Another Post About Rape Pt 2
This experience also clicked something else into place in my head.
I’ve told a fair amount of people about my rape. People I trust very much, people I know very well, and people I am not so sure about. And, of course, through this blog, I’ve told just about the whole world. I have gotten experienced in the Reaction to The Rape Victim, and pretty good at reading who’s going to react how. This isn’t some awesome skill I picked up because I am so cool; it’s a life survival skill that just showed up after being burned pretty fucking bad by some solidly vile people.
I like lists, so here you go:
Reaction to The Rape Victim Types:
- I Don’t Believe You: may be accompanied by various excuses, such as “he would never,” “you’re just bitter,” “if it was really rape, you would have called the police.” Hi, Gregory! Also, fuck you, Gregory! Not a calm type, the I Don’t Believe You will tend to approach you with a disproportionate degree of self-righteous anger, though it may be couched in thinly veiled and condescending psychological help, i.e. “I’m telling you this for your own good.” Additionally, hi, Gregory! ad nauseum.
- I Don’t Believe You But Am Too Fucking Gutless To Say So Because I Know That’ll Make Me Seem Like A Bad Person and I’m Really Not I Just Don’t Think You Got Raped: AKA “I’m not going to take sides.” Early indicators of this type are: mechanical reaction of sympathy to being told about your rape, still hanging out with your rapist, saying positive things about your rapist to you, a la “he’s a good guy, at heart,” and “he’s really changed.” Frequent admonitions that you should really “calm down” or “get over it.” Can be the most obsequious of the types. “I can’t possibly understand what you’re going through, but (I don’t care and shut the fuck up about it) maybe it’s time to move on?”
- I Believe That You Were Raped But I Don’t Think It Was Really A Bad Rape, Like Not A Rape Rape Or Anything: I was going to make this a variant of Type 2. But people in Type 3 really believe this. They do believe you were raped. They cannot deny — you said no to sex and sex still happened — and that was rape. But they can’t reconcile that with everything else they want to know and believe, such as: “If only you hadn’t been wearing,” “Why didn’t you fight,” “Nobody I know could have done that,” “I don’t want to live in a world where I could be raped at any moment.” I am somewhat more sympathetic to these types, because honestly, a lot of rape victims themselves end up here, at least for a time. Doesn’t mean I am friends with this type, though — they are crazymaking with their wishy-washy minimizing enforced naivety bullshit, right when you need a goddamn ally most.
- I Believe That You Were Raped But Am Completely Unable and Unwilling to Offer You Any Support Or Understanding: Yeah, it happens. Sometimes it’s the most perplexing. You can see their real belief in their eyes, hear it in their voice. And you’re like, finally! Somebody who is going to stand by me here! And then they disappear completely, off the face of the fucking earth, like there is no room for talking about video games or chit chat now that you have TEH RAPE. Or they respond with non-responses: aggro and peacockish “I’m going to kill him,” instead of talking to you about how you feel, or even how they feel, which I would really like to hear more of. Or they live separate and conflicting lives, like a saddlebacker: as your friend, they believe you, they support you, they are there for you. When you are not around, they are chatting with your rapist because it is kind of too awkward to not chat, somehow, in their world. Most of my friends I lost, I lost this way.
- I Believe You: Rare and wonderful. And your instincts are usually pretty dead-on about who this is going to be. This is a hard type to be, because, in my opinion, you get to experience the secondary effects of being a rape victim. Denial (“this can’t have happened”) coupled with guilt (“how can I pretend it didn’t happen? I know what happened. What if I could have stopped it, though?”) coupled with anger coupled with cynicism (“how can this be the world I live in?”) coupled with impotence coupled with fear coupled with sadness. And, too, people who believe you face many of the social choices you do: when they tell somebody that their friend was raped, they will quickly start to learn the “types,” and have to make their own decisions about what friendships to keep. That’s kind of what being an ally is: being willing to experience your suffering, even though they had the option not to.
