“Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and one another’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.”
– Melissa Febos, “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
I can’t tell this story without sharing some important context. Several events in my childhood and youth colored my reaction to what years later I learned to be my rape. The first took place when I was seven or eight years old. In short, I experienced a “bad touch” by a stranger in a public place. My mother witnessed the molestation while sitting in her car a few yards away. When I returned to the car, my mother said to me, in a tone like a slap, “I thought I told you to never let anyone touch you like that.” That was the last time she spoke of the incident. When I confronted her about it decades later, she denied any memory of it. Then, when I was twelve, a friend, classmate, and neighbor of mine was raped at gunpoint by a stranger while home alone in her mother’s apartment a few doors from the apartment where I lived with my mother. After the rapist fled on foot, I was the one who found my friend, naked and bound at the wrists and ankles. It was years before the rapist was caught and convicted.
To be sure, these incidents warped my views of sex, men, safety, and security, not to mention my view of myself, but combined with some other childhood circumstances (most notably, a largely absentee father and walking on eggshells around an abusive, gun-fixated, alcoholic stepfather), they also contorted my sense of agency and responsibility. My twisted logic led to the assumption that if anyone forced my body into sexual activity or even so much as touched me against my will, I was to blame. The only explanation I could concoct for the barrage of fleeting but powerful images, sensations, claustrophobia, and terror that would arise in me like a flock of birds in my face was that I had let a man touch me like that.
Over the years I have participated in my share of self-blame and self-shaming, unacceptable though it may be to admit it in the current climate of heightened rape-culture awareness. I have wondered, was I foolish to have even agreed to spend time alone with H that night? Should I have, as they say, known better? I hesitate to mention it here, because I haven’t been able to find citations to the research, but I recall reading about a study that found that daughters of absentee fathers are more likely to be sexually assaulted. I also recall at least one study that showed that females who experience one sexual assault are at higher risk of subsequent assaults. Could my fatherless childhood and the molestation when I was eight somehow have marked me as a prime target for H’s evil act? Was it something in my countenance, my body chemistry, my posture, or, dare I say it, my judgment, that, just as a young, elderly, ill, or injured animal piques the interest of a predator, alerted H that I was easy pickings? I’m not supposed to have those thoughts. There’s no excuse for rape and it’s never the victim’s fault. That’s right—never. I’m supposed to be bigger and stronger than to allow rape culture to cow me into turning the wagging finger on myself. But I’m through with denial and pretending away the worst, so I’m not going to pretend I haven’t had those doubts, because I have. What I’ve been searching for over the years is an explanation for why H raped me; the fact that my some of my theories assign responsibility for that rape to me, not him, is the very definition of rape culture. And yet, if we don’t force ourselves to look at all possible factors that contribute to men raping and influence their choice of victim, we’ll never get anywhere in stopping rape from happening in the first place.
I didn’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t have known what to tell or where to begin. All I had circulating in my head and my body at the time were out-of-focus snippets salvaged from the cutting room floor of my mind. Maybe if I had told someone, they’d have instantly known that I was describing having been drugged and raped. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. At that time and for many years after, those snippets would randomly surface, in no particular order, and seemingly apropos of nothing. The churning panic and terror that was the emotional soundtrack of this jittery movie mixed with shame and guilt. And I had no explanation—again, no language—for what was happening to me or why. At the time, “flashbacks” were the exclusive territory of combat veterans and people who’d tripped on acid. The word “trigger” was still 25 years away from making its way into the common parlance to describe a sensation, sound, smell, sight, or taste that elicits a memory of a traumatic experience. It would be several decades and a three-year round of EMDR therapy before the snippets would begin to present themselves to me in the linear order of the paragraph that opens this piece. I felt as if I’d lost my mind, and I feared anyone I tried to tell would instantly know it to be true. Cognitive dissonance blocked me from acknowledging the most likely source of this uproar—that H had raped me. All together, it could have been enough to bring me to a halt. School, my part-time job, my family and friends, and my relationship with my boyfriend, though, together propelled me forward. As time passed, I managed to tamp down thoughts of the nameless horror that haunted me. When the images and sensations and emotions bobbed to the surface, I waved them away. Growing up, I had mastered the art of pretending everything was fine when everything was anything but fine; it was the way of my people. I was in my forties before I learned that one way or another, avoidance always fails.
About five years later, I had graduated from college and was living with my boyfriend (now my husband) in our hometown. One day the phone rang. It was H. His voice barely registered above a whisper. His words came slowly, hesitantly. Whatever he was calling about, it was big. In a quiet monotone, H confessed to me that on that evening all those years ago he had drugged my wine and then raped me. I don’t remember if he said anything else. I don’t remember what, if anything, I said. I don’t remember if he apologized. All I remember is that my heart was pounding so hard that my body swayed to its beat as I stood in our kitchen. With sweaty palms, I death-gripped the phone receiver, pressed it hard against my ear, and twisted the cord. The black and red vintage floor tiles beneath my feet seemed to throb with my pulse, undulating before my eyes. In a matter of seconds, H’s confession had set me free—the fact that he had drugged me explained why in an instant I had gone from conscious and sober to incapacitated and why my recall of the evening was pea-soup foggy, at best. The nightmarish siege of images and sensations that would hijack me out of the blue were indeed shards of memories. And what had happened to me was neither my choice nor my fault.
