The language of abuse doesn’t really matter, Brian C. Rideout writes. Instead, we need to focus on helping and allowing the victims to heal.
Julie Gillis recently wrote a thought-provoking article entitled “Heresy, Rape Statistics, and Getting Away from the Poles” that got me thinking about my own experiences as a male survivor of sexual assault.
In particular she started looking at how we defined rape, and how a definition that involves penetration ignores the fact that some men are raped by being forced to penetrate. As several of the commenters put it thereafter, that an erection has been considered consent, even when it shouldn’t be. Ms. Gillis continued to ask about where the line is drawn, if penetration of the mouth by an object with violent sexual context, for example, might or might not be considered rape.
It is a question that underscores the problem with language and the laws built on it, and it is a vital point in the debate, but when we focus on it I think we miss something even more important altogether.
Please, let me tell you a story.
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I suffer from chronic mastitis, a mildly painful swelling of the fatty tissue and musculature of the chest. In effect it gives me breasts. I hate even saying it like that because they aren’t really breasts, they are breast-like. I could write another article just on the language that floats around men with this problem.
I went through a bout of juvenile depression around the age of 11. I stopped exercising, started eating my pain away, and swelled to an enormous weight, but thanks to the perversity of genetics the fat went to my chest first. By the time I was in seventh grade, I was “better developed” than many of the girls in my class.
This, along with being quiet, brainy, and emotional made me the perfect target for bullying. For the most part, I learned to get a thicker skin. I figured how to deal with words. I learned how to handle violence for the most part, too. But then along came a boy named John …
John’s bullying started out the way everyone else did, probing rude questions in public scenarios, name calling, then punching, and slamming against lockers, but then his violence turned sexual. John would slam me against lockers and grope and twist my breasts. When I resisted, he would smash my head against the locker. It became his favourite game. In class he would rub his chest and flicker his tongue at me, or call me sexually dirty names before lunch to let me know he was planning, and every lunch hour he would attack me the same way.
When I started fighting back, he got two of his friends to help by holding me down while he did it. And he invited them to join in “the fun.. Like every bully with an audience, he needed to escalate. At first he started forcing his tongue into my mouth. Then a couple of times he hit me until I put my hands down his pants and touched him.
The violence hit its peak when John and his friends beat me, and held me against some lockers, forcibly kissed me, then put his hands down my pants and started playing with my penis while calling me his whore and a bitch while his friends groped me. Then they punched me in the gut and left me against the locker.
The worst part was looking up and seeing the teacher in charge of hall discipline meet my eyes then look away, ashamed. She’d been ignoring John’s “little jokes” for three months. To my knowledge, John was never confronted for his behaviour. He got involved in a sports team after that, and had better things to do with his lunches.
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After that incident I lost my sense of worth as a human being. I tried in secret a few times to write a suicide note, but just didn’t have the nerve to finish it, or carry out the act.
For years afterward I held a deep, bitter homophobia that made it impossible for me to allow myself to be alone with other men. I kept all my friendships at arm’s length. I refused to get involved with sports or for that matter, any activity that would put me anywhere near a large number of guys.
I consider myself fortunate that I moved at the end of that year, and I was forced to start over again, including opening myself to new male friendships, including becoming friends with three gay boys. I didn’t release my homophobia entirely. I learned to like and respect gay men, but the idea of having another man touch me would cause me to panic.
I hurt the feelings of one of my gay friends very badly a few years later. He told me he was in love with me, and I had a panic attack. Our friendship slowly died out after that. He committed suicide a few years ago, and I never got he chance to apologize for how I treated him.
Fear of my own sexuality prevented me from learning how to self-pleasure until I was in University, and for years afterwards I felt guilty and dirty every time I had sex.
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I don’t call the things John did to me for that three-month stretch of abuse “rape.” I have had friends who’ve been through far worse than I have. Having someone repeatedly French kiss me and force me to touch his penis is not nearly as bad as some of the stories I have heard.
I also don’t care about what happened to John, or whether he was punished or not for the things he did to me. To heal I had to let go of all the anger and pain and shame of it. Every time I get angry or sad or frustrated about what he did, I’m forced to relive it in my memories; there’s nothing to be gained by opening up old wounds. It saddens me to think that he might have done the same to other boys in the years that followed, and I hope that if he did, the authorities around at the time were more willing to do something than that teacher was.
