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TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS WHOLE POST. I'm trying to walk the line between trigger warning and cut-tagging, because cut-tagging things means no one reads them.
I woke up thinking of a particular friend-of-a-friend who'd been part of my life in Florida. I pondered going to my best-friend-in-middle-and-high-school's Facebook page to see if I could track him down through her, but I might not be able to track him down well, because I'm not actually Facebook friends with her.
Talking about rape was different in 1994, you see. In 2012, if someone tells you they've been raped, you have a general idea of what to say and what not to say. In 1994, it was a transgression of social norms to even say those words. So she had no toolkit for this, and her reaction was the number one reaction we tell people to give:
She didn't believe me.
She didn't believe me because she knew about my abusive relationship with the guy I call the Bad Boyfriend, and because I'd hinted about my bad childhood. She thought it was exaggerated, too much, that that doesn't all happen to one person.
The CDC did a very comprehensive study last year. One of the interesting pieces of data? 35% of women who were raped as minors were also raped as adults.
My friend didn't know that, of course. She just saw drama. And none of us knew, because studies about rape culture were in their infancy, that the fact that someone was raped in the past makes people less likely to believe them in the future. Even though 35 damn percent.
When I give my survivor speech for BARCC, I only discuss one incident: the rape in 1994. I chose that one because it is dramatic and unambiguously rape, but most of all, I chose it because it was discrete. It was neatly encapsulated in one terrible night. I could talk about it and take questions and be done.
But that isn't all.
I've told you about my childhood, and I've told you about the Bad Boyfriend, but *that* isn't all.
I'm going to fill in a few blanks for you. Things that I've never talked about here or really much of anywhere, because it just hasn't occurred to me to do so, because they were categorized in my head not as "rape" but as "bad stuff happens".
1993. A couple of years after my Bad Boyfriend. One year before The Rape that gets capital letters in my head because it was an abduction and a stranger rape, which is rare as hell but is what the mainstream media tells me rape is. At the time, I'm not thinking of what the Bad Boyfriend did as rape, and I'm trying to not think about the childhood stuff at all. I am 19 and living in a trailer park North Carolina. I am known as a slut; I do fool around a lot. I was sexualized very early, after all. I tell you this because it all plays in. I tell you this because it gives you context, that one day a male friend is over at my place and we're fooling around, everything strictly above the waist, when he starts to go up my skirt. I say "no, I don't want to do that."
He says, "You may as well give it up, or I'm just going to take it."
Something in me splinters. There is an echo of the bad boyfriend, who said much the same. There is the knowledge that if I do fight, no one will believe me, because I'm a slut and he's a nice guy. And so I send myself far away and I let it happen, because I don't want him to hurt me.
It takes over a decade for me to realize that this is rape.
1997. Three years after the rape I still think of as The Rape. My boyfriend and I have been hanging out a lot with the Tori Amos fan community; this is in the days of IRC, and I met said boyfriend and a lot of friends on #tori. I was introduced to Tori's music by a friend when she heard I'd been raped; she played "Me and a Gun" for me. This is the year after Boys for Pele came out, and we've been following Tori around Florida, showing up at all the meet and greets. At a club in Tampa I kiss this one fellow fan, because we're all elated and people are kissing each other. Months later, he's over at our house; we're all going out later with fellow fans. He and my boyfriend and I are sitting on the couch together; Elayna is napping in her room. I am so exhausted, and the guys encourage me to nap on the couch. I do.
I wake up with two fingers in my vagina.
I freeze. I sneak a peek through my slitted eyelids. My boyfriend isn't there, and this near-stranger who, yes, I kissed once on a dance floor.
He moves his fingers.
I stay frozen for the longest I-don't-know-how-long of my life while he continues to do this. Finally I fake shifting in my sleep, and he withdraws his hand. Soon after that, I fake waking up. I stumble into the kitchen for a glass of water and don't look at him. I apologize for not looking at him. He tells my my boyfriend went to run errands. I say okay.
I never tell my boyfriend. Because I kissed this guy once, you know. I know what my boyfriend would say.
It takes over a decade for me to realize that this is rape.
That boyfriend becomes my husband in 1998. When he rapes me, I know it's rape. I am saying no and lying very still and tears are pouring from my eyes to puddle in my hair. Even though I'm not fighting, I know that it is rape. (I divorce him in 2001. This is not Adam. Dear gods this is not Adam.)
I'm not going to continue. But the point is that I could continue. That there is a list I could go on with, of being driven out to places I have no way of getting back from and told that this was my only way back, of things going farther than I said they could and being told that the guy misunderstood.
And none of these things are things I talk about when I talk about rape, because they're not discrete. Because I can't condense all of this, the full impact of the rape culture on one person, into a five-minute speech with Q&A afterward.