I bring up all these types because I want to tell a story about my best friend Badger, who is type 5. She was one of the last people I told, mostly because I didn’t want to tell her over the phone, and I see her very rarely. Even knowing she was my bestest friend in all the world, I was still nervous, and told her in this sort of disaffected, “oh by the way” kind of way. Her eyes widened in horror and she cut me off, saying, “Harriet! That’s horrible! That’s fucking horrible! Oh my god, I’m so sorry!”
I went on to explain it the way I explained it to everybody: the rape itself wasn’t “that bad,” but only because my entire relationship with Flint was that bad — the rape was consistent with how my husband treated me overall. And that it wasn’t like what you think of as “rape” — there was no fighting or yelling or big dramatic “no means no.” But I barely got through the spiel before she was cutting me off in her own overwhelming sense of horror. “Harriet, you got raped! Oh my god! That’s just the worst thing… I’m so sorry!”
I talked to her about how, really, it was the same sex we’d always had, except this time I said no. And the only reason I hadn’t said no in the past was because I knew it wouldn’t stop him, and then I wouldn’t be having sex anymore; I’d be getting serially raped. I know I mostly give this spiel because I feel like I have to explain to people why it’s rape, why it’s bad, and why it’s more than this one little event that took ten minutes of my life. I feel like I have to, because only 1 out of 6 people seem to get it. And I never realized how much I was excusing myself, explaining, teaching, educating, until I told Badger this and she responded with, “That’s rape, too! That was rape, all those times you were afraid to say no!”
There are people in the world who don’t get that. No matter how often I explain it, or in how many words, they don’t. They don’t because of a lot of reasons, because their definition of “sex” allows for force, pain, and misery, because they live in a culture that considers it sexually stimulating for women to be forced in pain and misery, and because women’s pain and misery is not considered to be human enough to warrant horror and justice.
But one of the people I have always loved and cared about most in all the world got it. I have made mistakes in my life, and I have to fight pretty hard to keep my regrets from turning me into someone whose pain and misery is not worthwhile. I regret that I didn’t leave sooner. I regret that I “let him.” I regret that I never stood up for myself, just left quietly and ignored him like he didn’t exist. I regret a lot of things. But I have chosen in my life as a best friend somebody who really got this, and that is a rare person, in my experience. Whatever kind of poor judgments I’ve made, I don’t think they outweigh or are responsible for the actions of others. Because my judgment has been good enough to rally good people around me, even in the midst of all the bad.
That’s not any grand summary. I just wanted to leave on a note of good stuff. I’m proud of my friend, and I’m proud I chose her as one. And I am unapologetic about my refusal to be friends with any other type — none of them bring me any of the good stuff.
I once had a friend who was raped by an ex. I tried to be type 5 for her, and she told me I was being too aggressive. That I shouldn’t judge a person only by the worst thing they’ve done (ie. rape her). She acted like I was purposely trying to upset her by telling her she was raped, and it was my fault. She continued to be friends with her rapist, and slept with him occasionally, letting him pester her for sex. I think what she wanted from me was anything other than type 5, which she got from everyone else, so she could keep living her delusion. I’m not friends with her anymore. I hope she has a good life, but I don’t want to be in it.
I was molested when I was younger. In the previous entry, you mentioned that you don’t have the huge, all-encompassing flashbacks where you feel like you’ve traveled back in time. I’m the same. I tried going to counselors for a few years in my mid-teens, and they always seemed confused and disappointed when I said I don’t have them. Like I’m not having *real* PTSD if I don’t have this one symptom. Anyway, it’s a pet peeve of mine, and it’s nice to see someone else who doesn’t fit the very specific mold that psychology has created for sexually abused people to fit into.
Generally, I want to thank you for your blog. It helps me to work through and think about some horrible experiences of my own.