Whether what he did to me qualifies as “rape” or “sexual assault” or even just “assault” doesn’t matter, because it was just three months of lunch hours.
What does matter to me is the years of pain, shame, nightmares, wounded friendships, lost love, suicidal thoughts, and lost opportunities to make meaningful contact with other men.
It bothers me that a teacher who was supposed to be looking out for me was so uncertain as to how to understand what was being done to me, that she let it go on in front of her for three months … and then was too ashamed to even look me in the eye afterward.
It bothers me that I was living in a time and place where, after what John did, I was made to feel so ashamed and so dirty, not to mention so confused about what happened that I didn’t feel like I could turn to anyone for help.
It bothers me that I had difficulty coming to a functional relationship with my own sexuality for nearly fifteen years because I had nowhere to turn to.
It bothers me that there was no support group I could join or hotline I could call as a male survivor of sexual violence. That I was so desperate for some way of letting all of that pain out that jumping out a window or cutting my wrists opened seemed like a valid choice.
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When we talk about men as survivors of sexual violence, we still don’t talk about them as human beings. They are a statistical anomaly, or a political cover-up, or a problem in our discourse. We use glib language like that which commenter Archy on Ms. Gillis’ article quoted to sidestep the survivor’s humanity:
For the sake of the small but suffering number of male victims—and for the far greater number of women who are the victims of men—we need to shatter this pernicious myth about the male body.
In final analysis I care less about the politics of language, or the (mis-)representation of the issue in statistics, or even the laws aimed at punishing the perpetrators. What I care about is being given the opportunity to speak about what has happened, to heal, and to be treated with compassion.
And I care about us making sure that every survivor of sexual violence, whatever form it might have taken, be given that chance to shed their humiliation and anger, rather than carrying it around for years. If that means finding other language than “rape” to use, and accepting that it will take years for male survivors to get the legal and governmental recognition they deserve, so be it. Let’s just get down to healing and raising awareness before one more boy loses a friend, gives up on sports, or contemplates suicide.
—Photo s.thornton/Flickr
About Brian C. Rideout
This was a very good post. Thank you for sharing your story.
Just to add to what you stated, I do not think terminology really helps when dealing with abuse on a personal level. Far too often people get caught up in whether this act “counts” as rape, sexual assault, or abuse. As you said, that matters far less than the impact those acts have on a person.
More so, we cannot tell how something will affect a person. I know men who were only abused once who seem more severely impacted than someone like me who grew up with it. As I tell those men, it does not matter what was done; all that matters is that it was done.
As for the comment Archy quoted, I think some people forget that they are talking about real people. It is very easy to get caught up in rhetoric and forget that you are not speaking or writing in a vacuum.
Jacob,
Thank you for reading. You hit the nail on the head. When we talk about the laws and statistics, we forget that there are real human beings who have been hurt in the most intimate level human possible. Sexual violence hurts almost every part of a human being, and it lingers a whole lifetime. No two survivors are the same, nor are their experiences or what it takes for them to heal.
I’d like to think people are more important.
I am an overweight male myself and was groped and called all manner of names by girls n guys at highschool, one incident was during class and I swore at him, teacher took notice and what ended up happening was she called the police to talk to us in a school parade the next day. The police said it was sexual harassment, I believe I remember being asked if I wanted to press charges but I just wanted it all to end and everyone to stfu about it but after that the groping stopped at school but the verbal abuse got worse.
I still to this day am unsure of what to call it, all I know is how it felt. humiliating, degrading, I felt like I wasn’t a male at all, I felt very ugly and like a monster to the opposite sex. As far as I can tell it’s technically sexual harassment but what it is to me is an absolutely disgusting and agitating behaviour, I wanted to literally bash the people that did it but feared the consequences. That along with the other bullying of my weight made me fear being seen in public without a shirt on, I still feel strange swimming without my shirt because I feel those stares and negative thoughts.
ht tp://www.rolereboot.org/sex-and-relationships/details/2012-01-erections-arent-consent-what-the-new-fbi-definitions
The quote itself is from here and as soon as I saw it I felt utterly disgusted. After stats showing the prevalence of male sexual abuse victimization is huge and being a victim some degree of sexual harassment it made me question if my own experience was even worth anything. It sounded like my experience was some out of the blue rare and non significant thing, but wait a minute, what of all the conflicting evidence I hear. They finally start doing studies on male victimization and end up finding there’s a hell of a lot of it yet leaders in the field of gender studies say this tripe? Makes me sick.
