“He tells me to scooch down more and it’s clear he wants to get my face in close proximity to his dick. He pulls his dick out and takes my hand and puts it on it. I was like, wow, you won’t even kiss me before you’re asking for head? Long story short, he makes me feel super weird and I end up giving him head (I don’t know why)...When I finish he gets up and turns the lights on and is like ‘well I’m going to eat dinner now.’ And so I get dressed and when I’m done he’s sitting on his bed and I’m like ‘ok well, bye?’ and he gives me this eye roll and stupid laugh and gets up and walks me to the door and is like ‘bye’ and sticks his hand out for me to shake.”
That was a quote from my friend. My best friend. The details aren’t mine; the story isn’t my own. But the narrative arc could be.
“23.1% of college-aged females report experiencing sexual violence.” I got this stat from rainn.org. These numbers are horrible, but I don’t think they even begin to cover the full picture. Sexual assault is much more complex than “Boy shoves penis into girl’s vagina and violently forces her to comply.” There is so much more emotional force than physical in the majority of assaults. My friend could have ended that bullshit immediately if she’d up and said “fuck you,” and walked out of his apartment. I doubt he would have retaliated physically. But when you hear the other parts of her story, it’s clear that fear of physical violence was not what kept her in the room: “I’m literally running my hand through his hair for 20 minutes while he just lies there and I’m trying to ask him some questions about himself so I can get to know him better to which he goes, ‘Why is everything a barter with you? Why do I have to answer questions in exchange for head?’” “He was like can I draw on your tits with a sharpie? I was like no. He started taking pics of my boobs and sending them to his friends which made me feel like shit but it’s not like I really care I guess because my face wasn’t in it?” It’s like she owes him something.
There was the morning another friend called me on the phone and told me she’d woken up in her boyfriend’s best friend’s bed. When she asked him how she got there, he said, “Don’t you remember how much fun we had last night?” She did not remember. She had to go to her school’s infirmary because the sex she couldn’t remember having had lodged a tampon up into her cervix. It smelled awful, and the pain was nauseating. “I would never forget to take a tampon out before having sex,” she told me. “There’s just no way.” To this day, we do not know exactly what happened. She only had 2 drinks that she knows of, so it is likely that something was slipped into one of them.
There was the text back-and-forth I had with another friend who told me excitedly about the boy she had hooked up with last night. “Well, but there was one thing that was kind of weird,” she said “Mhm?” “Well, see, at first I was just giving him head, and that was fine. But like, I could tell he was getting closer to coming. And right before he came he kind of, like, spun me around and just put his dick inside me from behind. And I mean, it was fine because I would’ve said yes, if he’d asked, you know? But like, he didn’t...ask. So it just feels weird. Maybe he just wanted us both involved, like so we could both enjoy it. But, yeah, I feel a bit strange that he didn’t ask. Is that normal?”
There was the 2am facetime with a friend who told me she ended up having sex with a guy that night because he refused to “take ‘no’ for an answer.” When you say no you just mean yes. There was the conversation with my childhood friend when she revealed she was raped in high school by a boy we both know. There was the time at one of my first frat parties, when another friend ended up alone in the bedroom of a...man she did not know, who fucked her not only without asking but also without a condom, and she had to spend every single day of the next month worrying he’d gotten her pregnant.
The first time I ever, in my life, had sex, I cried. “Are you upset?” he asked. “ Should I stop?” “No,” I said.
He turned away from the contortion on my face. “How can you want me to do this to you?”
“It’s my first time,” I said. “It’s supposed to hurt.”
There were the nights that a boy I used to sleep with would try and shove his dick in me before I had given him the go ahead. “Just the tip?” “No, no, no...not without a condom.” “Please? Just the tip?” “No...” a little more pushing. “No...” a little more shoving. I’d get tired of saying no. And then he’d be fucking me, and it wasn’t just the tip. And I’d be frozen, petrified. But...I’d given up on saying no to his nudging, and I’d had sex with him before. And we were hooking up consistently, and I liked him a lot. And I knew I could tell him to pull out of me, and I knew that he would. But for the first few moments, always, I couldn’t.
There are the countless times I have tried to find some humanity in the person who is thrusting himself inside of me. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes he locks my gaze and we smile at each other, or he slides his fingers between my own and holds my hands. Sometimes he is there with me when we have sex. But sometimes he is not.
Sometimes I am doing everything I can not to vomit or shout because he is thrusting too hard from behind, and my face is in the pillow and my neck is craned so hard that it just might snap in two and I never even wanted to do doggy style in the first place but I told him three times already to slow down and still...Sometimes we are in missionary and he hasn’t touched my vagina all night and his body is crushing mine and his sweat is dripping onto my forehead and I am doing everything I can not to cry.
But sometimes I fail. And then sometimes I am crying. Sometimes I am lying flat and lifeless on the bed and he is thrusting into me. And I am crying, but still he is asking if he can come on my breasts. And so I am saying “okay” but I am crying, and he can’t see. Or he doesn’t want to see. He doesn’t see. He cares but he doesn’t see. He sees and he doesn’t care.
My sophomore year at Tufts, I had the honor of being on the committee of ASAP, the organization that puts on this very event. It is important I note that the definition of sexual violence extends beyond a male perpetrator and female victim. But as a heterosexual woman, the stories that most resonated with me were these. I have never experienced what I would consider an assault on my own body, but I had to start thinking about my sexual history differently. There was so much pain, confusion, shame and guilt around our sex with men. And at the end of a night full of sex we weren’t sure we’d consented to, we still worried if he’d left our beds liking us enough. When I have sex today, I often cry. My tears are my own, but they are also somebody else’s. I cry for my broken heart, my loneliness in the moments that are supposed to be imbued with the most intimate of connection, for the tearing of my vaginal walls and the cracking of my rib cage as he dumps his body weight on top of me. I cry for the trauma of the survivors around me. I cry for all the women I love and even the women I do not know, who have laid under the heaviness of a body determined to invade their own. This is how I feel most times during sex. Invaded; collectively, invaded.