Close your eyes and picture a rape victim. Whose face do you see? Chances are this story is not about that person.
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Sometimes I think I never left his apartment, that someone who merely looks and sounds like me walked out.
These are the words of a rape victim.
Close your eyes and be honest with yourself. When you picture the victim who might have written those words, what kind of person comes up on the screen of your eyelids?
For most of us, the face we see is female.
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That’s what rape does. It changes us, it changes the world for us, and our response to the trauma we’ve experienced changes the world for countless other people.
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But those words were written by a man. Not a man writing about a childhood trauma, but a man writing about something that happened to him just last year. Something that changed the way he saw the world, even the way he saw himself, so much, that he struggles to reconcile the man who entered that New York apartment with the man who left it some 60 hours later.
That’s what rape does. It changes us, it changes the world for us, and our response to the trauma we’ve experienced changes the world for countless other people.
Sharing the Stories
Every choice we make is a stone thrown in a pool, it creates ripples. And the stone never sees all the ripples created in its passing.
I have, if it is possible, an even deeper respect for the men who have stepped forward to say, “Yes, rape happens to men. It happened to me.”
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Which is why I have such deep respect for every survivor who has shared the story of their experience with rape. Whether they shared it with their family, with their community, or with the world, they’ve created ripples of awareness. Ripples they will probably never see.
They’ve illuminated the way for other survivors to bring their hurt out of that secret Pandora’s Box of darkness that holds their victimhood, and they’ve put the spotlight on the attitudes and assumptions that have allowed this problem to fester unchecked for generations.
I have, if it is possible, an even deeper respect for the men who have stepped forward to say, “Yes, rape happens to men. It happened to me.”
And that is exactly what Richard Morgan did.
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It wasn’t the first time he’d written about rape happening to men. In 2004 he published an article in Details magazine about men who are raped by women. Bill O’Reilly discussed that article on his show.
“If you’re lucky enough as a guy to have some girl come on to you in that manner, but you don’t want to reciprocate, you stand up and you leave, unless the woman is 240 pounds and tackles you. The man is traditionally stronger and better equipped to leave the room.” – Bill O’Reilly
O’Reilly’s comment completely negated men as victims of rape, and neatly captured the disbelief most people have about the ability of a women to rape a full grown man.
Every time we discuss rape as if it’s only men dragging women into alleys, we make the act of reporting it all the more uncomfortable, burdensome and alienating for women being raped by their boyfriends, or students being raped by their teachers, or men being raped by women, or men being raped by men. It is an act of theft on top of an act of rape.
O’Reilly’s comment completely negated men as victims of rape, and neatly captured the disbelief most people have about the ability of a women to rape a full grown man.
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Yes, when we make it more difficult for survivors to step forward and say, “This happens. It happened to me,” we rob them of their power to heal. But every time we discuss rape as what it is, not only forcing the sexual act on another person, but rather violating their right to withhold consent for any sexual act, we invite the telling of new stories, which opens a road to healing, not only the wounds of the victims, but the hurt that is at the heart of the crime.
But the untold stories are precisely the most important stories to tell. The more stories that are told, the less they can all be the same.
Yes, It Can Happen to You
He’d written about rape before, but he never expected to have his own story to tell. In his Washington Post article, Richard details, dispassionately and succinctly, his own experience of being raped. His rapist was another man, someone he’d met at a house party and was interested in. He was drugged, but as he states clearly in this article and in the Details article as well, not all rapes are accomplished through physical force, psychological force is still an aggression.
In fact, it was psychological force (of a small, almost unnoticeable, nature) that got Richard drugged in the first place.
Gin makes me sick. “That’s not really my thing,” I said. Then he pouted, comically and even adorably: “But I made it just for us.”
Falling prey to “micro-aggressions” is so deeply conditioned in all of us that it makes psychological rape, or psychological manipulation to make rape more easily accomplished, a universal threat.
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Ah, guilt. Of course, even though gin makes him ill, Richard didn’t want to disappoint his new friend, so he took the offered drink. Which didn’t contain gin, but was laced with “G” – GHB, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, which is used so often in situations such as this one that it is commonly known as “the date-rape drug.”
Falling prey to “micro-aggressions” (a term George Will used in his much-attacked Washington Post article about campus rape) is so deeply conditioned in all of us that it makes psychological rape, or psychological manipulation to make rape more easily accomplished, a universal threat.
Which is why the stories are so important, not only to healing, but to prevention.
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As victims, we find the world would rather disbelieve us or blame us, and all too often we blame ourselves.
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It is natural to blame the victim, or even prefer to believe that they’re making it up. In Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success, by David B. Feldman, PhD and Lee Daniel Kravetz, they explain that our need to maintain a “rosy worldview” or a belief in a just world, requires that we look for evidence that bad things don’t happen to good people. Or at least not to smart, good people. So, if something bad happened, it must be because the victim either did something bad, and deserved it, or they were just plain stupid.