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I think you sound pretty right on about your friend, and what she was able or willing to deal with at that time, and I’m glad you didn’t take it personally — that was totally a her thing, not a you thing. And I think you made a good decision not to have that in your life.
I lost a whole lot of friends after my rape, and a handful of them I am very very angry at. A lot of them I am a little angry at, but I also understand that they just couldn’t deal with this in any way that worked with the way I was dealing with it. They were just people who coped with important things so differently from the way I coped with them. And, looking back at these friends, there was always some amount of that going on before my rape — we were always different in what seemed like potentially fundamental ways — but it was easier to ignore, seemed less important. After my rape, I was suddenly forced to put those relationships under a harsher light, and found the things I’d been willing to let slide just weren’t going to work anymore. I was vulnerable, and needed people I could trust to be compatible with me in the ways I needed most. Turned out, very few people I knew were people I was compatible with in any long-term and meaningful way. A lot of them I have no ill will against — I just can’t have them in my life and be happy at the same time.
Thanks for your comment.
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I wanted to thank you for the last few posts you’ve done on this topic. Like you I was raped by my partner but rather than ignore my “no”s, he just made sure I couldn’t say them. He would wait till I was asleep. I often told him no after I woke up enough to realize what was going on, but he didn’t listen.
It took me over 2 years to realize that what I had endured was rape. And it’s only been recently that I realize how amazingly, insanely, frighteningly deep that damage has gone.
Unlike you, I didn’t talk about it and have told very few people. I feel like I will receive no benefit from focusing on it anymore. I’ll never see him again thankfully and just want to file that part of my life away under “Really not going to do that again.”
But I would ask you a question, if you don’t mind. Have you found any healing from talking about? Especially in such a frank way and open format as a blog?
To Courtney,
Don’t feel alone. I have a very close friend who shared your experience. She also said she didn’t have those big huge flashbacks but she undeniably had PTSD. Speaking for myself, I think that some pain the mind buries so deep that even PTSD can’t force you to go back through it. When I was 18 I was run over by a car while I was rollerblading. My mind suppressed all memory of the actual impact and immediate event. As a result I didn’t have the “time-travelling” flashbacks cause I had no memory to trigger but no doctor ever claimed I didn’t have PTSD.
I recently found a very helpful book on the subject called “I Can’t Get Over It: A handbook for trauma survivors” by Aphrodite Matsakis. In it she talks about how flashbacks are only one form of the larger diagnositic category called reexperiencing. It’s a good book and hope it can help.
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Erica:
Thanks for your comment.
In answer to your question, yes, it’s helped me a lot to talk about and share my experiences. But I want to qualify that. It’s helped *me*, and I think it could help a lot of other women to do the same, but I am very very wary of setting some standard generalization across all women about the things they ought to do to recover from rape. I think rape victims deal with enough bullshit about “you should’ve” and “why didn’t you,” I don’t want to pile one more utterly unhelpful demand on top of people already going through some horrible shit.
I think rape victims feel a lot of obligation to act in certain ways to validate their experience. Like you’re not a “real” rape victim unless you talk about it, or call the police, or act hysterically upset, or have flashbacks, or confront your rapist, or never speak to your rapist again, etc. But people process trauma in different ways, and there’s never any set end point of “getting over it.” The worst thing about being raped is that it will stay with you the rest of your life, and over the course of your life, there will be different ways you feel comfortable dealing with that. All of them are the “right” ways, because they only need to help you.
Before being raped, I had always promised myself in a really self-righteous and grandiose way that if I ever got raped, I’d write about it. I’d write so much, and I’d get all aggro about getting it published and in people’s faces. People need to know, I thought. I’m not going to be nice about this. But once I was raped, I *did not* want to talk about it. I could tell a very few people what had happened, without using the actual word, but otherwise, I could not talk about it. I did not feel safe. I felt terribly ashamed and cowardly and worthless about that. And I was forever conscious of how this might reflect on me, and whether or not people believed me. And that made me feel less safe, and more worthless.