It sounded like a cheap shot to paint women as worse always to the point where male suffering is nothing, let’s fix the “bigger problem” and worry about the rest after that’s done. I’m sorry but I call bullshit on that, and my biggest problem is the way people use the term rape (which by definition leaves out many male victims and female perpetrators) to portray it as a heavily gendered crime against women. It saddens me that I feel we have to prove men deserve support, in a time where equality is apparently the name of the game.
Thank-you for the article. And I totally agree with you Jacob. People handle trauma differently, the majority of my trauma came from the verbal bullying I received over the years and had far more impact than any physical altercation I got into (they seemed to just add to it). Words alone can be daggers that stab deep into the self-esteem and it’s taken over a decade to actually get past some of it. We need to respect all victims, regardless of who gets it worse, there’s always someone who had extra done to them but it still hurts us all. All of our pain matters.
I’ve been trying for a day to articulate all the thoughts that your comment has stimulated, and there is just so much to say.
I think that guys who are sensitive, and ones who are overweight from a young age find themselves wrapped around a chunk of pain that affects everything: their sexuality, their self-esteem, their motivation, their dreams, their chances of success, their feelings. It definitely destroys their ability to trust and relate to other Men, and to Manhood.
It is a whole-man pain. And ti took me years of intense work, study, practice, therapy, drama, prayer, relationship trouble, and exploration before I finally managed to look at what it was doing to me and let it go.
Letting it all go is just as terrifying as holding on to it. And the worst part is, there is so few people willing to talk about it or support you while you explore it. It is why I started the business I did.
I would like to share a couple of links to things I’ve written with you, because I think they start to touch on everything I would like to say to all the Men out there like you and I:
http://wildman.newworldscoaching.ca/?p=88
http://wildman.newworldscoaching.ca/?p=58
And to you specifically, I would like to say “Thank you” very sincerely. I am always glad when I meet someone who has walked the same road as I have. It is good to be seen.
Thank-you. Interesting read, I’ve seen quite a few of these wounded men in my time. Missing out on positive male role models has taken quite a toll I must admit, my father died when I was 18 and I didn’t have any other men to look up to at that stage. It really taught me the importance of a good solid male role model when you desperately need one in your life and can’t find one, the only ones I knew and saw regularly were macho “eat cement n harden up” types that were insecure to the bone.
I use to think sensitivity was my weakness but after learning to protect it better I realized it was my strength, it’s quite rare for men to openly use it here in Australia especially and it’s the reason I can now judge a persons character quite well. Letting in only the good n getting rid of the bad people of my life has been a major help in rebuilding my emotional strength, it’s amazing how some people can drain you of it. Life is getting better now where my emotional batteries are recharging and have even received an upgrade, a new shield for the sensitivity and a much better understanding of other people has helped me take less offense at what people say and do now.
Simply knowing my bullies had tough home lives it really put things in perspective and made me let go of hate and feel pity for them, no doubt many of them were wounded men and women too and felt they had to harm others to feel a sense of power.
I’m sorry for what you went through. Many of us have similar stories. Where bullying crossed the line into the clearly sexual. But an element of the sexual is always there.
In many cases, it’s about making hidden sexual contact for the bully. If unchecked, such behavior grows over time. If our children could learn early enough that pushing and grabbing are not right, we could keep such behaviors from growing into an outlet for suppressed sexuality. From growing from the excitable actions of toddlers into the adult actions of monsters.
But the intention to teach that physical bullying is wrong often goes against generations of physical violence including corporal punishment. And requires a level of effort that some parents can’t summon the will or the energy to apply.
Another note. I too carried a distinct fear of being touched by gay men. It is the result of similar experiences. But, thankfully, I have slowly learned to love my gay male friends and to know in my physical self that an embrace is not a sexual “come on” and that being open to others is not an invitation to abuse. But it’s been a long time coming. A long long time.
Also, I am of the opinion that my abuser was not and is not gay. Just cruel. And in need of contact he could not find in any other way.
Mark, you have a very valuable perspective on bullying and being bullied, its one that I am going to be thinking on and writing about in days to come, no doubt.
The funny thing with the bully who assaulted me, was that he was having frequent sex with multiple girls. I once found myself in a movie theatre behind one of his girlfriends as she descried the experience of giving him a blowjob to another girl. It wasn’t so much that he had no other way to express himself, than that it was he was working out something very dark inside his head. I suspect he was himself the victim of some pretty serious abuse, or suffering from some kind of mental illness.
