Six years ago, a man broke into my house in Nicaragua while
I was sleeping and I woke up to feel his hand on me knee. I held my breath as I
tried to convince myself that the presence I felt in the darkness wasn’t really
there. There was a struggle, a hand over my face, and then he was gone. For
months, the slightest sound at night would wake me up, and I found it hardest
to sleep when I was home alone.
The worst of it though, was that I just knew deep down that
somehow it was my fault. I’m a feminist, have never shied away from the term. I
hated slut shaming long before culture gave me a term for the feeling. I knew that victim blaming is repugnant, but
I became my own persecutor.
Earlier that night, there was a fiesta, and my friend Norlan had walked me home, and I’d invited him inside for something to drink. We’d left the doors to my house open so no one would think anything was happening inside. I was trying to respect the cultural mores of Nicaragua, but maybe that had given someone the idea that I was easy anyway?
I had found my clothes on the floor of my kitchen and shrugged, thinking they had fallen off the door to my outdoor shower. It didn’t even occurred to me that they had been knocked down by someone who had already tried once that evening to get inside my house but had been thwarted by the bar on the door. (When they’d returned, they’d brought a stick to lift the bar.) Maybe I could have been more vigilant.
I always slept in the dark, but that night I’d left the light of my fan on. Maybe if he hadn’t been able to see me, he would have come in, stolen my wallet, and left.
It was so hot that night that I was wearing a new nightgown I’d gotten in Masaya, an orange cotton so thin that it was translucent. Perhaps if I hadn’t been wearing something so revealing, he wouldn’t have been tempted.
I remember the hand on my face was soft, just a boy’s, and
trying to justify why he would have felt like it was okay to do what he did.
Surely I must have lured him in some way.
The list of things I could have done became a litany that I used to
punish myself, but also to comfort myself. If I could figure out what I’d done,
maybe next time I could do better. Next time I could protect myself better. It
took years to convince myself that that voice was a lie, and even now when I’m
down, that voice is there. Part of me will always believe that I could have
done something to prevent what happened.
Last Saturday night I told the “hilarious” story of that one
time I got roofied by sailors in New York City. It’s hilarious because I choose
to tell it that way and my friends took care of me and I was safe when I woke
up in a strange bathtub without my underwear. All’s well that ends well, right?
I choose to tell it that way because it lets me distance myself from how it
really makes me feel: vulnerable, scared, foolish, complicit.
I think the worst thing about rape culture isn’t that it
makes it easier for men to assault women, although it does, but that it teaches
women that it is our fault. That we deserve whatever happens to us. That we
could have prevented it, and by not preventing it, we are responsible. We have no one to blame but ourselves. It tries to rob us of our ability to
emotionally defend ourselves, to self-advocate.
To do so requires that we admit that something terrible has happened to
us, but also to admit that we are human – that we make mistakes, that we trust
people we should not, that we drink too much, that sometimes we want sex and
sometimes we don’t. It is tempting to believe that this is always about
admitting we are female, but that would not explain the same attitude being
applied to other victims of sexual assault, and it surely is. I think the real shame we are expected to
feel is about admitting that we were vulnerable. That we could not control
every aspect of a situation. It is the greatest shame in our society to be weak
when someone else is strong. In the strategic game of “Please don’t rape me,”
we picked the wrong move, gave someone else the upper hand. We lost and they
won, fair and square. Take your shame
and go home. Do better next time.
There isn’t a single person I know who has survived a sexual
assault (a staggering number) that didn’t blame themselves at least once. We’ve learned our lessons well.
Recently, something really terrible happened to me. I refer
to it as “something terrible” because I’m not sure there’s any version of it
that could be called assault. It was consensual but dishonest, and that
dishonesty came to light at the moment when I was most vulnerable in a truly
awful way. The incident has left me shaken, distrustful of my own instincts, feeling
utterly unloveable. After it happened, he cried about his inability to control
his emotions, and I comforted him. In that moment, the cascade of horrible
feelings I was experiencing seemed less important than this other human’s
visible pain. With his tears dried and the blankets pulled between us, I asked
him to leave, and he did. I went to sleep castigating myself for inviting that
person into my life. I did this to myself.
I’m trying to talk myself out of that, but it really is
hard. Because if you believe that you deserve it when someone sexually assaults
you, it’s easy to believe that you deserve all the other things too. That you deserve to have people lie to you.
That you deserve to be treated badly. That you deserve whatever crap happens as
a result of some other person just doing the best they think they can do. If
you’re responsible for your own sexual assault, how can other people ever be
responsible for anything?
The same old narrative started up again, the one that says I
didn’t protect myself enough, that I have to do better next time. Not knowing
how to do better, there’s a kind of repugnance for the whole process, for the
concepts of vulnerability and trust. For now, it’s a nice cocoon to hide out
in, but it scares me that this might be a place I stay for a while. I’d like to
think there are other things to be learned from this, but I can’t figure out
right now what they might be. I need an alternative narrative, to find a voice
that’s louder than the one society taught me.
I think that’s part of why I’m telling the internet this, to
say, whether I believe it all the time or not, that I don’t deserve this crap.
That I’m not ashamed because I didn’t do anything wrong. That in those moments
I was vulnerable, and at some point in the future, I will have to choose to be
so again, and when that happens, I don’t want to be afraid of it because
vulnerability and weakness are not always the same and those that make it so
are the ones in the wrong, not me. It’s a start anyway.
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