In the wake of the wonder of hashtags that women and men are
using to try to argue sexism, sexual assault, and other fun and exciting things
in the world, I wanted to write up my own experiences and share them. Not all these experiences are mine, but all
of them affected me, whether it was because I was intimately involved or
because the person involved was a close friend, and I was there for them during
it.
Where to start?
I was sexually assaulted once. I avoided it twice.
The first time I avoided it was when a friend and I went to
visit a guy she had set me up with. I
thought he wanted to be my boyfriend. I
was probably about 14, and he was over 21, but that didn’t stop me from
thinking that he was interested, and he acted plenty interested. But when we went to go hang out with him, it
turned out that he had bought us wine coolers (we were both young teenage
girls), and when he flipped on the TV, it “somehow” had a porno in it – “Younger
Girls with Older Men.” I could swear it
was a Ron Jeremy, now that I know who he is, but at the time, I just remember
thinking that maybe I was not in the best place. I drank anyway because, hey, it was alcohol,
and then I wanted to call some friends – drunk calling! – and the only phone
was in his bedroom. Of course. So my friend and I went back into his
bedroom, and then he followed us in.
Naked. Of course. My friend and he started going at it, and I
was surprised at how quickly it had changed from a “hey, he likes you” moment
to a “hey, we’re going to have a threesome.”
I was not interested, and I left the room, telling me friend to think
about what she was doing. (Yes, she was
a willing participant, but being that she was 13 and he was 21, she wasn’t
truly able to consent…) After I left,
she realized what was happening, pretended that she was going to get sick, and
he kicked us out. Yep. He had driven us to his place, in a town
where neither of us lived, and then went ahead and let us go on out into the
street, two drunk young teenage girls.
This was before cell phones.
Luckily, I was able to call a friend who could drive who came and picked
us up and dropped us off at our houses. But
who knows how many other times he did it before – or after – and things didn’t
turn out that way?
The second time I avoided it was when I was dating a guy
that I had known literally since kindergarten.
He claimed that I had said I was interested in him back then, but I
could swear that in kindergarten I had liked another boy. Regardless, when he asked me out, I said why
not. Like in the first situation,
alcohol was involved. I had told this
date of mine that I would not have sex with him – I was always up front about
the fact that I was not going to have sex at that age – and he, like so many
other guys I dated, always said he would be the one to change my mind. This particular guy, though, thought that the
way to change my mind was to constantly give me alcohol. Again, being a young teenager, I wouldn’t say
no to drinking, and so most of our dates involved going to his house and
getting drunk, sometimes with other people around, sometimes alone. One time when I got fairly drunk, and was
still saying no, he attempted to convince me to change my mind by just whipping
it out at me, as if this would make me suddenly change my mind and fall over
all him. Instead, since I was massively
drunk, I laughed at him and told him to put it away. After that, there was some drunken fumbling,
but in the end, I convinced him (through the use of a knee) that he was better
off putting it back in his pants.
I would like to say that taught him a lesson, but it wasn’t
the lesson I wanted him to learn. Here’s
where it turns into someone else’s story.
A close male friend of mine approached me, knowing I had dated this guy,
and asked me if I could do something.
This ex of mine had apparently begun dating another girl – one I didn’t
know, but one that I did meet after this – and in her case, when he whipped it
out, he kept going and raped her. She
was terrified of him, and she was terrified to tell her parents because she
thought they would blame her. She hadn’t
told anyone but our mutual friend, and this ex of mine was still trying to talk
to her and convince her to keep going out with him. Being the kind of person I am – and was – I confronted
my ex, told him to leave this girl alone, and, okay, maybe there was some threatening
involved in he continued to harass her at school.
An important thing to note – at the time this happened, he
was a football player, and probably stood about a foot taller and at least 80
or so pounded heavier than me. I was
five ft one and maybe 100 pounds, soaking wet.
What was the outcome here?
Well, his father (an ex-marine) called my mother and said that I have
been threatening his son, and I was supposed to stop doing it because his son
was scared of me. Yes, scared of
me. I explained the full situation to my
mother, and she was on my side and told me I didn’t have to stop scaring
him. He didn’t speak to me again after
that, and, to the best of my knowledge, he also stopped talking to the girl he
raped. Did he rape anyone else? I don’t know.
But he did find me on Facebook many years letter and send me a creepy
message and friend request. I blocked
him, and I have no idea where he is now.
I would love to say these were isolated incidents, but they
really weren’t.
I knew another girl in high school who got raped and didn’t report
it. I had been friends with her for
years, and so she told me because she didn’t know what to do. She had a boyfriend, an older guy, and her
parents knew about him and let her date him, but they didn’t like him very
much. She knew she wasn’t supposed to
let him up into the apartment while she was home alone, but one time they were
hanging out, and he asked if he could just come up and use the phone to call
someone. She agreed, knowing her parents
would be home soon and thinking she could trust him since they were
dating. Instead, he attacked her and
raped her on the couch before her parents could get home. Then he left, and she felt she couldn’t tell
her parents because she had disobeyed them and therefore they would “blame her”
for the attack. She finally told me
because she was worried – AIDS was in the news everywhere, and when he raped
her, he hadn’t used a condom. She knew
she wasn’t pregnant, but she was afraid of having an STD. She refused to report him, especially because
at that time she had no proof it hadn’t been consensual since it had been more
than a month ago. I convinced her to go
to the doctor and tell him. Her doctor was
awesome and did free testing for her and told her to get counseling (which I
don’t think she ever actually got). But
at least she did get her mind freed from one worry – the tests came back
negative, and she went back six months later and got tested again (free again)
and was clean.
If that was it, I would say it was rarer, but then I made
another friend who, while she had been in college, had been in a sorority. She had a boyfriend who was in a
fraternity. Those things are somewhat
immaterial to the story, except for the fact that they knew each other because of
Greek events. She was having consensual sex
with him at that time. Then, at one
party, they went back to a room where he had a friend waiting. The plan, apparently, was for the friend and
him to rape her together, but when she began fighting and yelling, her “boyfriend”
discovered that this wasn’t for him. So
he left, leaving her there to be raped by his friend. After that, his friend would constantly taunt
her in the halls, leading her to drop out of college, and years later, she
discovered that he had given her an STD that led to her being sterile. She never reported the rape, either.
Notice a common thread here?
No reports ever filed. Three
women, all raped, all silent about that rape.
Notice another common thread? Not all guys are evil. My friend who intervened for his female
friend that had been raped and asked me to help. A doctor who tested a girl for free just to set
her mind at ease.
Yes, I honestly believe that all women have been touched by
or somehow affected by sexual violence. But
I also honestly believe that not all men are involved with it (in a negative
way). In fact, I think many men have
also been affected by it, just by having contact with women who have
experienced it.
And, let’s be fair here – some men have been directly
affected by being assaulted themselves…I am not including them in my blog
simply because I am not friends with any men who have been sexually assaulted,
or at least, none of them who have told me about it. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen – just that
I cannot speak to it.
So before you begin getting all up in arms about the trashing
of men and the trash-talking about women, keep in mind that this is just one
small microcosm of the world that I’ve been a part of. In some areas, it’s worse. Maybe in some, it’s better. But the point is, it’s out there, and saying
it’s not, and saying you’re not part of the problem isn’t good enough. It’s time for all of us to be part of the
solution.
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