Bullying is a way to work things out, and I have always wondered if we gave kids better support; offered them the counselling and voice they needed, if that might be a better way than zero-tolerance policies and bullying laws.
And as you say, we need to work on teaching kids where the line is, but that isn’t easy, and some parents just don’t have it in them to teach it… which is probably part of the same problem.
I think there is something really worth exploring in the fear of being touched by Men. I have known two other survivors who also had that fear: for some it turned into a fear of homosexuality, and for others a generalized phobia of physical contact. It isn’t an isolated fear, and the way it hurts male relationships is just staggering,
I can definitely agree with that Brian, most of my bullies I believe had abusive homes and simply brought that pain to school. It’s like a ball of fire where you have to keep passing it on instead of someone just dumping the much needed water on it.
Whilst most of my bullying wasn’t sexual, I feel the same or similar principles are at play as tools in the great toolbox of evil that is abuse. I ended up with a heavy depression and social anxiety disorder from it, feared being around certain kinds of people and infact avoided human contact all together apart from online interaction for 90% of the time as an adult. The most damaging scars are unseen.
Brian – thanks for telling your story. It helps to illustrate the breadth of experiences that come under that banner of sexual assault. For too long those experiences have been ignored, just as your teacher turned away and ignored reality.
“In final analysis I care less about the politics of language, or the (mis-)representation of the issue in statistics, or even the laws aimed at punishing the perpetrators. What I care about is being given the opportunity to speak about what has happened, to heal, and to be treated with compassion.”
I see exactly where you are coming from. Survivors first.
Unfortunately, to get recognition in the society we live in there are the issues of recognition by language and with that the Politics of language and people who have a vested interested in that politics. I saw all that whilst being party to forcing such changes here in the UK.
What I have seen is how by working from two ends it is possible to bridge the gulf. The first crossing may be narrow and rickety, but it allows traffic and commerce, and as that grows the impetus for a better crossing and easier access grows. Eventually you end up with a super highway – with ease of access to all.
You keep building foundations where you are – the highway will come. Politics is the slave of commerce and Politicians can only act as slave masters for so long.
What an incredible story and journey you’ve been through! It’s courageous of you to share such a tormenting time in your life; kids are cruel at that age! That teacher of yours who knew about all this bullying/sexual abuse was at fault for doing nothing about your situation; i believe she had a fiduciary obligation to stop the bullying or at the least report it to higher-ups or police. Had this happen today, I’m sure she and that school would be sued!
Good to see that you have taken these experiences and helping others to learn to open-up, heal and overcome their troubles. Very good stuff!
A courageous and worthy article. I have nothing else to say.
cosigned
Thank you both.
Thank you for your honesty– as a female, it’s honestly difficult to imagine the violent sexual abuse that occurs on between men. My heart goes out to you.
I completely understand your (past) fear of being touched by men. As a woman, I have that same fear. I don’t like to hug, be touched, or even be near men thanks to past abuse. I imagine many women have that same feeling, but hearing you frame it as a man helps me understand. It’s real fear and trauma I have to overcome, not just being a “prude.”
Thanks for sharing that with me. The fear of being touched is something that I want to devote some serious thought to, and maybe another article or two will come out of it. It is terrible when someone touches you in a caring and compassionate way and all you feel is your skin crawling and terror. It taints just about every good feeling you can have related to other human beings.
It’s far worse when nobody understands why you won’t let yourself be touched. So many of them get angry, or feel rejected, or somehow turn it into a game where they keep trying. After awhile you start to wonder if you are just being crazy or overly sensitive, or a “prude” like everyone says.
I used to call it “the fear between me and my skin.”
It feels so good to know I’m not alone in that. I hope you find the help you need. No person should have to have anything between them and their skin.
Thank you Brian, stories like yours need to be told.
I was bullied in my teen as well, but it wasn’t as sexual or as invasive as your experience was.
Without reading stories like yours, I literally could not imagine this kind of experience. Conversely, having read them allows me to better understand people and, in case I would meet someone with these kind of “touch fobia”, I hope I’d be able to understand (I’m a very tactile person).
Talking about bullying, what happened to me was that, the day I reacted and slammed that bully against the lockers (I was madly enraged), the teacher held ME as the culprit.
