Despite being a survivor himself, Nico Lang holds onto the hope that someday rape will no longer be something we expect will happen to us.
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Trigger warning for rape and sexual assault
When you go to a psychologist’s office, you’re often asked to point to a face that indicates your mood, making your feelings into what is quantifiable and nameable or what is normal. If I were asked to do this same exercise for rape, to point to what rape looks like on a chart, I wouldn’t be able to point to any of the examples. In my mind, rape is this thing that happens outside the confines of banal existence. Rape is unclassifiable and unthinkable. Rape isn’t something that happens on a seemingly ordinary evening. Rape is another universe.
This is the way we are taught about rape, the way we internalize it. Rape is something that feels impossible, the thing that doesn’t happen in a pretty how town or, at least, in your town. Rape doesn’t happen to you. I know this isn’t the way it works, because in 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men have been raped. I know this isn’t the way it works, because April counts the sixth year I’ve been a survivor of sexual assault. I know this isn’t the way it works, because this is the first year I’ve been able to use “that word” when describing it.
I came out as a survivor last year. I’ve been able to say the word “rape” since last month without feeling guilt, shame or disgust. Part of me thought that naming my demons would feel liberating, but it doesn’t feel better, necessarily. It just feels.
I’ve been thinking lately about a stand up act that Ever Mainard performs about sexual assault and how sickeningly normalized rape culture is. In the segment, Mainard discusses an evening walking home from the Morse stop at night and being followed by a man acting suspiciously, “wearing sunglasses” and a “fur-rimmed hood.” He’s the kind of guy you’re told to look out for when you’re told not to get raped. Mainard proclaims the message we’re given is: “Never walk alone at night! You need a man to survive, unless he’s following you at night!” It’s a perfect satire of a culture that tells us not to get raped rather than not to rape.
However, what the skit shows me most is that we’re told how rape happens. Rape happens in a dark alley. Rape happens when you leave your drink at the table as you go to the restroom. Rape happens when you least expect it. Rape happens when you’re not careful and it’s preventable, like a cold or watching Charlie Sheen’s FX show. You can change the channel. You have the power.
Mainard discusses that we all have a moment when we say, “Here’s your rape!”, as if being sexually assaulted were expected. “It’s 11:47. How old am I, 25?” Mainard quips. But we should never expect rape. Rape should never be so commonplace that it becomes the equivalent of a box that’s checked off or the World’s Worst Bucket List.
Yet that is exactly the sickening reality many women face today. It was the reality that Jane Doe faced when her attackers couldn’t recognize that raping and tossing around an unconscious body was inappropriate behavior. I saw it in the face of Judith, the protagonist of Tyler Perry’s Temptation, who is raped by her partner and told to give in: “You can say you resisted.” The film glosses over her assault, refusing to narratively recognize it as rape. It takes place in the grey area that we don’t like to label rape, the one we don’t like to talk about. However, it’s not grey at all. There’s nothing grey about rape.
This was my own experience six years ago, when a friend didn’t take no for an answer. Earlier this year, I was again reminded that rape doesn’t occur in another universe. It takes place once every two minutes. It will happen between two to five times before you finish this story, depending on how fast you read it.
♦◊♦
We’ll call him Paul. Paul is one of the most laid-back guys I’ve ever met, partially due to his genial nature and otherwise due to the copious pot that he smokes. I like Paul because when I’m around him, I don’t have to impress him or try to be anything but myself. When we hang out, always at his apartment, he’s usually too stoned to notice whether I shaved or reapplied deodorant before coming over. I usually just wear pajamas and whatever ironic t-shirt seems appropriate for the evening.
Paul and I only hang out late at night, per our ritual. On Tuesdays or Thursdays, I would text him after the business of my day to see if he was free. If he wasn’t, I didn’t mind, because he was moving and I didn’t plan on developing feelings for him anyway. This is what it was like to have a friend with benefits. For a serial monogamist brainwashed by a lifetime of Julia Roberts movies, being with someone without the need for commitment was comforting, like wearing those old house shoes you know are falling apart. They don’t have to look good. They just make your toes feel warm and less alone somehow.
I’d gotten so used to Paul that I didn’t think about having sex with him necessarily. It was a perk, but by no means a given. Sometimes we would just fall asleep while talking about nothing, and if he’d smoked too much, it was about nothing by design. Paul works in the restaurant business and because of his schedule and propensity to be a night owl, he goes to sleep later than I do. It’s a struggle to stay awake with him until the moment we fall asleep together, but I never want to be the one to crash the party. I want to be awake to get in the last word.
One night, I wanted to go to sleep early. I had just started a new job, and I wanted to impress my bosses by getting there early with a cup of coffee in hand. I brought the right tie, because when you want someone to like you, you always want to have on the right tie, perfectly ironed. You want to look put together, down to the pull of the tiniest knot.
I tried the melodramatic yawn and the glance at my imaginary watch, but he wasn’t picking up on my “Boy, it sure is past my bedtime!” signals. “Ten o’clock already?” I sighed to no avail.
