I didn’t really like him. I’d known him for only 3 hours when he suggested that we go back to his place, to “see his art.” Gullible me at 25. I actually thought that’s what we’d be doing. He spoke well, showered every day, has a job, he couldn’t possibly mean me any harm. He was acting more like my brother than someone with romantic interests. We had some good conversation over a dessert that he’d paid for and then he wanted to show me his pictures. He’d been friendly, courteous, so I didn’t see any danger from this mild, polite man. He wasn’t much bigger than me. He couldn’t possibly be a threat.
I looked at his pictures. I looked at the graphic design he did for work. We talked about our families. Even though it was an official date, I was feeling more and more like it wasn’t really going anywhere romantic. I was fine with that. Then, at a break in the conversation, he turned to look straight at me. It was a heavy, silent stare and I knew what would follow.
He leaned in. His breath smelled. I will always remember how his breath smelled, so I didn’t really want to kiss him. But I kissed him anyway because it was the polite thing to do. How many women have to suffer from being polite? I thought, kisses are harmless. I’d kissed plenty of boys when I was a teenager and never went farther. I’d dated a guy before I’d moved where all we’d done for 4 months was kiss. Up to this point, kisses had a safe track record. But, I was finding that in adulthood, kisses were just the beginning and most men wanted more. The frustration of feeling like a body rather than a whole person to men had been grating me down, but I still assumed so naively that I had the control here and could stop it at a kiss.
I kiss him for a few more minutes, trying to time it out to a duration that won’t seem rude or that I’m not interested when I want to leave. I’m not interested, but that might hurt his feelings to know. It wasn’t passionate at all, kind of awkward actually. I think he kept going because he was trying to turn it into something. I stopped when I felt that I’d given it enough. I said, “I need to go home,” and he pulled me back in. This time, he was touching my chest and his mouth kept getting more and more slobbery. He seemed to be working really hard so I didn’t want to discourage him by pulling away again. I felt I owed him something and this was kindness. I couldn’t figure out why I stayed when I wanted to leave.
He took off my shirt, ripping down the front snaps with a nifty, metallic pop. I’d worried that he’d broken one of them. This had been my favorite shirt since 9th grade, western style denim with a big embroidered sunset on the back, and the awesome pearl snaps. After this night, I stop wearing it and can’t figure out why. I was wearing a shirt underneath so I didn’t worry because there were still clothes between us. I was actively planning my escape. I’d be leaving as soon as I could figure out how to do it politely and remain agreeable. Even if I never saw him again, he had to still like me.
He liked the sound of my buttons coming undone and opened his own snap front shirt with the same fervor. But he didn’t stop at his top shirt, and pulled his undershirt up over his head immediately. Now I was getting uncomfortable. I was quickly losing the safety of clothing.
I tried once again to stop him. I said this was too much for a first date and I needed to go home. It was getting late, I needed to get up early, I was a teacher, I had an endless stream of reasons that he batted away.
Now, I am a teacher, an educated person, an adult, from a good family, and here I am letting this boy that I don’t like very much keep me up past my bedtime and start removing my protective layers. But I guess all my education can’t overcome my programming to be agreeable, likeable, submissive. I must have learned it somewhere. I was told that women are strong and can do anything a man can do, except be rude and say “no.” I wasn’t really allowed to say “no” except on health class pamphlets. Those pamphlets would come back to me months later to help me understand what happened to me this night, but they weren’t enough to stop it from happening.
He grabs my chest in response to my excuses to leave. This is not what I expected and I don’t have a real counter attack. He starts to pull me towards his bedroom. Wait! When did a few kisses and your shirt off, not even mine yet, equal go to the bedroom? This is moving too fast and I tell him so and push his hands away. He laughs and keeps trying to grab me and take me into bedroom. This is the first time that I tell him, we are not having sex. I don’t know him. I’m not interested in sex with him. I am resolute, rude for the first time in our night together. I stand firm as he continues to try and physically push me into the bedroom. He gives up with an exasperated sigh and then takes me back to the couch. I think it’s over and I pick up my shirt to leave. He pulls it out of my hands and goes back to kissing me and pulling me towards the bedroom. I stop him again. He looks frustrated and says, “fine, we can go back to the couch for awhile longer.” No, I want to go home, I remind him. “Just sit with me,” he says. I sit.
