[Rape Culture and Me]

So, there are a lot of subjects in my head that I want to write about. A lot. Narrowing it down has been exceedingly difficult, but then I thought about what made me really want to start this blog in the first place. There is this continuing discussion about whether or not rape culture is a real thing.

Click this for a fantastic missive on why this shouldn't even be a debate.

I can't even lie that this is a discussion that fills me with anger and a bit of resentment. The truth of the matter is that I am a rape survivor and victim. Also, almost worse than that, a rape culture victim. This is my story.

When I was 15, I was going through a majorly rough patch in life. At home (if a motel room can be called a home), I was dealing with a highly volatile, violent situation between my mother and her boyfriend. Being an audience to a domestic violence and doing everything to protect my then baby sister from being harmed in the crossfire takes it toll on you. Especially when you're doing it in a new town, away from all the stability you knew. I (perhaps inevitably) quickly turned to drugs, drinking and the completely wrong crowd to distract myself from all that.

Part 1: I developed a close friendship with an upperclassman we'll call T. What I thought of as a close friendship, at least. I spent an inordinate amount of time with his girlfriend, his best friend and him. One night when the girlfriend wasn't around, we were drinking and I was getting high. I was a slip of a girl and rapidly reached a point where I was unable to function normally. I was also a virgin at this point. That old fashioned kind of girl who wanted so bad to just find the right boy (or girl) and be in love with them. I'm fairly certain you can see where this is going and that's where it went. I wasn't passed out. I almost wish I was. What those two boys and their other friend did to me is something I wish I didn't have to fully remember. It's the kind of experience that 18 years later makes my stomach twist in knots when I talk about it and makes my hands shake as I type this. The word no was said and didn't matter. It didn't fucking matter, because I was just one girl.

Part 2: Then we come to what happened after. I fell silent and I fell apart. I couldn't go to my mom, because she already had so much going on that I didn't want to add to the situation. I couldn't go to my friends, because it was my friends who had done this to me. Just to make sure I couldn't say anything, T told his girlfriend that I had hit on him and he had to tell me no, destroying that friendship. I couldn't go to the police, because at the end of the day, I was just a drunk and high girl in a too short skirt who got "taken advantage of". I carried it in silence for years and I broke for years. The first person I ever even told about it was my first boyfriend when I was 17. Even then it was because I was lucky to find a fantastic first love and felt he deserved an explanation about why I had intimacy problems.

Part 1 is how I was a victim of rape. Which was awful and destroyed my life for many years. It took a lot of time for me to move beyond victim to become a survivor. Part 2 is how I was a victim of rape culture and in many ways I still am. This culture that told me in so many ways that I deserved what I got, because I was a lost little girl who made some bad decisions. This culture that told me my no meant less than someone else's, because I was a "bad seed". This culture that makes light of and romanticizes violence against women made me feel like there was no one I could tell and no one I could trust. I honestly can't help but wonder, how much of my life and how many different decisions I would have made, if this culture didn't tell me to be silent at every turn.

In many ways, I'm still silent. This is the very first time I have told the entire story from beginning to end. The partial reason is that it's such a difficult story to tell, but another part of it is that part of me still thinks that if I had made better choices, it never would have happened and that makes it partially my fault. Silence almost killed me then. Maybe not being silent will help save someone next time. Which is why I decided to finally tell this story to the world.

So, next time you're tempted to think that rape culture doesn't exist, think of that (and all) broken little girls who make bad decisions and when what they need is someone who understands, what they get is someone who murders their sense of self worth.