Meet the Other Phone. Protection built in.

Meet the Other Phone.
Protection built in.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Rape? I just don't know, long sorry

53 replies

Treelined · 22/07/2011 19:52

Hoping someone can get my thoughts together and help me.

A long time ago when I was 16 and a virgin, I saw a man at my place of work who I found very attractive. I bumped into him at a pub weeks later and this is what I need help with.

All I remember (I was very very drunk) is him talking to me and saying 'lets go outside'. We ended up about 5 minutes walk away, behind an industrial unit. I didn't know of its existence before this night. I remember lying down and feeling him doing something 'down there' and pain, but thats about it. Most of this I have remembered in flashback since. I got back to the pub somehow but don't remember how. The next morning the whole thing was a blur.

We bumped into each other at work again some days later and he asked me out on a date. We were supposed to go shopping. He drove round and round for ages then stopped in a deserted car park in a rural area. He started kissing me but I said 'come on lets go shopping' so he drove round again. We ended up at the same place and he said it was too late for the shops (it was mid afternoon Hmm ). Anyway, he got on top of me and I said I didnt want to (mainly because we were in a car in broad daylight and I was a virgin (or so I thought)). He ignored this and although used no force just carried on. I didn't know where I was, had no way of getting home and just sort of lay there while he got on with it.

He was 23 and I was 16. He knew I was 16 because of the job I did at the time. He told me straight after that he had a girlfriend who was pregnant with twins (this was true I found out later).

I sat there and made sarcastic remarks about buying baby clothes. I didn't shout scream or yell. He drove me home.

Can any of you help me make sense of this? As a very inexperienced 16 year old I didn't realise for a long while after that he'd probably had sex with me on that first night when I was too drunk to know what the hell was going on. Maybe this explains why he acted how he did in the car, because he thought/knew we'd already had sex?

Why did I act so weirdly? I didn't tell anyone or cry. I did however, go on to sleep with 10 men that year. I felt it was going to happen anyway so I may as well lie there and let it. I'm very ashamed.

I did tell someone recently but they said 'Oh I thought you meant you'd been properly raped, you know by a stranger with a knife or something'. Was I raped? I have no bloody idea.

OP posts:
SpringchickenGoldBrass · 25/07/2011 13:30

I was just about to link to that blog as well, it's very good indeed as an explanation of how these rapes happen.
The thing is that this minority of arseholes (and NOT all men, by a very long way, want to have sex on the bodies of women who are not interested) do it again and again and again. It's a massive sense of entitlement that drives them - they want to stick their dicks in a woman so they are going to do so, no matter what, because that's what women are for. THese rapists are calculaing; it's not that they got a bit pissed and didn't read the signals, they will always have set up the situation, perhaps bought the woman more drinks than she wanted, or lied to her in order to get her to step away from her friends or go in to a room it would be difficult to get out of.
HOrrible shitbags, they all are. It wasn't your fault if one of them targeted you.

Quodlibet · 26/07/2011 21:22

Really terribly sorry and angry to hear of the experiences of women on this thread. I was looking for that blog post that buzzsore linked to, it explains things extremely well for me.

There's another really interesting blog post (male author, someone on here linked to it ages ago?) denouncing men who commit sexual violence and looking at studies which show that as SCGB said, the majority of sex crime is committed by a few calculating individuals who repeat the behaviour again and again and get away with it again and again. He makes a very strong argument that other men have a huge responsibility to listen out for when these men admit their disgusting attitudes (because they do), call them on it and publicly denounce their behaviour.

I feel like young people need much, much, much more explicit teaching and direction on sexual consent/boundaries too to help combat the ingrained submissive/deferent female behaviour that the blog post talks about.

hellymelly · 26/07/2011 21:34

I have a close friend who was in a similar situation.She certainly feels she was raped and so do I.She also froze up and "let him get on with it",and I think that is suprisingly common.The only rape most of us see is acted out in films or on tv,how can we know how we would behave in other situations unless we are in them?
I am also wondering if he might have spiked your drink the first time?

New posts on this thread. Refresh page