Stop always means stop
"Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine." ~ Andrea Dworkin
Dan Abrams had a lengthy interview with a woman who was raped twenty years ago. The attack occurred when she was in college. She reported the rape, but no one pursued the investigation. Twenty years ago, expecting someone to do something about it was bound to end in disappointment. The guy did drop out of college not long after the rape.
Recently,she got a letter from her rapist offering an apology. They had an email dialogue for a while. He had become active in AA and needed to make amends to people he hurt. There's not much of a way to accomplish that when the offense is rape. Eventually, she decided to press charges and, because of a very liberal statute of limitations law, she was able to pursue the criminal conviction.
A lot of the interview was about the post-attack ramifications. She said that she lives with the memory of the rape every day. She thinks about it every day. She wonders why he did it. She blames herself.
These types of stories always cause me to think of my own rape, thirty years ago. Do I live with it every day? No. I think about it more now because I have this blog and one of my goals here is to figure out how I got to this moment in my life. That means that, from time to time, that event gets replayed in my mind. Other than under these circumstances, I rarely think of it.
I don't wonder why he did it. He did it because he could. Maybe he did it because my screaming "Stop! Stop!" was just me being coy. He certainly believed we could continue with a relationship afterwards. I think that's pretty interesting. I always have.
As for whether I blame myself, that's a little more complex. I certainly had an agenda. I wanted to get the first sexual experience out of the way with someone with whom I wasn't already emotionally attached. That must have been in my mind at the time. On the other hand, stop most definitely means stop. He didn't. That's his responsibility.
It's always dificult for me to separate the ramifications of the rape with the all of the sexual abuse I was subjected to prior to the rape. I think the way I was raised almost ensured that I would find myself in that situation. So I'm not certain that he really inflicted more damage on me than had already been done a thousand times over. Certainly I was angry with him and I let him know that. It didn't destroy my trust in men, though. I've never had any.
I do think it contributed to my free floating hostility towards men. It fit in somehow with my need to compete with men, with a certain contempt I had for them. Competitiveness aside, I think I did believe that men outside of my family might not be physically threatening.
I hardened my heart towards men after the rape. I chose not to get emotionally involved until I met the man I later married. I became extremely careful about being in dangerous situations with men. I never went to anyone's house without taking someone with me. Dates always really loved that about me. Yes, I'll come over for dinner, but I'm bringing a couple of friends with me. Surprise.
I think I may have freed myself from that blanket distrust. I still believe that men are easy to manipulate; that's part of the whole competitiveness that lives on within me. If I'm able to manipulate people, they earn a certain measure of contempt. That, by the way, applies to both men and women. Unfortunately, lots of people are easy to manipulate, even when I'm not trying. Generally speaking, I choose not to manipulate others. It's too reminiscent of my father and, let's face it, it's just creepy.
This rape is just one of many that happened to me in my life. Some were far more harmful than this one. I guess that's how I'm different from the woman who was interviewed. The rape didn't fuck up my life because it was already fucked up. In a big way.
America held hostage day 1581
Bushism of the day:
"I'm occasionally reading, I want you to know, in the second term." --Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005