He talks to me for another minute with his shirt off. I try to put mine back on but he takes it from me again. He’s impatient while we talk and eventually goes back in to start another round of slobbery kissing. He pulls me up off the couch and tries for the bedroom again. When I stop him again he says that he’s just tired and wants to lay down with me. We don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. He just wants to hold me and cuddle, nothing more. I’d cuddled with men before where it had been just that and I had this annoying habit of taking people at their word. I believed him when he said that was all he wanted. Girls like to cuddle. I like to cuddle. Wouldn’t it be nice to be held? It had been a long time since I’d been held or had this much attention from another person.
Moving to California had been amazing but making lasting friends had been difficult. I’d turned to dating to fill my need for connection with other people. It had produced a couple friends and a couple activity partners, but real, solid friendships I could count on one hand. I had been going on lots of dates lately. I had felt this inner need to be accompanied by another person through my life. It was a new and unusual desire that perplexed me, this compulsion toward needing a boyfriend. I suppose it was because I had moved across the country, far from everything that I’d known for the first time and I was probably feeling a little homesick. My search for friends had left me frustrated and sad. Though if I’m really honest, I’d been told that I needed to couple up long ago, this search for my mate had been lifelong. I had always felt inefficient at it, but here was a guy giving me the attention I’d been craving. Maybe that’s why I was here. There are a million reasons I can give to explain why I stayed when I wanted to go, but the real truth here is that no matter what decisions I’d made that night, none of them should have led to what happens next. Only certain men will take a story like this to the conclusion it has. There is something wrong with this man I’m with, not all men rape.
It would be okay, I told myself and followed him into the bedroom. I was still bound to this place, more concerned with minding my manners and not hurting his feelings than I was in looking out for my own well-being. As we reached his bedroom, he takes off his pants. “Whoa!” I exclaim, “I thought you just wanted to lie down!” I laugh and keep it light. I don’t want to be mean about it. He might think I’m a bitch. This is one of those moments where future me yells at past me to “Run!” But of course I didn’t or I wouldn’t have this story to tell. I should have known that it wouldn’t end there, especially with his excuse, “it’s more comfortable without my pants,” as he’s also removing his boxers, which I did stop him from removing. He’s getting upset that I won’t let him be completely naked and suddenly I feel like I need to placate him, as if he’s a bomb that will explode or he’ll turn into the Hulk if I upset him too much. I should have just let him be angry, but I’m not programmed to let that be okay.
I thought I was strong, and I am. But here I also am, standing in a moment I never wanted, faced with what should have been a clear decision to stay or go, knowing in the back of my head the outcome of both choices. I had been so filled with strength and bravery lately, moving far from home to a place where I knew no one. Californians seemed to have a special freedom that I had never seen before. Life wasn’t as serious as I’d always taken it to be. Their promises of being free and unleashed were seductive and I thought I could be free too. Of course sex was encompassed in this life philosophy too. It was a free for all, and if I had sex with lots of people, with no emotional attachments, that would make me free as well. What if waiting till I know someone before having sex is what makes me feel free? Something in him is treating sex as casual as shaking hands, and I’m the one who’s wrong because I can’t brush it off as so insignificant as well. It never meant so little to me. Yet, I’m with this guy that I’m not even interested in and the situation that I thought I would have seen coming is sneaking up on me and all my power is gone as I become more and more vulnerable by the minute.
Months later, when I finally see this for what it was, I will see the moments that I could have changed what was happening, maybe. But for now, I’m with this boy who I have no desires for, making out with him to make him happy. I sense his plans, well not his final plans, I just know what he wants but think I can keep denying him. I think I have the control, and my insane need for human contact keeps me put when I want to go. I stay because I don’t believe that there’s danger in this boy. People are innately good, but they can also be selfish. This boy sees me as someone who can fulfill his needs for the moment. I would find out soon that his needs were more important than what I was saying. My requests to stop, my insistence that I was not having sex with him were mere annoyances to him getting what he wanted.
He pushes me down on the bed before I can hem and haw over this decision too. I said, “my pants stay on,” so he coaxes me out of my shirt. I remind him again that we’re not having sex. Once the shirt is off, he reaches down to my pants zipper. I remind him that they are to stay on and there’s a struggle where he laughs at me while trying to undo my zipper and I try to push his hands away but he pushes my hands away instead and gets them undone and starts to pull them off. I tell him to stop and I manage to grab them so that he can’t keep removing them.
