So many black roses

This may get graphic, not so much in physical details as in things that may be too personal by most people's standards. I pose this both as a trigger warning for victims of sexual assault and for people who would rather not know some things about me.

I'm posting this as a reply to a question that was posed to me by a commenter on Pandagon on this thread (because where would a thread on sexual assault be without the rape apologists coming out to play and asking everyone to think of the poor victim menz?). I post under the screen name INTPagan.

When I post about things like that, and then I see a poster list my name in a list of people they trust on this topic, it breaks my heart, because it underscores for me the fact that so many other women have been through this. I don't *want* to be trusted on this, because I want it to be *my* problem. I do not want to share this problem with someone else. I want to be completely alone in this, because there shouldn't be anyone else who has gone through it. This post is a very long response, because I feel it's warranted not so much by the question (my answer, Essie, and I thought hard about it as I wrote this, is a resounding yes) as by the culture.

To explain firstly exactly what this is about, I have been in a relationship with someone who abused me, as I have mentioned, and I had also experienced date rape with someone I was seeing casually, which I may or may not have mentioned. There is also one much murkier occasion. Discussing my personal experiences with rape is rather clinical for me, because I see them, in a way, as something that I was disjointed from. I understand that is a sign of dissociation and that most people would likely tell me to get therapy for it; my response is that, if money really wants to start growing on trees, it had better get cracking. It personally upsets me more that I let it happen to me, even though I understand intellectually that this is not the case. However, this is not a conversation that traumatizes me; it traumatizes me more when I hear about other people's experiences, because I think, on a level, that I see other people's experiences of this as more real than mine. I consider myself strong, and the thought that this happened to me is kind of anathema to my whole self-image.

I think the first time it started to seep in that this was that widespread was whenever I was a senior in high school. It hadn't been too long for me since I had been in these situations (both occurred in my junior year). A girl I didn't know well at the time (we're close friends now), whom I had thought was very stuck-up, was talking to her friend about her controlling boyfriend, and I dragged myself out of my book (because, of course, I was buried in a book) and cocked my head to listen. Being fresh off of it and horrified enough by the thought of someone else having something like that going on, I jumped in. I don't remember the conversation very well, or what came of it, but she broke up with him a while later and, years later, she told me her story - that, one night, when she was in her mid-teens, she was out with him (he was in his early twenties) and his friends and they were drinking, and he pressured her into sex, and, ultimately, she had said no and he had continued anyway. She "knew" she couldn't tell her parents because she had been drinking and out with a guy and it was all very forbidden. So my friend has been raped. (She recently went to a party, ran into the guy, and he pulled her aside and apologized to her, which is a rare addendum, but at least something.)

I started hearing other stories, seeing statistics, and realizing that what had happened to me is horrifyingly common. I seem to be the rule, not the exception. Numbers are cold, though, and it didn't really hit until I went to see the Vagina Monologues with my boyfriend and his family almost a year ago (his sister was in the show). For those who are unfamiliar with the show, participants who have been sexually assaulted wear a black rose, the ones who know someone but have never experienced it personally wear a red rose, and the ones who have not been touched, directly or indirectly, by this experience wear a white rose.

There was not a single white rose there, and there were so. Many. Black roses. So many. It was this tangible, visual representation of how not alone I was, and I wanted to scream because it made me so angry. I'm angry that this has happened to me, but I accept it as part of my narrative. I am enraged that this has happened to other people, because what the fuck?! Again, this is not something you want to be a shared experience. You want to be alone in this.

So, for the sake of posterity, and for the added power of another voice, here's my stories. I figure, the more women talk about it, and the more women talk about their perceptions of what has happened to them (because a lot of rape happens in that grey area where the guy just thinks he's putting on pressure, which I will cover later), the more unacceptable the whole spectrum of behaviour will be.

I'm not sure when I think the first time I was raped happened. I became sexually active at fifteen years old and, where other things that I did with that guy were often coerced, I did not lose my virginity with anything other than my free will - at least, I think. My memory of that entire relationship is so muddled that I have a hard time keeping much of it straight. Either way, I willingly, having planned it, lost my virginity to this guy, and willingly had sex with him on many occasions. Unless you're ready to consider any time that a guy tells a girl, "If you don't do this, I'll find someone else who will," to be coercion, I don't really think that I was so much coerced as mind-screwed into the other things that I did. At any rate, I moved away for a year and moved back at the beginning of my junior year, when I was sixteen. The summer before that I stayed with him and his family on what was originally intended to be a two-week visit and instead ended up staying there until my parents got back out to the area. In the meantime, things got a little darker.

