Note: I am friendslocking this because I think my journal can be searched via google and I am not yet confident enough about this subject matter to want to broadcast it on the internet.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about rape and rapists. I am close with more than one woman who was raped and who still has to deal with the person who raped her socially. In at least one case this feels even more personal and difficult and it has prompted me to do a lot of thinking. Not too long ago linked to a discussion about rape that made me think. How many people know rapists and don’t even realize that they do? No really–look around your circle of friends, you probably know a rapist and you may or may not be able to figure out who it is. That got me thinking more about my own history of sexual assault. I’ve written about my early sexual assault experiences here in some detail but I’ve skipped the last few sexual assault experiences entirely. Why? I feel like part of the reason is because they were all less physically traumatizing so I minimize them in light of the rest of my history. I mean, if I can survive being brutally sodomized when I was like nine years old, what is a date rape here and there between friends? I say that sarcastically but that is basically how I have treated this subject. There is a part of me that believes that given how “minor” the sexual assault was–no physical damage–I need to just get over it. There is that fucking phrase again. “Just get over it.” Fuck that fucking phrase with a fucking chainsaw. (Can you tell I like stream of consciousness writing?) There is another part of the issue that plays a much bigger part I have realized recently. All of the recent assaults touch other people in my life in some way or another. Two of them are still friends with people I am friends with. If I talk about the assaults I will name them. Naming them creates a situation where people might say, “Oh I don’t believe that ‘x’ did that to you”. How fucking awful is that. I have counseled dear friends to publicly name their attackers because otherwise the bastards get to continue to have squeaky clean reputations and when someone eventually says they are a rapist it will be harder to believe–if there is a history of it, maybe something will actually be done about it. But that means I have to put myself out there and make me vulnerable to disbelief and maybe even to losing friends. That is scary. Hey wait! I’m a counter-phobic six! It’s scary! Here I go.

Cut for length.
I don’t know how to begin this so I guess I just will. How about chronologically? Does that work? Sure. When I was a sophomore in high school, so I guess I was 15, I went on a “date” sort of a date, sort of just hanging out with someone who spent a lot of time with my social group. Mostly this means he knew one particular girl I knew and spent time at her house. So we went to his house and I told him from the very beginning that I wasn’t interested in having sex. He said that wasn’t a big deal because I was way too young anyway (he was over 20, but I can’t remember how much older). We hung out for a bit and then he started wanting to make out. I told him that making out was ok but I really didn’t want to have sex. He said that was cool. He started to pull my underwear out from under my skirt and I repeated that I didn’t want to have sex–he said he wouldn’t, he just wanted to touch me. Of course he fucked me. I lay there and cried chanting “no no no no no no” but I didn’t physically protest. His name is Derek White. I don’t know for sure if he is still hanging out with the mutual friend I met him through but I wouldn’t be surprised.

At the end of the same school year I went to a party on the last day of school. There were a bunch of people from my social group. There was a bunch of drinking and silly/stupid sex-oriented games that didn’t really go anywhere but which were highly titillating to a bunch of 15/16 year olds. There was an incident at the party with a girl getting alcohol poisoning under very suspicious circumstances, but that only barely touches my story. The host of the party was found with her and he claims that he had no idea where she got the alcohol or why she drank so much. The parents of the host rushed her to the ER and she nearly died. The parents didn’t shut down the rest of the party which I believe shows a disgusting lack of judgment on their part. Later on after everyone was falling asleep on the floor all over the house the host came over to me and tried to have sex with me. I protested and tried to physically fight him off but I wasn’t strong enough. Luckily his buddy pulled him off of me and took him to another room. My almost rapist’s name is Justin Greenwood. Many of my high school friends spend a lot of time with him still. He teaches middle school. The fact that he teaches middle school sits in the back of my mind as one more reason I don’t want my children going to public school–who the fuck knows what kind of people are allowed to teach there. Oh wait, I know. And I don’t want them near my kids.

The last event is one of the sexual assaults I feel the most shame about. There are layers upon layers of shame over this and it’s still incredibly hard for me to talk about. I was 18. My friend Anna was housesitting for a rich family up in the mountains. We were stupid teenagers and we invited a few people over for a party. We raided the alcohol storage of the house because they were hella rich people and had more alcohol than BevMo. I invited someone I had been flirting with on the internet. I didn’t really know him. He spiked my drink. I don’t remember anything from the night past the first shot of tequila. Anna said I had three shots over the course of the night. She knows we went back to the bedroom. The next day I found several condoms in the garbage but I knew I hadn’t wanted to have sex with this guy yet. I spent the whole next day puking my guts out in a porta-potty at SF Pride because I was scheduled to work a booth. It was a miserable experience. I tried to press charges this time. I decided that I was done being victimized. The sheriff assigned to my case was a complete piece of shit. He told me that I got what I deserved for inviting a guy I didn’t know to a party like that. He told me that the guy in question was an upstanding member of the Coast Guard and charges like this would ruin the rest of his life and I had no right to do that. There was more shaming and he basically ranted at me for a while about how awful I was and it was all my fault and at the end he asked me again if I wanted to press charges. I told him no and spent days crying. He took the sheets as evidence anyway. I’ve always thought that was a bit weird. Taking the sheets meant that Anna and I had to tell the people she was housesitting for. They were of course furious with her. She lost a lot of money over this event. It didn’t help that earlier in the weekend I had gone skinny dipping and flirted with a guy painting the house. The skinny dipping/flirting was witnessed by their gardeners who told them all about it. The house painter guy covered his own ass and made it sound way way worse than it was and acted like I had been absolutely disgusting. So the family was even more angry with me. I felt like I was just about the most horrible, awful, disgusting whore ever born. Years later I saw this family on the freeway (their license plate is their last name) and I pulled off the next exit and almost vomited out of stress/anxiety. Unfortunately/fortunately I don’t remember this guys name. I didn’t really know him.

And the last sexual assault that has happened to me happened within the last five years. It was with someone that would surprise people. And I just can’t talk about it yet. Maybe in five or ten years.