He’s getting upset with me and then lets his true intentions be known by saying this really rapey thing, but at the time I just heard it as another “boys will be boys” statement.
He says, exasperated that I keep stopping him, “When I get horny, I just want to have sex and that’s all I can see until I get it.”
And there it is. He’s not really paying attention when I say I don’t want to have sex. And how dare I deny him? What I want isn’t important to him. What he wants is king in this room. I was offended. I realized that I wasn’t special to him at all. He may not even be that attracted to me, I’m just there. I try to really leave this time but he pushes me back on the bed and pins me there so I can’t get up. He wants to reason with me so I see his point of view. He promises he won’t try anything, he really does just want to cuddle, back peddling from his previous statement now that he’s losing his chance. He enjoys my company, he even throws in. I told him that his point of view on sex is really slutty. If I’d had the right vocabulary at the time, rapey is really the correct word there. I told him that I didn’t feel comfortable with him. He shrugs as if I’m just not cool enough to get it. “That’s just the way it is,” he says. I feel in this moment as if maybe I’m doing something wrong. Maybe I’m not being as nice as I think I am. He’s upset with me so I must be doing something wrong.
He still insists that he won’t try anything, he just doesn’t want me to leave. I naively believe him. He’s small, mild mannered, he can’t be a threat. We’d had a pleasant evening together before this. I take him at his word. But I take the wrong words into consideration.
After another half hour where I’m trying to leave and he keeps me in his bed, laughing like it’s a game, trying to pull my pants off, he finally gets them off, still saying he’s not going to do anything I don’t want. Maybe he was also lying to himself that what I want is not what he’s hearing from me. He just wants to touch my skin, he says. I do have soft skin. I’ve heard this before. He just wants to hold me and be close to me. I guess I could use a hug more than I realize. He tries to go for the one motion, rip the panties off, but he only makes it to my knees and I reclaim them back to their proper position. He laughs again so I’d think it was a joke, he’s not really serious about it, I’m safe there. I don’t buy it. I realize that he’s still trying to get me into sex, but again, I think I have the power. I think that he can’t get anywhere without my permission and I don’t plan on giving him my permission. I expect that he’ll stop when I say so. I don’t look at all men as rapists waiting to be given the opportunity. I still think I have to say yes for sex to transpire and I’m not saying yes.
He tries a new tactic. He wants to give me a massage, he says. I like a good back rub. We used to give them to each other at summer camp, with our clothes on of course, and it was totally innocent, something I’d do for a friend any day. “It’ll help you relax,” he says, but I don’t hear the unspoken other half of that sentence, ‘so I can have sex with you,’ and figure that would be okay. Maybe he’d get tired of this game and let me go home. I even reminded him, sure, a massage, and then I was going home, nothing more. He agreed in that moment and in the next moved his massage from my shoulders, down my back and slipped them into my underwear. I freeze up and he feels it.
“Come on. It’ll feel good, just relax,” he replies to my tension like a line out of a health-class pamphlet on abstinence. The literature had taught me well and I was prepared with my come-back, I just didn’t realize that I was reading from the wrong pamphlet. “No,” I said, thinking this should be enough. He’s referring to the physical pleasure of sex, for me I’m more concerned with the emotional harm. I know sleeping with him will only make me feel ashamed, even more so if it doesn’t mean that he becomes my boyfriend. I’d been here before. I’d made the wrong choice in the past, and often enough it wasn’t really a choice I’d made but something I’d been talked into. I’d resolved with myself before this date that I’d say “No.” No would be my mantra, my flagship, my beacon. I would honor myself and not give in to sex that someone else wanted if I didn’t want it. And I said, “no.” I said no so many times that night: when we got up to his apartment, when he first kissed me, when we went into the bedroom, when he’d taken off my shirt, when he’d taken off my pants, and here again. I said no at every available opportunity but he still wasn’t listening.
I know that you reading this, you might be saying, “but you stayed.” And I’ve beaten myself up for it so many times that I didn’t fight harder to leave. I got past this shame by reminding myself that a “no” should be good enough to not get raped, that people who rape are broken, entitled, and wrong. I cling to my “no’s” when I tell myself this is my fault over the years. I remember how I’d said no again and again that night. Rape is not something that you invite, it is something that is done to you without your consent. This was not something I asked for. This was something that I’d very clearly said “no” to, repeatedly.