Where before he had used words to persuade me, he became much more physically aggressive, and, where a year before he had been a pretty stick-skinny guy (although with over a foot of height on me), he had put on at least fifty pounds, and it was muscle, so this threat wasn't exactly unfounded. There was one occasion where he had me pinned to the couch and was starting to take my shirt off (I think), I was whimpering for him to stop, and his dad happened to walk in and snarled, "Get the fuck off of her." He may have been raised by a father who is demonstrably a misogynist (though not outside the normal spectrum of the attitude), but I don't think his parents would have tolerated out-and-out obvious rape, and he was starting to push those lines. There were a lot of times when things like that happened, or where he seemed to snap to his senses later on after we were well into my telling him to cut whatever shit he was pulling.

After I moved in with my parents, we had an agreement that we could see other people, which I knew even then meant more that he could see other people (since he told me that we "could" still have sex; how generous). I still started dating someone else, and then sleeping with that guy, who actually treated me with respect.

My abuser's mom died that year. She had gone into surgery for an ulcer, I believe, and then she had a pulmonary embolism and was left comatose and was not expected to live out the day. I was very close to her, so I was devastated, and, naturally, so was he. We usually went to church together, and we did that morning as well, and I remember the way he broke down whenever they asked everyone to pray for his mother. We went back to his house to change clothes and then we were going to spend the day waiting for something, anything, to happen.

I do not read situations well. I was overcome with grief for him and his mother, and felt a massive amount of remorse about "cheating" on him. So I told him, that moment. I was stupid; I was insensitive; I was something. He was very wounded at the time.

He pinned me to the bed and raped me. I mean, there really isn't any other way to put it. He wanted to prove his dominance. He wanted to prove that I was still his. His universe was in complete upheaval and, if my body was the only thing that he could control at that moment, so be it, but it was worth that price to him.

We went to a recital he was singing in later that day, and he broke down in the middle of his song. I just sat there in a daze, thinking, I love him, his mom's dying, and he raped me, and no one here knows it.

She died later that evening, and I held him while he cried, thinking, he's hurting so badly, and he raped me, and I'm hurting, too. It was all just too much to process.

That's the first time that really sticks out to me as being rape. I didn't tell my parents for a multitude of reasons - the most important, to me, was that, if I told my parents that he raped me, they would know we were having sex. I never felt that I was threatened physically or emotionally by giving that message, but part of why I feel a fundamentalist Christian upbringing is harmful is because I was that afraid of being thought a failure as a Christian, so I just didn't tell. That's part of why I can be ambivalent about Christianity; I feel like that aspect of the religion HAS TO GO in order for us to eliminate this problem. Period. As long as women, and teenage girls, do not feel as if they can have consensual sex without shame, there is absolutely no way that they will feel free to report rape, since it is usually an intimate goddamn partner who does it. I think my read on my parents was mostly wrong, but that doesn't change the reality of the message that sends teenagers who do not have the discernment to understand their situations.

The rest of it blurs. He was physically abusive at times, but that blurs together, too; I remember his pulling my hair and hitting me occasionally, although not bruising, and not in the face. He was verbally abusive, and was always extremely hypercritical of my body. He was sexually abusive in that he didn't see consent as a necessity - just a bonus. He would force oral sex on me while I was asleep. He was just generally like that.

We broke up a few months later; I spent the last month trying to break up with him over the phone, but he would threaten to kill himself. Finally we broke up. I was glad. There was one more time when, for some reason, I went over to his house a long time after, got drunk, and we had sex, but I don't really know what I think of that. It's very grey. He had always said that he would never have sex with a girl who had been drinking, but, well, there that went. I don't remember very much of that. Whatever; it's another story in a long line of abuses.

I still feel guilty for what happened because of his mother. I know that it's wrong, but that's the way it hit my psyche at the time and cleansing that is not necessarily a given.

I do not know if he has raped anyone else. I fervently hope not.

The date rape is more unclear to me, although I know it was rape. I had a boyfriend at the time - it was a long-distance relationship with a guy I had known in California. We were free to date, but not to have sex.