And because there is so much of it that you will not believe me. At a certain point, sometimes as low as just two sexual assaults, which is actually really common, people will not believe.
And so we don't tell people.
I woke up thinking of that nice guy I knew in Florida who made me a model Babylon 5 Black Omega Starfury. I thought of him because we just moved the Starfury out of my craft room to paint it. It's sitting on a bookcase in my living room. And Judah and I watched B5 last night. I thought about looking him up, and getting the recipe for the flan he brought to my house that one Thanksgiving, because that was great flan. And I'd like to know that he's doing okay. But that led me to my friend, and that one thought that floats over a decade of friendship, that one thought that snaps across everything that we used to be; she used to be my best friend. That one thought.
She didn't believe me.
I woke up thinking of a particular friend-of-a-friend who'd been part of my life in Florida. I pondered going to my best-friend-in-middle-and-high-school's Facebook page to see if I could track him down through her, but I might not be able to track him down well, because I'm not actually Facebook friends with her.
Talking about rape was different in 1994, you see. In 2012, if someone tells you they've been raped, you have a general idea of what to say and what not to say. In 1994, it was a transgression of social norms to even say those words. So she had no toolkit for this, and her reaction was the number one reaction we tell people to give:
She didn't believe me.
She didn't believe me because she knew about my abusive relationship with the guy I call the Bad Boyfriend, and because I'd hinted about my bad childhood. She thought it was exaggerated, too much, that that doesn't all happen to one person.
The CDC did a very comprehensive study last year. One of the interesting pieces of data? 35% of women who were raped as minors were also raped as adults.
My friend didn't know that, of course. She just saw drama. And none of us knew, because studies about rape culture were in their infancy, that the fact that someone was raped in the past makes people less likely to believe them in the future. Even though 35 damn percent.
When I give my survivor speech for BARCC, I only discuss one incident: the rape in 1994. I chose that one because it is dramatic and unambiguously rape, but most of all, I chose it because it was discrete. It was neatly encapsulated in one terrible night. I could talk about it and take questions and be done.
But that isn't all.
I've told you about my childhood, and I've told you about the Bad Boyfriend, but *that* isn't all.
I'm going to fill in a few blanks for you. Things that I've never talked about here or really much of anywhere, because it just hasn't occurred to me to do so, because they were categorized in my head not as "rape" but as "bad stuff happens".
1993. A couple of years after my Bad Boyfriend. One year before The Rape that gets capital letters in my head because it was an abduction and a stranger rape, which is rare as hell but is what the mainstream media tells me rape is. At the time, I'm not thinking of what the Bad Boyfriend did as rape, and I'm trying to not think about the childhood stuff at all. I am 19 and living in a trailer park North Carolina. I am known as a slut; I do fool around a lot. I was sexualized very early, after all. I tell you this because it all plays in. I tell you this because it gives you context, that one day a male friend is over at my place and we're fooling around, everything strictly above the waist, when he starts to go up my skirt. I say "no, I don't want to do that."
He says, "You may as well give it up, or I'm just going to take it."
Something in me splinters. There is an echo of the bad boyfriend, who said much the same. There is the knowledge that if I do fight, no one will believe me, because I'm a slut and he's a nice guy. And so I send myself far away and I let it happen, because I don't want him to hurt me.
It takes over a decade for me to realize that this is rape.
1997. Three years after the rape I still think of as The Rape. My boyfriend and I have been hanging out a lot with the Tori Amos fan community; this is in the days of IRC, and I met said boyfriend and a lot of friends on #tori. I was introduced to Tori's music by a friend when she heard I'd been raped; she played "Me and a Gun" for me. This is the year after Boys for Pele came out, and we've been following Tori around Florida, showing up at all the meet and greets. At a club in Tampa I kiss this one fellow fan, because we're all elated and people are kissing each other. Months later, he's over at our house; we're all going out later with fellow fans. He and my boyfriend and I are sitting on the couch together; Elayna is napping in her room. I am so exhausted, and the guys encourage me to nap on the couch. I do.
I wake up with two fingers in my vagina.
I freeze. I sneak a peek through my slitted eyelids. My boyfriend isn't there, and this near-stranger who, yes, I kissed once on a dance floor.
He moves his fingers.
I stay frozen for the longest I-don't-know-how-long of my life while he continues to do this. Finally I fake shifting in my sleep, and he withdraws his hand. Soon after that, I fake waking up. I stumble into the kitchen for a glass of water and don't look at him. I apologize for not looking at him. He tells my my boyfriend went to run errands. I say okay.
I never tell my boyfriend. Because I kissed this guy once, you know. I know what my boyfriend would say.
It takes over a decade for me to realize that this is rape.