I’m starting to talk myself into what we’re doing, even though it’s further than I’d wanted to go, because something I’d learned along the way had told me that I needed to be agreeable to be a good person. I still wouldn’t have sex. I was resolute on that one issue, but messing around a little wouldn’t hurt and then I’d leave when I’d given enough that I didn’t feel so guilty that I’d be denying him. In leaving, he might call me a tease, a bitch, a slut. I should have let him, but I stayed, even as he continued to try and remove my underwear because I still thought this was my decision. Nice guys don’t rape. But apparently they do.
I got tired of fighting over it and I’d run out of excuses so I let him take off my underwear, feeling sheepish that I’d lost that battle. He wanted oral sex if I wasn’t going to sleep with him. I didn’t want to. I did. He wanted to reciprocate. I let him, even though I didn’t want his mouth anywhere on me. The whole time, I’m watching myself as I let this person that I don’t even like do things to me that I don’t want and I still can’t run. I start to suspect that it’s about to go exactly where I don’t want it to. I try again to leave now that I’d gone past a breaking point and the only thing left was the one thing I’d said “no” to all evening. He hadn’t come during oral sex. I think he was saving himself for what he really wanted.
I repeat that we’re not having sex and try to leave again. He keeps agreeing that it’s okay verbally while still touching me in a way that says otherwise. The next part gets muddled in my memory but he ends up rubbing his penis on the outside of my vagina. I push him back and ask what he’s doing. He persists that he’s not going to put it in, he’s just feeling me, just rubbing. “I just want to say, ‘Hi.’” I don’t know what that means but I let him continue because he’s also saying he’s not going to do the thing that I don’t want. I thought that we were still on foreplay activities and that I still had to say “yes” to make sex actually happen. Apparently he didn’t think he needed a yes to proceed and I discover too late that everything I’d been saying he was ignoring.
“Wait!” I say. “Shhhh!” he replies. “Wait!” I say again but then he’s in.
At first I’m in shock that this is happening. I’d been listening to his words, believing him, when I should have watched his actions and taken those more seriously. I don’t know what to do for a second and lay there paralyzed. In the next second I think about just letting it happen, it’s obviously what he wants and he’ll be so mad at me if I stop him. I also tell myself that this is my fault. It’s happening because I was a slut again. And then I remember how I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to do this. I remember that I don’t want to be having sex and decide to let that float to the surface and dominate. I found my voice, small at first, “stop. Stop!”
I put my hands on his chest and pushed and said it again louder, “NO!” He tightened his arms around me and picked up his pace. I realized he wasn’t going to stop for my pleas. I pulled my knees out from under him put them on his belly and pushed again with my arms, yelling for him to stop. Picking up my knees had allowed him deeper in but I think he may have thought this was my surrender at first and loosened his grip so I was able to launch him off me and from the bed. “I told you I didn’t want to!”
His response showed me how much he didn’t get it, “I was so close!” he yelled, exasperated at being stopped. “I was there! We were basically doing it, Can’t we just finish?”
“No!” This time I knew not to listen to anything he said. But so weirdly, I felt bad, like I’d done something wrong, not for letting him inside me, but because I’d stopped him. This poor man, stuck with a tease like me. Something in me still felt obligated, I had to make up for denying him what he wanted. So, I stayed and finished him off manually through his insistence to be let back inside me. He whined the whole way through like a kid who had just lost a video game and wanted another turn.
As he was falling asleep, I put on my clothes and finally left, the way I’d wanted to hours earlier. He asked me to stay and cuddle but I knew what he really wanted and that he would try for me again. I felt insulted and gross at this request.
The next day it rained hard. I was downtown running errands but ended up sitting in my car in a parking lot across the street from his apartment, coincidentally. I couldn’t really categorize this strange experience. I didn’t have the right name for it yet. I called my friend to see if she wanted to get lunch. I told her this story, about this idiot who couldn’t stick to his word and tricked me into bed. Instead of the validation that I was looking for, she spat back, “You’re always getting yourself into these situations where you let these men take advantage of you.” I was shocked and hurt but then she crushed me with, “you give it away too easy.” There was the social proof that I’d been a slut and that’s why that had happened. I’d let it happen. From the mouth of another woman, it was my fault. I felt so dirty, followed by shame. I panicked and tried to explain how, no, he had done something to me, he was in the wrong, but I didn’t have the right word to call it what it was. I couldn’t say rape yet. Maybe if she’d commiserated with me, told me how awful he’d been, instead of blaming me, it wouldn’t have taken as long to come up with the right word.
