I have been raped. More than once. I have friends that have been raped, some of them, more than once. My mother who loves me and is a wonderful person says that if I truly didn't want to be raped, I would have fought my rapist(s) to the point of my being killed instead of being raped. My mother who loves me and is a wonderful person says that if I truly didn't want to be raped, I would have killed myself after being raped.
As I have written before, I am a survivor of sexual abuse by a priest. I tried to kill myself in 7th Grade. I've had sex, both consensual and non-consensual since I was a child and with both men and women. As I child I allowed adult men and women to "play with me" sexually, petting me, stroking me, kissing me, licking me, masturbating me. I didn't reciprocate. I was acted upon, I didn't act.
As an adult female, I had no interest in women. My passion was for men and their erections, ejaculations, their power & strength.
Was I raped as a child?
Depends on what your definition of 'rape' is. As a child, I don't recall wanting anything but something sweet to eat, candy, ice cream, cookies and milk. The adults who had sex with me, noticed that and would always have a treat ready for me. One woman dipped her nipples into grape jam to try to get me to suck her breasts. I didn't want to do it and she backed-down and resumed to perform oral sex on my tiny vagina.
I had no problem with anyone wanting to do cunnilingus to me, but I had no interest in returning the favor. Frankly, to me, vaginas smelled bad. I guess I never questioned if my vagina was different. If my vagina was tasty.
Frankly, it felt good to be held. It felt good to be naked and held by another naked body. It felt good have someone between my little-girl legs.
Oh don't get all crazy with me and condemn me. The Queen of Talk, Oprah, has admitted that when she was found out to have been molested by a relative, she didn't understand the hoopla because she thought sex with her relative felt good. Oprah told the big secret, sex can feel good, even to a child.
So why wouldn't I suck on that woman's' nipples with the grape jelly? Because I thought she smelled bad. I never liked the smell of adults who were having sex with me. I thought they smelled rotten.
So have I been raped?.
I put the question of defining rape to South African writer & poet, Dennis Brutus, who was teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, when I was there as a nursing student. I asked Dennis Brutus what was his definition of "rape" since he used that word "rape" when explaining what was happening in Africa.
Dennis Brutus told me that rape was anything that was done against your will and that caused you go off your given course in life.
Not the answer I was looking for, but a good one.
By the time I got to Northwestern I had been raped quite a few times. I questioned my complicity in the matter of my rapes. Once, while hitchhiking in the mid-West with a gay companion, we were picked up by a trucker. The trucker wanted me to give him fellatio. My gay companion said that I was pregnant, true, and not feeling well and that he (the gay guy) would "blow" him. The trucker had been pulling off my clothes and the next thing I knew, I was being tossed out of the truck's cab and into some snow on an interstate cloverleaf somewhere in the mid-West. I heard the truck zoom off with my gay companion still in it. I was weak and tired and practically naked.
I remember being carried into some kind of vehicle. I remember being bathed in a tub. I remember falling asleep on sheets that smelled good and clean. I remember thinking that my mother had found me and was taking care of me.
When I awoke. I was in a clean bed, wearing someone's pajamas. in a cute little bedroom on the second floor of a wooden house. I went to the bathroom and I noticed that there was a woman's touch present, in the pinks and yellows of the towels and shower curtain. Decorative soaps were in a soap dish. I went downstairs in the borrowed pajamas to look for people. No one was at home. I was alone. In the laundry on the main floor I found some jeans, tee-shirt and I went to the kitchen to look for something to eat. After eating, I went back upstairs, rummaged through the closets and drawers finding a pair of boots, socks, coat, hat & gloves.
It had been hours and still no one came to the home. I was getting antsy, so I left a note thanking whoever had rescued me and I said I was going to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Back out on the interstate, I saw a sign that said "Livonia" so I guess I had been in Livonia. I hitched to a commune in Ann Arbor and never saw or heard from my gay travelling companion again. I don't think he made it to Ann Arbor. I sometimes wonder if he got away from that crazy trucker or if the trucker killed him and buried his body in some forsaken part of Michigan.
There were other times, when I was in situations that had a potential for rape.
The times I actually had sex against my will, diminished with age and maturity. I still wonder how much I was to blame for those sexual encounters and sexual close-encouters.
Flirting would be a sexual encounter of the first kind. Loving someone with your eyes. A visual encounter. If you don't want to flirt with that person, you can just look away.
Touching would be a sexual encounter of the second kind. A physical encounter where you touched or were touched by another. If you didn't like the touch you could still pull away.
Penetration would be a sexual encounter of the third kind. You are captured or you capture another while their defenses are down. Hard to break away from that kind of action.
I wonder about my friends who tell me about their being raped. Because I wonder about how it was that I came to be raped, on more than one occassion, by both men & women, once by a gang of teen boys. Was I always asking for it? How did I find myself in a basement with 3 teen boys, two who were the brothers of a girl who was having sex with me. How does that happen?
I am a deeply flawed human being, I must be. I can't blame anyone else for my confusion. I must have, at least subconciously, wanted and enjoyed the sexual contact with the priest.
It's almost 2:30AM here in Chicago. I've grown tired. My lofty thoughts about my mother have deteriorated into self-recrimination. I think I need to go to sleep. My home health care team, RNs, CNAs, PTs, OTs, phlebotomists, will begin at my door by 8AM. I need to get some sleep.
Ponder this topic of rape, again.
I always wonder who I would have been, if I had not been sexualized as a child,