that guy, at that time, under those circumstances, resulting in a tragic loss of waffles. I felt like no one would understand. I knew that many women have experienced unwanted sexual penetration in some form, but it took me a long time to identify with them. Since it’s such a personal event, I wasn’t able to relate to anyone or anything else. I didn’t find many stories or much information online. But the more I talked about it, the more stories I heard, the more I felt like I was in good company. The last statistic I read said that 1 in 6 American women gets raped. Even if it’s 1 in 10, that is still millions of women.
And that’s pretty much it. You can try to deal with it as best as you can, and find a way to make it make you stronger. Piece of cake, right? And you can just recognize the fact that when you get raped, it totally sucks. Sometimes it is a series of suckyness. Sometimes the suckyness compounds other suckyness. I felt like telling my story would help me, and maybe help others. Don’t be afraid to tell your story.
And if you see Rob, don’t act like you don’t know.