I saw him a couple more times because I thought I had to. He offered to make me dinner at his house one night but when I showed up, there was nothing there but an invitation to his bedroom again. I very staunchly sat on his couch and refused to move this time. He eventually made me a cup of noodles and I left right after to his complaints and a rolling of his eyes. Thankfully, our time together petered out quickly. He got tired of trying to get me back into bed and I got tired of fighting it. Eventually, we stopped calling each other. I saw him only once more after, months later, passing him in a crowd on a street, weirdly on the same day that I finally had the proper title for this experience.
It was the 4th of July and I was riding a bike to beat the holiday traffic with my new boyfriend, a man who had stopped when I said I didn’t want to have sex yet, who was willing to wait for me to be ready. We’d decided the best place to watch the fireworks would be to make friends with someone who had an apartment downtown over a shop downtown. I said I knew a guy who lived down there. I hadn’t thought about him in more than 6 months, or had been trying not to at least. I remembered how I’d said no, repeatedly that night. I remembered how he’d struggled with me to stay in me. I remembered how I’d fought back and eventually had to use my legs to push him off me. I realized then that he was having sex with a person who was actively saying no and fighting him off. I realized in the brilliant sunshine of a happy summer day, gliding down a low hill under the dappling of tree branches overhead, that I had been raped. It was a dark icy thought for the heat of the day. I remember how it gripped me and I swear the light darkened in the world around me that moment.
I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about this. I knew the things that I’d agreed to and the ways I’d said yes. I wasn’t sure at first if my conclusion was correct. But then I remembered all the times I’d said no throughout the evening. I remembered how I’d told him again and again that I didn’t want to have sex and he knew what I’d been interested in that night. I remember yelling “No!” I remember yelling “Stop!” I remember how he’d held onto me, forcing me to continue the act. I remember the struggle and the fear when I realized what he was doing. I remembered that I had to fight with him to get him off, using my legs to launch him all the way off the bed. I saw the whole picture this time and remembered those check boxes on the health class pamphlets: I’d said No, I’d said No, and I’d said No. Plus, having to struggle and fight with someone to stop, is not consensual sex. I could relax into this knowledge that it was a choice that was made for me, not a behavior I’d chosen, though the other events surrounding it, the things that I’d agreed to so that he wouldn’t have sex with me, bothered me still. I found my assessment of the whole situation curious, that it took me almost a year to see what had happened to me, that that night even, I’d felt bad for stopping him, and how he’d been able to keep me there when I really wanted to leave.
I spent years trying to tell myself that it didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t a back alley rape, sneak attack that I’d been warned against. I walked the town at night with my keys sticking out of my knuckles and my head up so that I didn’t look like an easy target. I was on the lookout for that experience. This was date rape. It was slow and sneaky and it had come from a nice, regular guy, with a job and combed hair and nice clothes. This wasn’t the hooded figure that I’d been watching the shadows for. This rape hadn’t been a quick attack. It was a slow coercion played out over hours through emotional manipulation that I’d been conditioned my whole life to agree to: be agreeable, be nice, don’t be rude, smile, make people like you, don’t hurt people’s feelings, even if you have to hurt yourself. And everytime I tried to leave, or stop him, and he pouted or rolled his eyes, as if I was in the wrong, he was using this programming against me. Is he any less of a rapist for following his own gender role? And I know that he’d be shocked to be called a rapist. He was just doing what a guy has to do to get laid. He thought I was the rude one for stopping him from getting what he wanted.
I tried to figure out ways to tell people that they wouldn’t look at me as broken or think I was just a slut, the way my friend had on the rainy day that had followed. We spend our lives trying to appear strong to others. In the end, it’s when we are vulnerable that we show our true strength. Secrets are weakness. We are all human, having human emotions, doing confusing, human things, hurting the way humans do, and when we admit our humanness, other people get to relax and sigh with us, that, oh, we’re human too. We hurt too.