You are not weak and you are not a boy. You were not bested or conquered; you were taken advantage of in a way that precludes all gender conventions.
—
Trigger warning for sexual violence
Ten years ago, I blacked out and was raped by a woman who I proceeded to date for the next year and a half of my life.
My freshman year of college, I had a high-school girlfriend three hours away from me on the other side of Ohio. I tried my best to expand my social circle while maintaining ties with her, which was essentially impossible.
Like most college freshmen, I drank too much. And one night, I drank too much and was pitched out of a frat house in the dead of winter. I don’t remember much, but I do remember being initially grateful for the all the hands that helped push me home and into my dorm room that night.
And then my eyeballs flipped themselves into the depths of my eye sockets.
I woke up in my lofted bed, and there were about a half dozen people in my room hanging out. My clothing was on the floor, and I felt an invisible miasma of shame engulfing me. Maybe it’s the hindsight talking, but I had a premonition that something wicked was coming. Maybe it’s because my future rapist was in the room. My eyes retreated into orbit again.
I had met her at the beginning of freshman year. My dorm room was in one of three male-occupied floor towers. I was lonely and glad for any friends I could get. I had a long-distance girlfriend; she had a long-distance boyfriend, and being able to have someone to share these things with shunted the pain. She was nice to me.
And then she raped me.
When I regained my bearings that night, my friends were gone and gravity was a mystery to me. She was in my bed, and I couldn’t tell if my back was facing the ceiling or the mattress, nor could I identify whose sweat belonged to whom. All I could feel was pressure, and after coming to my senses I put together what was happening. I felt impotent to stop it.
The morning that followed came with a paradigm shift. I was embarrassed and shellshocked and refused to believe it had happened, even though she was next to me when I regained consciousness. As a man, I felt especially compelled to hide what happened to me, lest I come off as weak.
I asked her what had happened, and she confirmed all the details, which included consent and desire that seemed impossible to fish out of the folds of my brain.
At that point, I decided to own it. Because if I owned it, it wasn’t embarrassing and it didn’t strip me of my masculinity. I had never heard of this happening to anybody else, and researching it online made my problem seem more real to me, which was frightening.
Panic flooded me and all I wanted to do was scrub my soul of everything that was demoralizing and demasculinizing about the experience. My interpretation became consensual sex, and I proclaimed that sex was awesome, even though I had no clue what it felt like at all. I bragged to my neighbors, who could hear her wailing through paper-thin walls. The more I bragged, the more the agony subsided.
I was steadfast to make the loss of my virginity mean something. I immediately broke it off with my long-distance girlfriend. And my coping mechanism was to make my rapist my partner, giving purpose and intent to something horrible.
I put myself into a coma from reality. After dorm life, we split an apartment and shared a cat and grocery shopped and watched marathons of “America’s Next Top Model.” My family liked her a lot.
Eventually, writing became the vehicle that saved me. I started covering politics for local newspapers and music for an alt-weekly in Cleveland. Writing pulled me away from her, both physically and mentally, causing her web to seem a little less sticky. And then escaping my self-induced Stockholm Syndrome was within my grasp.
♦◊♦
The path to admitting to other people what actually happened to me was a tricky one. But as I matured years after it occurred, I was able to grasp that my concept of masculinity was childish, and only rooted in weird stereotypes.
First it began with “Yeah, I barely remember losing my virginity” before I was able to actually use the R-word to describe what happened to me. I was able to eventually even tell my parents. To this day, I don’t think they were fully able to conceive what happened to me.
Being able to admit that I was raped brought my life into high-definition levels of clarity. Especially when everybody’s response was the same — an awkward pause, followed by a facial expression that goes hand-in-hand with being upset.
And then I pulled the trigger and I ended it.
One week after we broke up, she resorted to violence. When the cops came to our apartment and she refused to let them in after they threatened to break down the door, I felt like I was getting my first dose of reality in nearly two years. Days later, she was in another apartment a few football fields away. From that point on, I only saw her two more times on campus before fleeing Ohio.
While I’m able to talk about what happened to me 10 years later, make no mistake: being raped seriously damaged me and had a profound impact on how I engaged with women years after it happened. Looking back on everything, it had more of an impact than I realized: two of my next three relationships were with virgins (and stayed that way from beginning to end), which seemed like an anomaly as I was finishing up school. In my first relationship after the breakup, I dated someone for six months and never so much as took her clothes off. And while that might’ve frustrated others, it was exactly what I needed back then.
In the present day: I am “normal.” I can engage on my past with any stranger who’s willing to listen without feeling like I’m going to pass out or throw up. While it’s not something I think about every day, it passes through my mind every week through various triggers. It’s never going to leave me, and I’d like it to stay that way, as I’m not prepared to reject the strong person I’ve become throughout all of this.
