I was ‘date-raped’ in my early 20s and totally recognise the ‘freeze’ reaction described above. I had learned that as a child. It was more than freezing actually, it’s like an instinctive detachment.
I know that feeling too. I was a victim of child abuse and was gang-raped at fifteen (the age at which I was raped twice; it was only about 3 years ago following EMDR therapy that I recognised the second incident was indeed rape). I speak about this openly, and have done in the past under the same Mumsnet handle.
As a child abuse victim my brain was already trained to shut itself down in this way. At that age there was nothing I could do to escape my abuser: it wasn't until adulthood that I even recognised him as an abuser. To you, your life is 'normal', until you seek therapy and one or two therapists/assessors have been so horrified they ended up in tears. And that wasn't I have to say the kind of detached professional response I was looking for.
My 'freeze' response was so well-perfected that I can't remember the full details of the gang rape. A semi-competent barrister would have made mincemeat of me in court. All I can clearly remember was feeling my breathing half-obscured and hyperventilating, and I can very clearly see in my mind's eye the exact colour and pattern of the carpet in the house where it happened. Of course, that now makes sense. I'd focused on the nearest thing I could see and my mind has blanked out the rest.
I've been treated for cPTSD and it's turned my life around. I can now spot danger signals, whereas before, I couldn't read these at all. Again completely natural: you can't live in a state of 'fight or flight' all the time when you live with an abuser, so your mind switches them off.
My 'spidey senses', as I've sometimes heard them called, have come out with a vengeance. I'm in my forties, and have never possessed such a thing before. That's an eye-opener. Which is how I know some creepy, sweating perve was filming me on his phone on public transport as recently as last week. I'd picked up on other signals, and am fairly sure he was doing this. I got the hell away from him PDQ, and would have texted the transport police had he followed me.
Women know when men are doing this stuff. We need to question the behaviour of men before we question what our gut tells us.
It's extremely unhelpful for women in this position, who have gone through life having been abused multiple times by men, to hear the refrain of 'not all men are like that'.
No, they're not. But enough of them are that the statistics of women killed and abused at the hands of men are disproportionate, therefore preserving our own safety has to be paramount. The bad ones are not branded on their foreheads with the divine stigma. Unfortunately, it's safer to trust no one.