Well, a guy I had been dating and I had been sleeping with dropped by without warning one night. I couldn't stand this guy. He had no personality, he was not remotely interested in similar things to me, and just wanted to go to the dollar theater before getting his rocks off. He was a good-looking, soulless shell. Top that off with the fact that I had just settled in with a CD of our spring concert from that year and was looking forward to a nice, introverted evening of enjoying music, and that I hate being interrupted from that sort of thing, and I was very unhappy.

I asked permission and went anyway. Why? My spine had been broken by my previous relationship. I was a pretty malleable ball of spinelessness at the time.

I told him before we went out, "L, I am not having sex with you. I have a boyfriend. No sex, no sex, no sexy sex. No sex." Probably in similar words; he was actually that dull.

We went to a movie; I can't even remember what the hell it was, and then he parked his van somewhere. I told him, "L, remember, no sex." We started making out; he pushed it, and then said, "We should go get some condoms."

I said, "No, we shouldn't, because we're not having sex."

He took the van to a store and got condoms anyway.

I told him to take me home because I was not having sex with his idiot ass and what part of no was so difficult to get through his fucking skull anyway?!

So, in lieu of taking me home, he took us to our usual spot. I told him no. He pulled me into the backseat, and, instead of fighting back, I clearly unwillingly went, and then told him no. He started kissing me, and I told him no. He started taking his clothes off, and then loosening and removing mine, and I told him no. He put the condom on and had sex with me and, at first, I said no, and then I just cried.

Then we went out of the van and sat somewhere, and he put his arm around me, and I think that might be as much as I have ever hated anyone in my entire life, because, not only had I just "had sex when I didn't want to," but it was with someone who was stupid and soulless and boring. We went home, and a Drowning Pool song came in the radio, with the words, "I don't care about anyone else but me." That stuck with me.

I called my boyfriend the next morning and told him about it. He was understanding (although I was ambiguous enough in my communication that I don't think he understood it was rape), but we broke up soon after because he decided that he was gay. I explained this to him in the past few months and he now has a better understanding of what happened.

I didn't think of this as rape until a year and a half ago when I was in my car listening to the radio, and that song came on. I had to pull over, and I was nearly physically ill. I suddenly realized that what I had pushed off as a miscommunication, as his being an asshole, was rape. It was more ambiguous, because I hadn't physically resisted, but it was rape. I didn't really function well for the rest of the day; I had to pretty much just go home.

I still have difficulty reconciling myself to the fact that I didn't physically resist, or something.

My point with these stories is that rape has a lot of different faces and a lot of different situations. Usually the victims feel a great deal of ambivalence because, frankly, rape is such an ugly word, and it's not a nice thing to think about someone you know, maybe even someone you loved or trusted - because, after all, rapists are all guys in dark alleys, right? They're all sociopaths, right? They all fantasize about removing a woman's choice in sex, right?

No. They can just be guys, stupid guys, who do not recognize your agency for a space of time. If that's the case, if it was just a regular guy who does and says and thinks regular guy things, you were still raped if you had sex against your will. Period. That is nonnegotiable.

So, you were already doing it, and he decided he wanted to do something you didn't want to do - have sex without lube, have anal sex, whatever - did he do it even though you said no? Then it's rape. Even if it started as a yes, if you expressed a no, it's rape, because your consent became secondary to his desire to do whatever.

I hope that my ambivalence in regards to the things that I've been through clarifies the fact that, until we make it absolutely clear as a society that the only acceptable kind of sex is sex with enthusiastic consent, there will be this blurring of lines, assholes will feel like they just convinced a woman once she has stopped struggling or saying no, and our daughters will go through the same things and have the same confusion that we do.

That's why we tell our stories. That's why we set those definitions. So that our peers and elders can have the courage to do the same, and so that our daughters and nieces and granddaughters can feel a kind of freedom that we didn't. They need to know that their authority over their own bodies is sovereign, period, and that is is nonnegotiable. They need to know that, when someone crosses that line, especially sexually, the offender is wrong. He wasn't only partially wrong because he was drunk, or your clothes were off, or you'd already done it before, or you didn't fight back. He is wrong.

So, there's my story, and my answer.

Edit: I deleted one story from this because I am posting it to Facebook as an invitation for any women who have stories to tell, to tell them, anonymously, here. I am not able to post one of the stories on here without it violating the anonymity of all parties involved, as it would be recognizable. So, here. Open forum. No judging. Tell your story, if you have one and if you feel able.