What I think I had to learn was not to take it personally. I had to recognize that I had not been raped because of something wrong with me, or something I had done wrong. I was not feeling ashamed or afraid because of something about me that deserved shame and fear. What happened to me was a reflection of somebody else’s sickness, and wrongness, that they had wanted to hurt me with. Something had happened to me, but that did not mean there was anything wrong with me. There was something wrong with my abuser.
It was still somewhat of a disappointing shock to realize that I had to extend that understanding to others, especially people I cared about. When I got bad or no reactions from telling mutual friends about my rape, I had to realize, that is about them. That is not about me. The fact that they don’t believe me, that they are angry with me, that they want me to stop feeling and talking about this, or making a big deal out of it, that is a reflection of their own worth and integrity, not mine.
I had a lot of rotten friends. I had a lot of friends who weren’t rotten, but weren’t much. And I had a lot of friends who were good people, but not people I could count on for support when I needed it. I knew this before I got raped. I wasn’t okay with that, but I was willing to accept it. After I got raped, there was no room in my life for people who I could not count on, who said vile things or had ignorant, misogynistic opinions. I didn’t feel safe with them, I didn’t like them, and I didn’t have any desire to expend the energy explaining to them why what happened to me was rape, and why rape was bad.
I also didn’t feel comfortable or safe spending time with people that I knew would stop being my friends, one way or another, if I brought up the rape. I could know, in my own head and heart, that what happened to me was rape and it was wrong. But pretending it wasn’t, and keeping my mouth shut to keep the peace, started to eat away at that knowing. If I surrounded myself with people who didn’t think it was important enough to talk about, I began to think, maybe it’s not such a big deal. Maybe it wasn’t a real rape. Maybe I should get over it.
So I found I *had* to talk about it. Even if nobody listened, even if I lost friends, even if it was uncomfortable. I had to talk about it, because it kept me from sliding backwards into denial and shame, and because it helped me find safe places and people. The people who cannot handle me talking about my rape are the people that I know, in the long run, could not have been my friends anyway — I just know much quicker now. The places where I don’t feel comfortable opening my mouth are places I know I am not safe, and I leave.
And, too, I find every time I do open my mouth and talk about it, I find at least one other woman who has been raped, or knows somebody who has been raped. And the relief at finding somebody who understands goes both ways, and makes me understand that I am not even close to being isolated or alone on this. Which is really fucking depressing, but makes me want to talk about it more. I am acutely aware that wherever I am, there is probably a rape victim in the room with me. Probably nobody else in the room knows that, and probably doesn’t want to know. I am also aware that, on the flip side, there is probably a rapist in the room with me. That makes me want to talk more. My rape took that blissful ignorance from me, and I don’t like anybody else having it; their having that ignorance — that rape doesn’t happen at epidemic proportions, that you don’t know a rapist — is part of what helped get me raped.
I feel like I’d like to help prevent other rapes, and I’d like to help other rape victims, but that’s sort of a general idea, and it’s very big and broad and floating out there. More specifically, I feel like I deserve to be safe, and I deserve to be believed, and I will fight and work to structure the world around me to do that. For me, I feel like that includes talking about it. That helps me know who is safe and worth my time and energy, and what places are safe places for me to be. An anonymous blog is one of the places that feels safe enough for me to talk about this in a lot of detail, and honestly, there are few places and people that I feel like I *can* talk so openly. There are not many people who want to hear about this, and not just because of rape denial; there’s a secondary trauma to hearing about this kind of depressing shit that’s hard to take, and not something I’m always willing to do to a person. I don’t think there are that many places for rape victims to be so open, and the Internet is one nice thing we have where we can do this. So talking — and writing — is what I do to help myself, and hope sometimes that it helps others. And those are my reasons why it helps. Maybe later in my life I will be sick of talking about this, and that would be okay, too.
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