That boyfriend becomes my husband in 1998. When he rapes me, I know it's rape. I am saying no and lying very still and tears are pouring from my eyes to puddle in my hair. Even though I'm not fighting, I know that it is rape. (I divorce him in 2001. This is not Adam. Dear gods this is not Adam.)
I'm not going to continue. But the point is that I could continue. That there is a list I could go on with, of being driven out to places I have no way of getting back from and told that this was my only way back, of things going farther than I said they could and being told that the guy misunderstood.
And none of these things are things I talk about when I talk about rape, because they're not discrete. Because I can't condense all of this, the full impact of the rape culture on one person, into a five-minute speech with Q&A afterward.
And because there is so much of it that you will not believe me. At a certain point, sometimes as low as just two sexual assaults, which is actually really common, people will not believe.
And so we don't tell people.
I woke up thinking of that nice guy I knew in Florida who made me a model Babylon 5 Black Omega Starfury. I thought of him because we just moved the Starfury out of my craft room to paint it. It's sitting on a bookcase in my living room. And Judah and I watched B5 last night. I thought about looking him up, and getting the recipe for the flan he brought to my house that one Thanksgiving, because that was great flan. And I'd like to know that he's doing okay. But that led me to my friend, and that one thought that floats over a decade of friendship, that one thought that snaps across everything that we used to be; she used to be my best friend. That one thought.
She didn't believe me.
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This in addition to the date rape that didn't involve penetration but was most certainly rape. When I said "no", he gave me a swirly. Yeah, and I got off lucky, according to friends who later said, "oh, he's like that; you got off lightly. He didn't actually rape you like he did me." Um, YES, he did. And if you knew he was that sort of person, why the HELL didn't you tell me when you found out I was going to go out with him?
Funny, his house burned down about six months later. Never did know the cause, but I suspected.
So yeah, I believe you. And I also believe that people don't believe when you tell them. I never told my family about either event.
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I read the whole post but I don't think I took much in after the 1997 part. Something similar has happened to me twice (once a doctor, once an airline security searcher) and if I talk about it as rape even clueful people still act like I'm trying to make drama, play up my "oppressedness" (both incidents were related to me being trans). And I struggle to let myself think of it that way, because, as you say, "bad stuff happens". And I don't feel I have a right to, because bad stuff happens.
There're things that have happened to me that I've never talked to about anyone, and I think part of it's that knowledge that I won't be believed. I don' tknow. I don't think I can write about this any more. But I'm thinking of you.
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I read the whole thing
Your post was also educational for me as a therapist and has me thinking. Thank you for making me think.
I also read everyone's comments and stories that were posted before mine and it is disheartening to see how many stories there are of this happening. I believe you all.
Re: I read the whole thing
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I think part of the social problem back then was that women as a class still were not considered believable by society at large about some things, including rape. very bad. This has, very thankfully, been changing for the better. I wish we were all the way there.
Apropos of nothing else in the post, my eyes initially read the model name in the penultimate paragraph as "Babylon 5 Black O Smurfbury." My brain haz teh strange sometiems.
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I've had similar experiences.
And THAT is rape culture.
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For me, part of that is that I can't think of what happened afterward, with others, as assaults, or rape. I'm not there yet. And I know too much about *how* I behave when I'm dissociated in those situations, to deal with it as such.
But part of it, is that it's not short, simple, concise. It's not one incident that I can tell in five minutes, or ten minutes. It's not always clear, it's not always easy to answer questions about.
And I'm sorry. I'm sorry that we live in a culture where those things happen, and that they happened to you, that there are so many of them. Thank you for sharing.
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I read this whole post.
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I want you to know, too, that your blogging for and about BARCC made me feel less helpless about rape culture at a point when I really needed it, gave me the words and the studies to support my voice in infuriating conversations, made me aware of the work that rape crisis centres do and how I could support them, and basically made me a better person overall.
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Then I drove for three hours and thought about it and cried some.
Then I came back today and read it again.
I believe you.
I feel ridiculous being grateful for the people in my life who have stopped when I said 'no'. I feel ridiculous that that is something that I feel grateful for rather than taking it for granted, because the not-feeling, thinking part of me says that 'no' should be automatically accepted and stopping should automatically happen. But I'm still grateful. And I resent the hell out of my gratefulness.
And then I started wondering about things-that-I-don't-categorize-as-rape. Or when it took the 3rd or 4th 'no' to stop things. What's in my own past that I just don't think about. How many other people might have. My friends. My friends' friends. Strangers. Because this doesn't fit into the typical image of rape that we see on TV and in movies and books and that we hear about in the news. How much gets thrown into the file for "bad sex" or "bad stuff" or "a rough night" and not into the "rape" file.