To say it aloud

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.

A memory

Setting: High School

His name was Robbie. The diminutive only made him seem casual, instead of young. He was not child-like, which (come to think of it) might have been part of the attraction. The corruption of innocents came later. He rode the bus home with me, just three stops from the last one, which was mine. I was always at the end of bus routes, it seemed.

He swaggered, and smoked, and had slightly unkempt hair he was forever pushing out of his eyes. We had nothing in common. Yet somehow, I conceived a lust for him. Perhaps is the was the classic air of the bad boy from an earlier day; a greaser, almost, with his muscle shirt, decidedly working class family, slick hair, and pounding music. He sat with his legs spread, and the outline of his cock would brush against the fabric. And I lusted after him.

I had a boyfriend, and had been having sex for almost a year. I wanted all the time, obsessively. I lusted after Robbie. I flirted with Robbie. Some days he would flirt back, and some days... nothing. Which might have been part of the fascination. I found adoration boring. But I wanted to be wanted.

I invited him over, while my mother was at work. He brought over a Metallica CD, played "no leaf clover". We kissed. He tasted of cigarettes, the cranberry juice I had offered, and sweat. Bitter. He touched me for a while, and then I sent him home. Three hours of late night phone calls later, and nothing was said about that night again.

I thought of Robbie today, a song on the radio sending me back to high school. I wonder where he is, what he is doing. But not enough to try to find out. The taste was bitter, and I didn't want more of it.