A Different Kind of Rape

My first love was from Texas. I fell deeply, crazily, unabashedly in love when I was seventeen, and even though it seems sort of insane to me now, I can't deny how very exciting that first love was. It was the classic sort of teenage love that made you do really stupid things, like lie to your parents, sulk around moodily when you had to be away from your enamored (which, in my case, was all the time, since he lived on a different continent), and make really foolish decisions. And though I now see that it would have been a real disaster had we ended up together, I can also recognize that I got a lot of positive things out of that relationship.

When I started having sex, and realized that my sexual persona was about "doing" things, not about "looking" a certain way, I embraced a [very crude and ill-defined] form of fat acceptance. Of course, it's a real stretch to say I was even fat at the time, but I certainly felt fat and got countless messages to the same tune. Several months after I'd "lost my virginity", I told my dad that I never wanted to hear any commentary about my weight from him again. In the intervening 9 years, he's mostly complied.

So there was that. There was also the intense creativity that came with my whirlwind romance. I wrote poetry, I read voraciously, I wrote songs, I made videos. The first year or two were a great time for my nascent self, sexual discovery, and developing a fierce sense of autonomy and defiance. And though there were a lot of other things that came later in the relationship that were really kind of awful, I still regard it as a net positive, and not something I regret. We dated for four years.

Last night, I attended the Yes Means Yes reading, where I got to (briefly) meet the lovely Jaclyn, and be in room with at least fifty other women who were all there, enraptured, ready to listen and talk. Half of the time I was there, sitting and thinking, where did these women come from? Where can I find them? How can I get to know them? So many interesting-looking people, old and young, butch and femme, queer and straight, trans and cisgender.

When I left, my mind was buzzing, and at night laying in bed with my boyfriend I must have rambled non-stop for forty-five minutes about all the things I was thinking about, the new concepts I'd been introduced to. In particular, I was sort of shocked at how common sexual assault was among this group. Every presenter, and many people who came up afterward and said "I was raped." People who knew people. And I was thinking that talking frankly about rape is such an important part of what happens in the feminist blogosphere, and even though we're a fairly prominent feminist blog, it's not a part of the set of personal experiences we talk about here. I don't know whether any of my fellow contributors have been through sexual assault, and I'm not challenging them to say so. But the fact that I consistently think of myself as someone who has not been sexually assaulted is a shining example of the way this discourse is extremely limited.

Because I have been raped.

Not in any of the ways that are part of the discourse. I did not endure a "stranger" rape. I have never been seriously attacked in public (although I've been groped upward of ten times). I have never endured "date rape." I have never been with someone who was so much older than me, or had such authority over me, that it called my ability for true consent into question. I was not a victim of incest. I have never been pressured into having sex when all I wanted to do was make out (although lord knows many tried when I was in high school).

Instead, my rape took the form of withholding and control. I will admit that I have not wanted to call it rape. I still do not want to call it rape, and am forcing myself to do so right now, and it is painful.

You see, a few years after me and my first love, from Texas, got together, the sex dropped off precipitously. My boyfriend was very attractive to me, and I was constantly horny. I wanted to have boring sex, kinky sex, and everything in between. But he withheld. He withheld sex and most forms of physical affection from me until it made me crazy. I don't know why he did it. But it became a constant form of negotiation, with me trying to get affection and sex, and him finding all kinds of reasons to decline. The nascent body-acceptance that I had formed before went off a cliff.

And then one night, after months of this, I awoke in the middle of the night to find him rubbing up against me with a hard-on. I was in that bizarre zone between wake and sleep, where everything seemed blurry and confused and it was difficult to identify reality. And before I could get out of that in-between zone, he was on top of me and penetrating me. I, of course, was not wet, having just been asleep, and not otherwise aroused. But this was what I wanted. I wanted sex and physical closeness so badly--how could I say no? Even in my diminished state, a "take-it-while-I-can-get-it" mentality took over, and I did not protest. I winced in a little pain. After he was done he kissed me and went back to sleep. I was left lying there, confused, upset. What about me? I was just starting to get aroused at the very end of the thing, and now, what was I supposed to do?

I went to the living room and cried my eyes out.

But it gets worse. This became a routine. For months and months, the only time we would ever have sex or be sexual was in the middle of the night, just like that. When I was asleep and groggy, quiet and undemanding. Sometimes it hurt, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes I would just go back to sleep. Sometimes I would cry. Sometimes I would get myself off quietly, and then cry.

I would try to initiate sex at other times, and I was almost always rebuffed. Sometimes I would be rebuffed at 10 pm, only to have him wake me up to fuck me four hours later when I was fast asleep.

How do I frame this kind of experience? How do I call this rape in a discourse where only violence, only strangeness, only force and unwillingness begets rape? There was no violence. It was someone I knew and loved, and wanted to have sex with so badly it hurt. But he had to find the only moments where I wasn't willing, where I wasn't wanting, and fuck me then. Withhold from me and put me in a position where I didn't want to say no. Where I felt I couldn't.

I don't know why he did it. I don't know if I was sexually intimidating or sexually demanding. I don't know if my enthusiastic consent wasn't a turn-on, but a turn-off.

It is extremely hard to tell this story publicly, but I think it is vital to expanding the dialogue about rape. Because I haven't heard a story like this before, and I'm not so self-absorbed to think that I must be the only one. But in a discourse dominated by "no means no," I don't know how a story like this can come out as a story about rape. Not to say that the "no means no" crowd would reject my story, say it's not rape, but that in such a discourse, someone like me would never think of it as rape. But when we move to a "yes means yes" discourse, our understanding is broadened. It's not that I refused that sex. I didn't refuse. I never said no. I never resisted. But my boyfriend chose to initiate sex with me at the only moments where I couldn't, and wouldn't, give enthusiastic consent. And in so doing deprived me of getting sexual pleasure out of our only sexual encounters, which were boring at best, painful at worst.

And that's rape.

As a side note, after five or six months of this, I came to him one day and told him I didn't want him to initiate sex with me in the middle of the night ever again, and that I didn't like it. He became upset, angry, moody, and silent. And refused to engage in sex with me or show me substantial physical affection for several months.

It felt like punishment, for speaking up.