To every man out there who has experienced something similar: You are not weak and you are not a boy. You were not bested or conquered; you were taken advantage of in a way that precludes all gender conventions. Recovering from rape is gender agnostic: it all begins with being able to admit what happened to you. However you choose to take that step — be it through therapy or confidentiality — is up to you.
By Anonymous
More from our partners at xoJane.com:
Video of Students Merrily Cheering About Rape is “Sexist and Offensive”, University Says
How Not to Be a Dick to Your Polyamorous Friend
Everything is very open with a very clear explanation of the issues.
It was really informative. Your site is useful.
Thank you for sharing!
Thank you so very, very much for sharing your horrific experience with honesty and integrity. My husband reached his full adult height and almost his adult weight by age 13. I saw the pictures of him at that age and indeed, he was a big boy who later became a large man. He was raped by his female teacher in the classroom coat closet that year and never told anyone about it except for me, his wife many years later. His rape took place in 1948. I am writing this comment to honor you as well as my late husband:… Read more »
Sorry, I can’t seem to make it through your post. It’s mot that I didn’t try or it’s not important. It’s too emotionally difficult. Based on the sub heading, I know you dated her for awhile. Trust me. I know that guys want to believe that it didn’t happen that I would have had sex with them anyway. At leasy with me it was two strangers and didn’t have to see either of then again. I don’t know what I would have done if it was people I knew and interacted with. I’m sorry that happened and I hope the… Read more »
Thank you for your story. I was just debating sexism, harassment and sexual assault with a “friend” and he told me that it is technically impossible for a woman to rape a man. It is astonishing that people still think about rape as a simple penis-vagina battle where the one that sticks out more wins. It is so insanely painful to think about the male victims of sexual assault who are even more dismissed than female victims (because this “friend” also went on to dismiss my assault experiences and practically defended the attackers in a twisted new-age karmic bullshit sugar-coated… Read more »
Thank you for sharing your story. More stories like yours need to be told to show and encourage men to come forward with what happened to them. I hope men can come around to the understanding that women do assault and that it does not diminish their masculinity or make them weak if it happens to them. She took advantage of a situation and violated your trust. No one should ever have liberties taken with their bodies without proper consent. I have a lot of respect for you acknowledging what happened and facing it when so many are never able… Read more »
Dear Anonymous,
Thank you so much for sharing your story. While the genders are different, your story is very similar to mine and I want you (and other victims: male or female or transgender) to know that it was never our fault and we were never weak. Getting to where we are now didn’t make us survivors – it made us warriors. Rape happens and can happen to anyone. It sucks pretty hard too, because no one ever wants to feel like it happened to them at first.
I got about a third of the way through your post then and almost started to cry so I stopped. I’m sorry this happened to you. Some days I wonder if I was lucky to not remember a thing. I sometimes try to convince myself that nothing happened. I tell myself they couldn’t have done that because they were concerned that I get home safe. Other times I think it would be better to know. Even if it’s the worst thing I could imagine at least I’d know for sure.
I need to say that my comment doubting the validity of female on male didn’t show here.
Hank, please see the link I posted in a comment above to aggregated studies about female-perpetrated rape. There is a LOT of compelling data that it happens often, more often than you’d suspect.
I don’t know what your comment was, but if you make a comment questioning a victim’s story – no matter who the victim is – on GMP, it will get deleted. We are not in the business of denying anyone’s experience.
Beyond that, the data about female-perpetrated rape just isn’t in your favor. There are facts here, and they cannot be denied because of your personal opinions.
Joanna, It looked to me that he said that he had given consent, and that both of them were drunk. Perhaps I misinterpreted the sentence. I would need to know exactly how rape was being “operationalized” (defined) in each of these studies to form an opinion. As a sociologist, I do know that male on female rape is what I’d call “overdefined.” People, for example, claim it’s around 30 percent for women lifetime, when researchers say it’s actually around 6 percent. I think claiming rape ex post facto the event is legally troublesome, and it’s something that people in the… Read more »
Still waiting for my response to appear.
Wow, I’m extremely pleased and kind of surprised to not see a single dismissive or derogatory comment regarding this article. The comments at xojane were equally thoughtful and appreciative. I’m really glad to see that reasonable people are able to broach this topic without them being lumped in with people that are trying to invalidate or reduce the importance of addressing sexual violence against women.
I went through a period of experimentation in my late teens and early 20s. With adult eyes it is easy for me to differentiate the consenting act from the sexual abuse I endured from both men and women who I considered friends. I tell very few people.
