I know this is probably very dark for Mumsnet and not sure if this is the right subforum, but I really want to write all this down as I don’t feel ready to talk to anyone in real life about this. Even if nobody replies, just writing this and knowing that other women might read it will hopefully help me a bit.
I have been raped twice in my life. The first time, I was nineteen. It was the summer between the first and second years of university and my friend and I had met up for drinks in a bar in South London. My friend (L) and I had not met since being back in London from university, where we had met, so I was excited to see her. A couple of hours later, sitting in a booth the bar, two men sat down beside us. They were in their mid to late thirties. I can’t remember what the one who sat next to L looked like at all, only the face of the one that sat next to me, although not distinctly. I remember thinking: he looks like Example, and to this day when I think of this man I think of Example, although with dyed red hair. The men bought us drinks. I can’t remember much else after that, only flashes - a vague memory of getting into a taxi, and then waking up in a treehouse in the garden of somebody’s huge and beautiful house in South West London, with the Example lookalike having sex with me. I had absolutely no memory of getting into the treehouse, had no clue where my friend was. I remember being freezing cold and not being able to stay awake, and I sort of fell in and out of sleep for a bit with this man still on top of me. My overwhelming feeling was not: what the fuck is he doing. It was: I haven’t shaved. I look like a cavewoman ‘down there’, what will he think? When I woke up again he was asleep next to me in this treehouse. I tried to climb down the ladder to find A but felt very fuggy and fell to ground. I had cuts and bruises all down my arms and a deep graze as though being pushed violently against the bark of a tree, although I had no distinct memory of that happening. I also had a distinct sense that he had had anal sex with me (I had not been aware of this ‘during’ as was too out of it, nor had I ever had anal sex before so didn’t know if it was definitely that, but I could just feel it.) There was a sort of outbuilding under the treehouse with a bed in it. L was lying in there with the other man. He was asleep, she was awake. We both held hand and left in a daze of disbelief, somehow found our way back to the train station and back to L’s house. Her mum answered the door and we told her we had stayed at a friend’s house. Too ashamed to say anything else, too dazed, too “hungover” to want to deal with any of it. My dress was on back to front and I was covered in bruises, but we went up to L’s bedroom and slept for most of the day. I realised what had happened was wrong but I didn’t want to use the word rape. It felt dramatic and I did not think I felt traumatised enough to use that word. I felt numb to it, because I considered myself to be the sort of person who this sort of thing happened to. So what if my drink was spiked? I’d probably have passed out anyway. I’m alive, no real harm done. I had spent my time at university so far drinking too much and having meaningless sexual encounters, and I thought, what’s one more man? This is just the sort of shit that happens when you drink too much and start talking to weird men in bars. Afterwards, we made ‘jokes’ about it: jokes about being like Tarzan and Jane, shagging people in trees. We laughed at our narrative of the night, in which we were wild girls, big drinkers. Better than shame, certainly better than feeling victimised. Never once did we use the word ‘rape.’ Only now do I feel deep compassion for my nineteen year old self and wonder at how I could have thought a man in his thirties having sex with an unconscious teenager was anything other than disgusting and wrong.