Probably she knew the bully could not be controlled (it was the ’70s and nobody was talking about bullying yet), so she wanted the other kids to behave to avoid trouble in school.
Anyway, I felt such a terrible sense of unfairness. So much that even nowadays (35 years later), sometimes I’m afraid that if I’m going to defend myslef, I’ll be the one blamed and accused.
Teachers aren’t always “emotionally equipped” for their job.
Thanks for reading Crescendo. Your comment shines a light on the basic decency that I think is inherent in most people. You heard about the pain going on in someone else’s head, and the first thing you did was say how much you hoped you would understand. Its words like those that prove to me over and over again that the good people outnumber the bad.
I was going to school in the early 90s, and there was an unspoken code among teachers about bullying: boys bullying girls was intolerable, girls bullying boys didn’t happen (I have physical scars that prove otherwise), girls bullying girls was bitchy – “but what can you do about gossip?”, but boys bullying boys was okay. They believed that letting a “soft and sensitive” boy get bullied would encourage him to grow a thicker skin, take up boxing, and get fit… so long as it didn’t go “too far.” They really didn’t understand that bullies naturally escalate, and if you turn a blind eye to two or three mild events, the fourth one will be really bad, and the fifth one will go “too far”. By the time “too far” comes, they may have been ignoring the bully so long it becomes a habit.
I’ve been blamed a few times when I fought back against physical bullying. In one instance a boy had been jumping on my back and forcing me to give him piggyback rides, stealing my clothes when I was in the shower, spitting in my face, threatening me with a gun, and habitually running up behind me and punching the back of my head. One day after gym class I heard him coming, turned around and swung at him with a bag of wet gym clothes. He fell and cracked his head on the pavement. One of his friends told me he would shoot me.
The nearby teacher hadn’t heard that, or known what the bully was about to do, but she had seen me hit him, so I was the one hauled off to the office, threatened with suspension, and reamed out by the principal. They even called the cops. But my friends came forward to the office to tell the VP about every even they had witnessed, including the gun and the death threat, and pushed other boys into promising to be a witness, too. When they offered to tell the police everything, the school started backpedalling fast.
They boy’s locker was searched, a knife was found, and he was expelled. The cops also had the gang task fore have a long talk with his friends and their parents.
Mind you, the school never admitted any culpability in the bullying, despite the fact that my gym teacher had witnessed half of the events, and no apology was made to me for the treatment I received while defending myself. The school did not inform my parents, but a concerned teacher did call later on, which triggered a storm of drama at home.
After that I was really afraid to defend myself. I had no faith that people would back me up a second time, and I ended up taking a lot of misery for it. I had a reputation for fighting back at least, and that kept the physical bullying down to a minimum. I have never been able to trust that I would be protected by authorities in any form after that, and I still don’t believe that there will ever be justice in the world.
The next year, one of the bully’s friends started up their tradition of forced piggybacks with another boy. It went on for months, again without teacher intervention. That boy threw off one of the bullies (the same one who threatened to shoot me), pulled out a gun, and shot him twice. The bully’s death started off a pretty big ripple of changes in the culture around bullying in California.
Bully or not, he didn’t deserve to die. It was the result of seeing the bullied as somehow deserving it because they weren’t “manly” enough, and turning a blind eye to the bullying because it would help the bullied become a “man.”
@Brian: “I have never been able to trust that I would be protected by authorities in any form after that, and I still don’t believe that there will ever be justice in the world.”
I’m sorry for you. It’s a terrible feeling to go around with.
Personally, to balance against my fear of unfairness, I’ve become better at speaking for myself.
I think it’s important being able to express our POV and telling someone “Hey, you aren’t fair with me, and here’s why”. Even with autorities.
Having a “victim mentality” (“Oh, never mind, they won’t care about me anyway”) is not helping.
When I was blamed when I defended myself, I wasn’t able to explain myself to the teacher (I was very shy). Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference, but it’s worth trying.
Truth is, as you said before, there’s lot of good people out there; hence, even if fairness is not guaranteed, most people try to be fair (but they need to know the facts).
Thus is personal responsibility to speak for ourselves and be heard. It means dropping the “victim mentality”. After all, if I don’t defend myself, who shall do? (I’m talking about adults, of course)
Don’t get me wrong, there is a big difference between believing there is no justice in the systems we create and adopting a victim mentality.