Sadly, the authors point out, not only do the non-victims hold to this self-deceptive strategy, even victims often cling to that worldview which now says, “Something bad happened to you. Therefore, you are either bad, or you were stupid.”
As victims, we find the world would rather disbelieve us or blame us, and all too often we blame ourselves.
It’s a world where George Will realistically can defend writing that sexual assault survivors “make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges.”
Which is why George Will’s article was so deceptively destructive. It presented what seemed to be rational concerns that played right into our predisposition to blame and discredit the victims.
It’s also why I wrote “My Thank You Letter to Mr. Will.” Because, for me, the outrage that followed that article was a ray of hope, a sign that we might, at last, be breaking free of our dependency on a “rosy worldview” and be ready to stand for truth. It also prompted an outpouring of stories. Survivors who never thought they’d need to say, “This can happen. It happened to me,” are coming forward to create their own ripples and to redefine what rape is, how it affects our world, and what we can all do to heal it and prevent it.
There’s No One Problem – and No One Solution
Rape may be as bad as murder, but, like murder, there are many kinds of rape. War-crime rape, date rape, rape as a ritual for pledging a fraternity, spousal rape, incest, rape with known assailants, rape with unknown assailants, police officers sodomizing a man with a broomstick. Rape contains multitudes. Any discussion of rape is going to require us as a culture to get much more imaginative about it.
Imagination isn’t something we like to pair with rape. But until we acknowledge all forms of rape as a violation against another person we will have little power to end the violations.
But until we acknowledge all forms of rape as a violation against another person we will have little power to end the violations.
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That means being able to imagine that a woman can hold such power (physical or psychological) over a man that he will have sex with her even if he doesn’t want to. That means being able to imagine that no amount of nudity or teasing, no state of inebriation or physical exhaustion, no previous history of sexual consent, makes it OK to coerce the other person once they’ve said, “No.”
That also means being able to imagine that the mind can betray the body.
It’s amazing how much fear can make you want — really want — to appease a captor.
And the body can betray the mind.
The sex itself was — I can’t really say it was “good,” because that’s far too moral of a word and far more than he deserves, but it was highly skilled. He knew exactly what he was doing, exactly how to stimulate me. What he didn’t know was when to listen to me saying “no,” when to stop, when to realize that my kicking and punching and shoving and screaming and writhing was not just some sick roleplay while he blasted Lady Gaga’s “I Like It Rough.”
It means being able to imagine these truths even though our personal experience does not include them, and to understand that they all represent a type of rape. It also means supporting survivors regardless of the choices they need to make to heal. Not all of us would be better for accusing our rapist, not all of us would be healed by telling the whole world. And not all of us are willing to face our rapists in court no matter what we think the legal outcome might be.
I don’t want anything to do with him. I don’t want him in my life, even in a courtroom.
There is no one form of rape, no one recourse of justice, no one path of healing. But just as Richard says, “Rape contains multitudes,” we, as a global community, contain multitudes as well. Surely, we can offer our imaginations, our open eyes, minds, and hearts, to healing and preventing something that costs us, all of us, so much.
I can’t offer a happy ending here. I don’t want the sort of closure that turns incidents like this into a neat three-act “Law & Order” episode. I’ve decided instead — and writing this is the first step — that the resulting self-awareness, and hopefully, beyond me, a truer social awareness of rape, is a sufficient coda.
My deepest thanks to Richard Morgan, and to all the survivors sharing their stories, for being wise enough to reach for self-awareness, and brave enough to invite us to do the same.
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Also by Dixie Gillaspie: My Thank You Letter to Mr. Will
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Photo: Flickr/afromztoa
I forgot to point out in my previous comment that the first quote in that comment was from the 2004 Details magazine article by Richard Morgan which was linked in the OP.
Bill O’Reilly is one thing. He’s a media hack with no competence in this matter. More damaging is the notions of researcher Peter B. Anderson and other experts: In one study they conducted, 51 percent of college-aged women polled admitted that they had once taken advantage of a man who was drunk or high. “If we were applying the same standards as we apply to men,” says Anderson, “these women would be talked about as date-rapists.” That’s not the same thing, he concedes, as saying that those same standards should be applied, which is exactly the criticism other experts level… Read more »
Thank you for bringing this up! I have it in my “blog fodder” files to write about and I’m glad to know it resonates. I think people keep trying to turn the focus (if not the whole definition) of rape back onto the violent or forcable rape because it’s more black and white (or at least can be portrayed that way.) But you are so right, and it’s what I tried to say in my letter to George Will, it’s the violation of consent to a sexual act that constitutes rape no matter how our legal system defines it. So… Read more »
Sometimes, your experiences still don’t change your perceptions because your societal perceptions are so ingrained and hard to change. On this site I know well enough to question, but on a news site unless I pause to think about it my initial thought would be male perpetrator / female victim. That doesn’t mean that on a personal level they haven’t changed my perceptions and thus my actions. When you realize that you can be victimized, you take precautions on a personal level. There are some who know what happened and can’t bring themselves to use the R word. There are… Read more »