This is sort of a response diary on a tangent. A recent FP story that made some accusations about a police chief that wasn't terribly well received spawned some responses to comments I made that made me decide to share my own ugly experience.
So why doesn't it matter? Because I'm not your usual victim, nor was my attacker your usual rapist. I'm one of the 9% of people who get raped who are male. And one of the 1% who was raped by a woman. In the lights of a number of DK commenters, that apparently makes my experience not worthy of being called rape, I guess.
I was in my early 20s, and talking online to a woman in the infancy of the internet, before the 'web' got started. We kind of hit it off, and I decided to do cross country vacation, and she suggested I stop by, spend a few days to a week at her school, that I could 'crash' in her apartment before resuming my trip.
That sounded ok, so when the time came, I packed up and started my road trip. In time, I was near her town, so I drove on in, gave her a phone call to get directions on just where in town her apartment was, and drove on over. She met me at the door, we hugged, and I gave her a little gift I'd brought along as a thank you for the invitation. We went inside, I put my bag down, she broke out some wine, and we talked for a while.
Her roommate arrived home at that point. A very large woman, I would have guessed her at more than twice my weight, since she was easily more than twice my size in volume. She grabbed a glass of wine too, and joined the conversation. She was pretty flirty, moreso than I would have expected with a stranger, but I shrugged it off.
I thanked my online friend again for letting me stop over, and as she had things to do, I went out to explore the town for the rest of the afternoon, only coming back after grabbing a bite at a local diner. (Yes, they still had diners back when I was young :P )
My friend was headed out. She hadn't known exactly when I was arriving, and already had accepted a party invite. I was cool with that, I'd been driving quite a while that day and was already pretty tired when I got there, and my second wind was wearing off, so I decided to crash on the futon she'd indicated was for me.
I think I got a couple of hours of sleep, before I was woken up muzzy headed, with hands down my sweat pants, one of which had a fairly firm grip on a rather tender part. It was already somewhat dark out, and the curtains were pulled, so at first I didn't know who it was, but I assumed that my online friend was more friendly than I expected.
That assumption didn't last long, as the grip became painfully tight, and I was suddenly having a hard time breathing with a lot of naked weight on top of me. I was a bit naive, sexually, back then, and didn't know about 'cock rings' or using elastic bands to restrict the blood flow to the penis to cause and maintain an erection, but I learned that night that even a sufficiently tight grip can cause enough blood to pool and provide an erection even when you really weren't 'in the mood'.
I'm not going to get any more graphic, but let's just say I was used like an inflatable male doll by a woman I barely knew who was much larger than I was, and stronger. I was pretty much in shock, and not really thinking straight, but I remember thinking at the time that this just didn't happen to guys.
I don't know how long it lasted, as I was just trying really to breathe and not to think about what was going on, but after some time, she made a long moan, then got off me and left the room for her own room. Parts of me were in pain, and I seriously considered bolting out the door right then, but I was a long way from home, didn't know where any hotels were, hadn't really planned well enough to take along extra cash in case I needed one, and told myself she surely wouldn't be back that night.
So I switched into jeans and curled up, trying to get to sleep and not think about what had happened. I heard my online friend come back a couple hours later, trying to be quiet so as not to 'wake' me, and just pretended to be asleep.
The next morning, I packed up the little I had brought in quickly, and as soon as my friend woke up, I made up some bogus lie about having miscalculated the dates, and told her I had to leave, and couldn't stay for the week. I was on the road again in minutes, and I never saw either one again, nor spoke with my 'friend' online again.
I know it wasn't her fault, but it took me quite some time to start to think logically about the whole thing, and not simply to try and pretend it never happened.
Yes, I was traumatized, and it took me more than a few years to fully put it 'behind me'. But it's good that I can, because where a woman who is raped by a man can always get sympathy, both from men and women, I generally get disbelief and belittling comments.
I can't bring up my experiences on DK without a half dozen women popping up to belittle my experience, to claim that people who comment that 'women rape too' are just 'sidetracking or trying to derail' a 'legitimate' conversation about males behaving horribly, or even trying to one up me. Others pull out statistics to show just how unusual my experience was. One commenter's reply was 'my mother was raped 3 times'. Obviously I haven't been raped enough to have a legitimate opinion or ideas about rape.
All rape is horrible. I'm not going to claim my experience was worse than anyone else's. But by damn, people generally don't go out of their way to make snide comments or claim that as a woman who has been raped, you have no insight or worthwhile things to say about rape.
I'm a man, and I was raped by a woman. So I just don't matter.
UPDATE I thank everyone for their kind words, and I will consider counseling, although, as always, my first instinct is avoidance. I think just reading some of the comments here has given me more insight on how my life has gone in the 20 or so years since this happened, and opened my eyes to how much it actually affected me even though I thought I'd walled it off, thought I'd made it vanish. So I thank you all again, for making me take a closer look at what I've done to myself since.
And I'd like to note that while I was, and am, frustrated with some of the comments that led me to post this, I bear no personal ill will to any of those who posted them. We all are what our own lives have made us, and on DK, of all places, one has to be acutely aware that our differing experiences have led us to have differing viewpoints that will undoubtedly lead us to upset or be upset by others at times.