The second time I was raped was very different and I have never, ever told anybody about this. It filled me with the deepest shame and self-loathing because I blamed myself entirely for it: for a long time, I didn’t even acknowledge to myself that I was raped. You cheated, I thought. This time, the man was not a decade older than me, or a man I didn’t know. I was not drunk, unconscious, physically incapable of saying no. I only resisted by frowning, by looking down, saying ‘I can’t…’ in a pathetic, weak voice. My resistance felt in hindsight like an invitation (I thought, perhaps I had a coy look in my eyes? I didn’t bare my teeth like a rabid dog and shout FUCK OFF, after all.) It is only recently that I have thought: there is no way he could have taken that for consent. Seriously, no way. But for years, when I have thought about this day (rarely), I imagined the critical voices of an imagined jury: you went up to his bedroom. You’re not that naive, you must have known what he wanted. As if you have been raped ‘twice’ now- yeah right, you’re just a slut, stop making excuses. I was twenty this time. I had just got into a relationship with a really lovely man. It was the holidays, again, and I was back in London. The boy I met up with was twenty too, a friend from my teenage years who I hadn’t seen in about two years. I had never kissed him, there had never been a shred of teenage romance between us, so I didn’t think there was anything wrong or untoward with meeting this boy at his home. It was a hot day, and we were sitting in his garden, with his mum, and a couple who were lodging there, and it all felt very civilised. His mum was talking to me about university (she had gone to the same one as me), I was talking about having just met someone I really liked. The boy was talking about music. Sex was the last thing on my mind when he asked me to go upstairs to his bedroom as he wanted to smoke and didn’t want to do so in front of his mum. When we got up there, we sat down on his bed. But he didn’t smoke (of course). Instead, he pushed me down onto the bed. Not violently pushed - more like, firmly maneuvered, as if we both knew what was coming and he was just getting the ball rolling. What are you doing, I asked. I asked it politely, confusedly, perhaps with a vague ‘errr…’ sort of face. Don’t offend him was the main thing on my mind, which seems absolutely alien to me now. He didn’t answer, just said ‘shhh.’ And then I completely disassociated. I couldn’t even feel fear, just a complete sense of detachment. I stared at his ceiling and thought, I don’t want this. This is disgusting. Again, numbness. I had never had a smear test then but I have since and it was like that - you focus on a point on the ceiling to try consciously and zone out of it. He climbed off me after a few seconds and said ‘I’ve finished’. We went back downstairs and shortly after I left. On my way home I thought: never think of this again. Never mention it again. What sort of girl lets someone have sex with them with such feeble resistance, especially when they have a boyfriend? When I got home, my sister asked me how the boy was. Was he at uni, had he changed at all? No, no. He was fine. Change the subject. I thought: that never happened. It never happened. Later on that day, the boy text me to ask me if I had got home okay. No mention whatsoever of any of it, and instead of thinking ‘he’s pretending it was consensual, casual sex to try and make me question my own sanity’ I thought, ‘he can’t even have been aware that I didn’t to have sex, otherwise why would he text me like it was all fine?’ I blocked his number, block him from all forms of social media, block him and the whole day entirely from my mind.
For a very long time, I buried the memory, but when it did flash up, I thought - you have absolutely no right to use the word rape this time. The thing in the treehouse was rape. This was all you. You went voluntarily to his house. You went voluntarily up the stairs with him. Shame, shame, shame. I felt such shame and disgust at this memory that I have never (until very recently) allowed myself to properly process it, I was so desperate to scourge the memory of it from my mind. For so long, I thought: how is this anything other than your fault? You didn’t say stop, not forcefully anyway. You said ‘I can’t’ and maybe that is actually quite a ‘come hither’ thing to say? He couldn’t have really hurt you, his mum was downstairs in the garden. You only frowned, zoned out. What sort of person just ‘zones out’? Could I kill someone and later claim it wasn’t me, I had ‘zoned out’ and avoid all complicity? No. There is something about you that is seriously troubled - this would not have happened to anyone else.
I am now trying to have compassion for my younger selves, and actually for my current self. I have internalised so much bloody shame and guilt, the sense of being underneath it all nothing but a ‘slag’. That everything good I have done in my life since is all a ruse, because underneath it all is a girl who let stuff like that happen, who had no sense of personal boundaries or self respect. I feel in my darkest moments unworthy of the man I am with, who is kind and decent and knows nothing about all this. I am trying really hard to think, WHY do you feel guilty because the first time, you were literally OUT OF IT, physically pinned down, a literal teenager. The man was in his thirties, I can’t imagine any normal man I know now that I am closer to 30 myself doing this with a teenage girl no matter how drunk?? The second time, how can a boy have interpreted a girl saying ‘I can’t…’ but nevertheless getting on top of her as she lays there in silence holding her breath until he disgustingly announces ‘I’ve finished’ as possibly being consensual??
Anyone else out there?