And over ten years later, I still want to shout about it sometimes.

[kiya]

angilong has been soliciting comments on the subject of rape and sexual assault in her journal. I wrote about this last year, and thought that I'd gotten a sort of catharsis out of it, found some sort of peace.

I guess I was wrong.


So this is part of what I wrote in angilong's journal.

I'd also like to add that if it's unfair of men to respond to indirect communication, it's unfair to expect women to do the same. The guy who assaulted me never asked me a damn thing. He started out with a kiss, and I spent the next week or so trying to figure that out, but of course he'd pushed a bit beyond the kiss when I didn't punch him in the nose or something, so I had that to figure out too; and he kept pushing, apparently using invisible signals to check consent, or calculating consent by whether or not he got decked. When he got to wanting sex, he started dropping oblique hints that I didn't know how to deal with, and I hoped ignoring them would make him stop.

He didn't stop; he assaulted me.

And yeah, it might have been better if I could have been direct in telling him what I did and didn't want, but the fact of the matter is he pushed me so hard from the day I met him that I didn't have the space to figure any of that out. I had no experience, was trying to figure out something completely new to me, and no space. And the only time I knew for sure what he was pushing was something I didn't want, I fought. And he pinned me down with his body and tried to move my arms from where he wanted to get at, and I locked down and froze up in a position that made it clear I wasn't having any of that.

If it was my responsibility to give him a direct "No" despite the fact that he was pushing me so hard and fast I didn't have space to figure out whether or not "No" was the answer I wanted to give before rape was on the table . . . where's his responsibility to directly ask for a "Yes"?

I think what gets me about it all is that I've never had adult space to address matters of sexuality without the warps that this induced. And I've gotten to a point at last in which the flow is mmmmmostly unturbulent . . . at least as far as I can judge . . . and I still rage about what I lost, wondering what channels got blocked up when someone went and dropped big fucking rocks in my mental river.

And now I'm wondering about having a conversation with Sutekh about this. Hm.

Comments

River: 1 Rock: 0

[briar24.livejournal.com]

I have nothing useful to offer you.

Just, I'm sorry, for the loss, and for the intrusion.

...wondering what channels got blocked up when someone went and dropped big fucking rocks in my mental river.

I'm a geologist; the image that comes to mind is river eroding rock, rock being smoothed, dimininished, over time, until it is... gone. Gone. River wins, every time.