At the time I was raped, I knew nothing about date-rape drugs. They weren’t widely discussed back then. I attended a university located in the middle of a cornfield, and apparently campus campaigns to educate college students about how to avoid being “roofied” that had begun to crop up at larger universities and urban ones had not yet reached there. Or if they had, I’d missed them, ignored them, or blown them off as a concern for other women, but not me. One side effect of being raised to pretend everything is fine—even when and perhaps especially when things are decidedly not fine—is a Pollyanna worldview that bad things happen only to other people, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Actually, that tends to be a very human view, no matter one’s upbringing, but I posit that the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” atmosphere in which I grew up exacerbated that tendency in me. And no, I’m not blaming my family for any of this—they were doing the best they could, and I know they loved and cared for me. And if prior to H raping me someone would have cautioned me to never leave my drink unattended and to refuse drinks from anyone I didn’t know or trust, it probably wouldn’t have changed my behavior that night. I knew H, and I trusted him. Now that I have a rudimentary understanding of the effects of date-rape drugs, much more about that night makes sense to me now, including the fact that I can remember so little of it.
None of this is to insinuate that I believe any woman or man is to blame for being raped. Of course I think the onus is on men to not rape. If only enforcing that were as simple as shouting online at men to not rape. We don’t yet understand the knot of psychobiological, social, and cultural reasons men and some women rape enough to prevent them from doing it in the first place. Until scientific inquiry achieves this–and I’ve read that most research pertaining to rape focuses on victims, not rapists–we’re stuck with garden variety precautions to reduce the risk of rape: protect your beverages, travel in pairs or groups, lock your doors and windows, be aware of your surroundings at all times. Most of these strategies imply that “stranger rape” is the predominant threat against which we must defend ourselves—the classic bad-guy-hiding-in-the-bushes scenario that we are taught to fear and that movies, television, and the news media perpetuate, and the kind that visited upon my friend when she and I were both 12. And the kind that’s statistically relatively rare compared to “acquaintance rape”, the kind that happened to me. It bears repeating that none of the aforementioned precautions would have stopped H from raping me. Because I knew him well (or so I thought), it never occurred to me that he might harbor premeditated plans to violate me. Familiarity breeds trust—that maxim can apply to a neighbor, the delivery driver, that guy from calculus class, a parish priest, a supervisor at work, or one’s boyfriend or husband. The presence of a current or previous relationship between rapist and his rape victim gives some skeptics the mistaken impression that they are within their rights to dismiss acquaintance rape as a misunderstanding, a communication breakdown, a love pat gone too far. Not only is it downplayed as just a sexual oopsie, but also many “tips” for avoiding rape are useless (other than perhaps the “protect your beverage” thing) when it comes to acquaintance rape.
What is the answer? I can’t claim to have one. I do believe that one thread in the rough weave of factors that lead to men raping is that some of those men—maybe even most of them—have experienced significant trauma early in their lives. In some of those men, the unprocessed, unaddressed emotions from that trauma manifest themselves as a propensity to commit acts of sexual violence. It certainly doesn’t manifest itself that way in all men or women. Yes, I’m trotting out the “hurt people hurt” theory to explain why men rape. Not to excuse rape. Not to let any rapist off the hook. But because I believe that “hurt people hurt”, as simplistic as it may sound, is at the root of much crime and anti-social behavior (not to mention many other social and health problems). And because if we don’t step back from our anger toward men who rape to consider what might be causing them to do it, we will never discover how to prevent them from doing it.
One might think that after years of carrying the burden of not knowing exactly what had happened, of shouldering the weight of baseless guilt and shame, H’s confession would have flooded me with relief. One might think I’d have been overcome with rightful anger toward H. I could let go of the unwarranted guilt and shame, liberated from the limbo of not knowing the provenance of the blurred memories that dogged me, and move forward, strengthened, vindicated, freed. Yet that’s not how it happened. I couldn’t handle this new information—that H had drugged and raped me—any better than I had handled the tortured state I’d subsisted in for several years. The idea that this man I thought I’d known, that I never would have dreamed was capable of such cold, calculated brutality, overloaded my circuits. I did what I’d always been taught to do in the face of disturbing events and uncomfortable emotions—I turned away, pretended it hadn’t happened, and sealed it away inside me to fester.
Within a year of H’s confession, my boyfriend and I got married and soon after moved a couple of hours’ drive away from our hometown to a small college town, where I studied for a master’s degree. After I graduated, we ended up staying there. I had buried H’s confession deeply, but that didn’t stop the memories of the rape—what I now know to be flashbacks—from eddying up into my consciousness without warning, as flashbacks do. When they did, I told myself they were recurring bad dreams, meaningless neural detritus to be blown off. The depths of my denial were about to be tested, and they were about to prove their mettle.
To be continued …
This Must Be Normal 