So I did what any emotional six-year-old would do. Rather than having an adult conversation about my needs, I let the party keep going and pretended to fall asleep. My old roommate called it “playing possum,” but I call it “avoiding confrontation at all costs.” Paul had just put an old Ellen Degeneres special into his VHS player, and I figured I would fall asleep anyway. I was sodden with sleep and Ellen Degeneres is like a giant lady pillow, easy to snuggle up with and let your mind drift away.
Although it seems out of character for an easygoing stoner, Paul doesn’t tend to be affectionate or open with his feelings. He’s strangely aloof, which makes it easy not to form an emotional attachment to him. His mind always seems to be somewhere else, and while he’s open to a hug, he’s not the type to reach first.
This is why it was a great surprise when the very moment I “fell asleep,” Paul began to cuddle next to me, showing care and providing comfort in a way he never does when I’m conscious. He kissed my neck and pulled me close to him. Who was this sweet person? This wasn’t the one I’d been spending time with.
♦◊♦
If this were an episode of CSI, there would be two possible versions to this story. In the more palatable version of events, Paul just doesn’t know how to express his emotions to people. The occasion of my slumber was a way show his affection without the fear that it wouldn’t be reciprocated. This is the guy who, in a relationship, can’t say they love you but expresses it in other ways. He folds your laundry.
I liked this version. This version was emotionally stunted yet sweet. This version would help me sleep at night.
In the other version, here was my rape. I was 25. I’d been raped before. In fact, this exact thing had happened to me before. I once woke up to a friend of mine giving me a blow job. He thought I was being passive. I screamed at him that I was unconscious. He was surprised that I was angry. At the time, that shocked me. I was still shocked when a friend of mine put his hands down my pants in a bar and our friends just sat there as he fondled me in public, like it was no big deal.
I don’t know what time it was then.
This time, I didn’t have a watch, but I guessed it was around 11:01 P.M. I didn’t know why, but in the moment, that sounded like a rape time to me. I remember thinking, “That sounds like a time someone could get raped. If I heard that on the news, I would go, ‘Their time reportage is probably accurate.’” I couldn’t tell if it was the shock of this happening again, as I prepared to fight off an abuser, or if it was just rape culture talking. The next morning I would ask myself, “Why does any time sound like the time someone could get raped?” I didn’t have an answer.
As I attempted to calculate the time, my body began to tense. My hands slowly became fists, without me realizing it. Later I would discover the imprints of my nails in my palms. They left behind red marks as a reminder the following day.
The first time I was raped I was so petrified of what was about to happen that I let my fear paralyze me. While he assaulted my body, I pretended to be a board. I wanted to feel like anything that wasn’t human. I wanted to be made of anything else other than myself. This time, I was afraid—but less afraid for me than for him. Years of living with the shame of abuse taught me to be a fighter. It taught me never again.
Rape culture doesn’t just happen. You have to be taught to expect to be raped. The urge to fight becomes instinctive, a reflex you didn’t know you had.
However, this time I waited. I needed to see.
You might think this sounds strange, but I waited because I wanted to believe in him. I wanted to believe in him. I wanted to hope for a world where we know not to rape people and don’t have to be told. I wanted to pretend, for just a moment, that Steubenville isn’t every town.
I wanted to thank him for not raping me, realizing how strange that sounded.
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He turned off the television, picked me up and carried me to bed. As he held onto me, I breathed in and didn’t let go, still expecting the worst from a society we’re told is going to rape us. I thought of my high school friend whose boyfriend didn’t understand that screaming “No!” wasn’t part of the sex ritual. I thought of the horror he felt when she told him that he raped her, and his tearful apologies as he found out he wasn’t the person he thought he was. We believe that nobody short of a monster commits rape, but what if you don’t think what you’re doing is rape? We live in a society that doesn’t teach us to know the difference. After all, who taught you not to rape? What did they tell you? At what age?
As he tucked me into bed, Paul dragged me over next to him to be closer to him and kissed my neck again. He put his hands under my shirt and bonded us as tight as fingercuffs. I was sure he could feel my heart beating onto his heart as they pressed together.
My fists were still clenched. I waited.
His grip loosened. He feel asleep.
I waited a moment to take in the silence and twisted my neck around to kiss him on the forehead. I cried again, just a little, and I wanted to thank him for being different. I hoped that one day he would be able to tell me how much he cared about me, so I didn’t ever have to mistake affection for danger. I wanted to thank him for not raping me, realizing how strange that sounded.
I closed my eyes, although this version of the evening that unfolded didn’t help me rest as soundly as I had imagined.
When I left for work the next morning, I finally looked at the clock. It was 8:05 A.M. on a Monday morning. I was 25, still, although I felt older.
I never saw him again.
Image: Flickr/Ben Fredericson (xjrlokix)
While stranger, or predatory, rape is virtually unknown among gay-identified men, date rape is the dirty little secret that is swept under the carpet because no one quite knows what constitutes a ‘date’ in gay parlance: Parties, bath houses, being along with a man with whom one feels comfortable being alone, bars or public restrooms, parks, where ever gay men might gather with the reasonable expectation of sexual activity… But no one will talk about it, it seems, or when people do they are usually dismissed as wishful thinkers since so many gay men (me included) really do have rape… Read more »