It is one thing to accept that a system is broken, and a totally different to assume that there is nothing to be done. We can always speak for ourselves, fight for improvements, and speak out. Human beings, especially Men, thrive best when we have a cause, a purpose, or see something we would like to change.
Add another to the blamed for fighting back, getting detention and other disciplinary matters over it. I found the guidance counselors to be a big waste of time, anything the school did to stop bullying to me usually made it worse so I gave up trying to ask them for help. I felt totally isolated and that only I could take care of myself, I was close to taking a cricket bat to school one day and putting just 1 of them in hospital to show how serious I was about wanting to be left alone, nothing major, just some broken shins or knee caps would have sufficed, but I would have got into more trouble and the bullies would have won (I never did it). I also ended up afraid I would get a nasty police record if I fought back at all, not just the cricket bat method, and just sat there n took it a lot of the time.
The times I did fight back, it put the fear of god into a few people and those bullies never annoyed me again. I don’t think they realized that I was nearly twice their size and quite strong, the look of surprise and fear on their face said more than words ever could. I didn’t want to harm anyone, I just wanted to be left alone!
So when you have kids who are ignored by the school, know that when they fight back it actually does something to stop it you can have desperate situations such as the recent kid in Australia who dumped someone on their head ( ht tp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isfn4OxCPQs ). The potential injury from that would be spinal damage and possibly paralysis or death, it goes to show how there is a point we all get to where enough is enough and some throw a punch, some throw the bully, and some grab a weapon as self defense or preemptive strike just to ensure their own safety. It’s really a pathetic insight to our society that our kids feel the only way to safe is to harm or kill someone else, or avoid the situation completely.
I missed over 20 days per term because I didn’t want to goto school, put up with those kids, I went from straight a’s to straight d’s because I was so depressed and hating my life. I was self harming, even once in class with scissors, just to feel a pain that wasn’t emotional, a distraction from my thoughts where I literally preferred a sharp stinging cut and it actually made me feel better. This is very common sadly amongst teenagers, all that pain and suffering and for what? Because I was fat, big fucking deal, yet kids would tear my heart apart over my looks and weight.
Bullying needs to stop, kids get abused in ways that if they were adults the bullies would be in prison yet schools either overlook it happens, attempt to fix it and fail, or don’t have eyes everywhere and bullies know this. So much pain and torment is inflicted on a place that is meant to be safe, truth be told kids are probably safer on the street at the mall, at the skatepark, anywhere else really.
If you need backup, try the feminists who know there are women getting that same treatment as you, then being dismissed because “they’re not sexy enough to assault”. Be not afraid of the “radical” label. It only means they believe that asking us to compete against each other whilst being held to separate, old gender binary standards leads to…well this kind of shit.
They’d be better to have on side than the men who’ll claim to be “financially raped” because they’ve had to pay for their kids shoes.
Truthfully, I try to look at all sides of the issue.
If you can get past all the sturm and drang, I think both groups still have a lot to give to male survivors of sexual violence. If you look past the angry vocal minority (in both groups), you see that both sides ultimately have a lot of compassion for the survivors, and want to help in different ways. After all, you don’t get angry if you don’t care.
In the end, I think we really all want the same thing, but we are so bad at understanding one another that it seems like we have to be on “sides”.
And I agree with you that the idea of being “financially raped” is bad language: it minimizes rape, and it poisons the dialogue with loaded words and hurt feelings from survivors.
At the same time, I know men who have been raked across the coals in family court, and left effectively indentured for life to people who have withdrawn all love and respect for him. It is a violation that wounds down to the emotional centre. It leaves a man unable to believe in justice, fairness, and love at the same time that his ability to trust has been shattered, and his sexual core has been wounded. It is an issue that needs to be addressed.
We need more words and better words: ones that engage compassion, rather than halt communication. This one ugly four-letter word is overused and over-encumbered.
As to the “too ugly to rape” meme: I get sick just thinking about someone being forced to hear that. I can’t articulate how horrible that is, and what it must do to a person in the space we have here. It is a second assault all unto itself. I suspect it woudl strip the woman who heard it of her sense of femininity and validity as a sexual being in the same way I felt stripped of my masculinity when people told me to “cowboy up” or “grow a thicker skin” and “be a man” when I went through those three months. I do believe that there is a lot that women who’ve had that experience could share with men who’ve survived sexual violence. I’m certainly open to the dialogue.