On prior pages, I've related that I'm a survivor of alcoholism and emotional abuse; I'm also a survivor of sexual abuse.
My first significant sexual perpetrators were two boys in middle school. One of them rode my bus, and the other one was in my gym class. Beginning when I was 12 years old, they both confronted me daily with an onslaught of lewd comments, leers, threats of rape and molestation, and an assortment of sexual insults. It was terrifying. I reported their behavior to my parents, who gave me all kinds of advice on how to deal with it: ignore them, tell them to stop, ask them why they're bothering me, try to make friends. It worked, with the boy in gym class -- I told him how much his actions bothered me, and he must have had some streak of decency in him, because he stopped, and we were on civil terms for the rest of the semester.
But it didn't work for the boy on the bus. It didn't matter what I tried, he would find me no matter where I was sitting or who I was with, and do the same thing every single day. I could be right by the bus driver, or crowded into a group of friends; it was still the same. He talked about my body, what he thought I'd be like in bed, he insulted me for being a slut or frigid or any of a number of sexual slurs, and it never stopped. It didn't stop until finally, my parents called the school, and the kid was hauled before the administration and told to leave me the hell alone or else.
He sort of did. He stopped with the sexual comments, but he complained that I'd told. Eventually, I had to move to a different bus in order to escape him. But, to their credit, both my family and my school were willing to do something about it.
That was my first experience with sexual harrassment. For those of you who don't believe it can happen in schools, open up your eyes and turn on your brain. It happens all the time.
Other, less significant (but still frightening) experiences include inadvertently taking obscene phone calls as a child, and being flashed by strangers. (The latter I handled very well, by getting myself and a younger child the hell away from the asshole.) More significant experiences were the sexual abuses I received at the hands of two of my boyfriends.
I've mentioned Ken's emotional abuse on other pages. Coupled with it was an ever-escalating sexual abuse cycle as well. My conclusion that he had been sexually abusing me comes from the realization that our level of sexual intimacy increased in proportion to how abusive Ken was being towards me: the more abuse there was, the more intimate we became. Essentially, Ken turned sex into a reward for good behavior, neatly incorporated into the full cycle of abuse/withdrawal/forgiveness/reward. When it all began, I was not really looking for sex. I was looking for love and nurturance, and I had some very fairytale-like ideas about love, romance, and relationships. I was a sexual being like anyone else, at a similar sexual development stage to the rest of my peers. But in my mind, I wasn't after sex per se. And when it all began, the relationship wasn't terribly sexual. I was only 14, after all, and it just wasn't really a goal.
As time passed, the abuse cycle became less and less subtle, and more and more frequent. We lapsed into a predictable pattern. First, something would set Ken off, and he'd launch into an emotional assault of some kind. Second, I'd wrack my brain trying to figure out what I'd done, and he'd withdraw. Third, I'd throw together some kind of apology from whatever I could come up with (no matter how unreasonable -- I just wanted it to stop), and apologize to him; and eventually he'd forgive me. Finally, he'd reward me with sex. The more abuse there was, the more withdrawn he'd become, and the more desperate I was for some kind of forgiveness and contact, and the more sex he'd give me as my reward. It all increased with time.
If it had been the sort of situation where we'd both just been sexual with each other when we mutually agreed to, and it had increased that way, I might have called it premature, but not abusive. However, the way sex was worked into the whole picture is why I think of it as I do.
The gradual usurpation of my sex life is what I find abusive, as well as the incorporation of sex and pleasure into his system of abuse, punishment, and reward. I believe with all my heart that he knew I needed affection, and that he decided to use that need to meet his own sexual desires. I did not have any choice in the matter. I was not sexual with him because I cared about him and wanted to share my body with him, I was sexual with him because he had taught me that sex was the only way to get any love from anyone. I will not say that it didn't feel pleasurable; I am just as much a sexual being as any other human might be. But I will definitely say that he did not have my full, informed consent, not ever. I was not capable of giving it.
Consequently, the messages I received about sex were devastating. He taught me that love was sex, that only "bad" girls got sex, that sex was a commodity to be rewarded for good behavior, that sex was a secret. He taught me that I did not own my sexuality. He taught me that sex was the only thing I was good for. And when he finally dumped me for someone else (a week after Valentine's Day, natch), he taught me that even my body had not been good enough to keep him.
I stumbled out of the relationship with Ken, and immediately rebounded with a guy who was also sexually abusive. He began by groping me against my will within minutes of our getting together; and ended by raping me. His tactic was persistence. He would push his hands all over my body, giggle when I removed them, and then fondle me again. When I tried to cover private places on my body with my hands or my clothing, he would push whatever was blocking him out of the way, again and again. He would bring hardcore European pornography over to my house and try to make me read it, despite my telling him repeatedly that I didn't want him to. It didn't matter how many times I told him to stop, he never did -- and eventually I found myself flat on my back in my parents' basement, being raped by this guy. I was not pleased.
But even worse than the attack itself was the treatment I received when I tried to tell my family what was going on. "I had sex with J---s" I said, "but I didn't really want to do it." If I had known what rape was, I might well have called it that. But I didn't. I didn't really know what rape was. Rape was the kind of thing that happened to girls who dared to walk home alone at night. Rape happened in back alleys and dark corners, behind a bush in the park. Rape was something strangers did to you. Rape was something that you could prevent if you tried hard enough, by being in the right place, wearing the right clothes, acting "sensibly" and not leading people on. That was what I had been taught about rape. So when I was asked if I had been raped, I didn't know how to answer. The experience fit none of the criteria I had learned so far. "I don't think so..." was my reply.
I don't know why my family didn't pick up on those couple of clues and get me some help. Perhaps they had the same ideas about rape as I did. Instead, they assumed I was responsible. They immediately put me under house arrest, called the boy's mother and told her what was going on. They treated me like I was a criminal. They restricted my activities, my movements, and my phone time. They even went through my trash and pieced together letters I'd written to my boyfriend and later torn up. I had no privacy. They believed I had been having sex, and they wanted it to stop.
Every time I've spoken about it with my family since then, they seem to regard their actions as being the right thing to do, even though they now know that I was in fact raped. I can say that it was absolutely the wrong thing, because it didn't meet my needs in the least little way. I was shamed, humiliated, and treated like I had committed the gravest offense. I was not allowed to feel angry at their actions, and was told that I deserved whatever I was getting. The deed was considered to be my fault; and it was a given that I should feel the consequences of my actions. Rather than being heard and understood, I was pilloried and debased. I was, in a sense, raped twice: once by the boy, and once by the people who were supposed to help me. Oddly enough, my family wasn't especially cruel about it -- they treated me kindly but firmly, and didn't become furiously enraged. They spoke to me very gently, they just didn't believe me. Nor did they recognize that my actions were a symptom of a family problem, instead of an individual problem.
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