It’s hard to explain, and even when you do, empathy, sympathy, paths to resolution don’t generally exist. No one likes a male victim it seems. Not men, not women. You are damaged goods.
Kudos for the piece.
It’s a shame that outside of this web site and perhaps a few others, this scenario doesn’t get all that much validity or sympathy. I mean, imagine all the confusion , the shame, the feeling of emasculation, in general WTF happened, and having to face that all alone. A emotional wrecking ball you have to keep secret!
That’s true. Hopefully GMP is the introduction to a wider scale discusssion. It might take a little while (unfortunately) but the first step needs to happen somewhere.
This is in many ways eerily similar to the way my virginity got taken from me. I am glad to see more men are telling their stories and I am glad the author of this article seem to have found his path towards healing.
Good for you, finally realising what had happened and finally getting out of that toxic relationship that could have had you fooled for years more. I wish you all the best with your future relationships and not let the memory of her and what she did impair you anymore
Big respect to the guy who wrote this. And I completely agree that the hardest part, and the most important step in recovering your sense of self, is to be honest with yourself about what happened. I hope it continues to get easier for you. My experience – which I only put the name “rape” to some time afterwards – involved a little more input from me. I’d been seeing a girl for about three months, and slowly coming to the realisation that I couldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her (metaphorically of course!!). We were staying… Read more »
Important to recognize that you did not lose your virginity in that first incident of sexual assault, nor necessarily in the following acts of self-preservation. Virginity is something freely given; people who are raped have not given anything freely until such time as they chose to have a consensual sexual relationship.
+1 to this.
That being said, certainly this survivor should be able to mourn the fact that this was his first time with intercourse, and he didn’t get to choose that. It may not count as “virginity” if he wanted to reframe it, but the reality is that he had that first technical time taken away from him.
It moves me to see anyone share such an important story of such an under reported crime. One of the hardest things to discuss in rape prevention education is about male victims. There are so few stories out there for people to relate to. It is hard for anyone to report a rape, especially when the rapist is a part of their social group. But it is hard for men to even identify when they have been raped when much of the messages they have received from society is that as a “man” they must want it all the time.… Read more »
I appreciate you speaking up. It frightens me to think of how many untold stories are out like this. We need to work on making sure they are told.
“Men have it so easy! They don’t have to worry about stuff like this!”
It pisses me off whenever I hear someone say this.
“Well, it doesn’t happen AS OFTEN.”
Even if that were true (I’m having my doubts), that would make it okay???
Great article by Ally Fogg as to the validity of studies suggesting rape against men (by women) happens MUCH more often than we have previously recognized.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2013/09/04/the-startling-facts-on-female-sexual-aggression/
Things like: “Men have it so easy! They don’t have to worry about stuff like this!” and “Well, it doesn’t happen AS OFTEN.” are quite horrible. They imply that since men don’t experience something (in this case rape) as often women or in the same ways as women then it doesn’t warrant discussion. This is really feeds into the us v them mentality in the form of acting as if women are the yard stick that male suffering has to measured against in order to determine its validity. (As a reversal could you imagine someone saying that women “have it… Read more »
Thanks for telling this story. It’s SO crucial that people understand that despite what society says, men DO deserve to give consent – they aren’t “sex maniacs” who will never say no, and only want sex.
The prevailing myth in our society that men always want sex is SO dangerous. And remember, an erection or even ejaculation does NOT equal consent. Both are reflexes and while often linked with desire and consent neither is a substitute for consent. Ever!
Erections are a point of discussion in Massage Therapy 101. I had the unfortunate experience of being in an all-female class at the time, so I listened to women being snide about this little fact of life. I gradually spoke up, and finally shot a classmate down when she said, “Women don’t get erections.” Just because we can hide it better doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I gave up when a mother of two (boy & girl) said, “Men are all pigs, from birth to death.”
You’d be so surprised at how many women don’t understand how the penis works. It’s not a light switch that can be flipped on command. And equally surprising is how many guys are taught to believe this and actually embrace it.
Thank you for sharing your story. It brought tears to my eyes. I’m so sorry that happened to you. I’ve been working on a piece of fiction dealing with this topic. You confirmed everything that I suspected. You have so much courage. I hope you find healing one day. You deserve it.
I think it’s really important to note how he didn’t even really realized what happend until a couple years later. That is sometimes how it happens. You think that some kind of relationship you had was normal, some things might nag at you but you can’t quite see it yet. Until a couple years later it hits you that it wasn’t and you figure out why it wasn’t.
So glad this story was shared. We really need to have discussions about impairment and the ability to not consent to sex.
With a few minor details switched, this is almost the same as my story.