Trigger warning: this post discusses non-consensual sex, specifically rape.
I was reading about the Clothesline project over on Scheherazade in Blue Jeans, and remembering when I lived in the college dorms and walked past the line every day.
I didn't want to acknowledge it. To look at the installation would be to admit that I had been raped. But this is not about that. This is about the boy I knew in high school who was raped.
He told me one day, about how he was at a party, and drunk. And when he woke up, he was tied to a bed, where two girls refused to let him go, and had sex with him. I wonder, sometimes, if that was why he cultivated the persona of a "player", used drugs, had trust issues... maybe.
But what I was thinking about today was how his story was the mirror image of the one I knew, and how I have never heard another case of a man being raped by a woman. I'm sure it happens... but do they tell anyone?
Who could they tell? How would that fit with the ideas of masculinity as strength, as sexually adventurous, as sexually indiscriminate? Who would they tell?
It's not really my story, but I felt the need to say something about his story, which he may, or may not have ever told again.
1 comment:
Wow. That's so powerful for a boy to admit. I cannot imagine how hard that must have been for him--for anyone really--to admit.
Beautiful, aching post.
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