Pandora's Aquarium: Stupid facebook! Trigger for my writing. - Pandora's Aquarium

Please click on the picture to read it.


This really set me off. I have a post I was going to share via fb, but I chickened out. I will post it here though. Hope this works! Never added pictures before!


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I saw this meme the other day and I can't stop thinking about it. I thought I was the only one. Number 9 is my story.

9. Don’t forget: Honesty is the best policy. If you have every intention of having sex later on with the woman you’re dating regardless of how she feels about it, tell her directly that there is every chance you will rape her. If you don’t communicate your intentions, she may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her and inadvertently feel safe.

***Graphic*** Trigger Warning***

I started dating this guy my sophomore year at college. I was never asked out much, so when he took an interest in me, I was totally flattered. He was older and a huge ex-football player. I mean, he was probably 6’5, 350 lbs at least. And for those of you who haven’t seen me in the flesh, at the time I was 5’0, 110 lbs maybe. He was nice at first. He knew I was a virgin and that I didn't want to have sex with him or with anyone else for that matter.

We dated for a couple of months but eventually, I suppose he got tired of waiting for me to be ready. I tried to placate him by doing other things with him. You know exactly what I mean – hand jobs and blow jobs. I was ok with that. He, apparently, was not.

The week before Thanksgiving vacation, we were at his house, doing the things we normally did, when he decided that he'd had enough of waiting. He said that if I didn't have sex with him, we were over. I cried, of course. His reaction was basically that if I didn't want to be with him, I wouldn't be so upset. Since I was so upset, I must want to be with him, ergo, I must want to have sex with him. But I didn't.

So we were on his bed, practically naked from having done those other things, and I was sobbing. And saying no. But I only began to hit him when it started to hurt. All these years I thought that if only I had started to fight back physically, sooner, it might not have happened. I replay that scene in my head daily. If only… If only I had fought back harder, sooner, yelled more loudly, just put my clothes back on and gotten out of the house… I lived with that guilt for 20 years. I constantly apologize to my 19 year-old self for not having fought harder. I tell her that it was not her fault for being so trusting, so naive. I felt guilty all those years, thinking that it was my fault for leading him on; after all, I had been willing to be naked with him, to do those other things with him.

But I don’t feel guilty anymore. I feel angry. Angry that my first time was like this, that I am stuck with this horrible memory. Angry that he is the only man I have been with. Angry because it still affects me to this day and he occupies a space in my head that I can’t fill with anything else. And I am so angry that nothing has changed. Colleges and universities put the onus on women to avoid being raped, rather than on the men who are usually the perpetrators. (I know, men get raped, too. They can write their own stories. This one’s mine.) And with all these rape, abortion, women's-rights-under-fire stories in the news lately, I can’t stop thinking about it.

According to rainn.org, 1 out of 6 American women has been raped. I don’t know if that includes unreported rapes (like mine), so it could be more than that. I personally only know of one other woman to whom this has happened. But then again, I only first told someone last year, 20 years after the fact. I decided to put my story out there so that rape might matter to you. I never really cared about Autism until my nephew was diagnosed with it. I never cared about maternity leave until I realized that my friends had to leave their newborn babies in day care because they had to get back to work as soon as possible so they wouldn't lose their jobs or health insurance. I never really cared about AIDS until I knew friends who were living with it. Maybe you’ll care about rape because now you know someone who was raped.

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I debated for days over whether or not to actually post this. So this is my decision. I only ask that you not comment on it, quite frankly because I don’t want to read about how you think I "might" have led him on, even just a tiny bit. I hear that enough in my head. You can “like” it if you read it. I won’t take it to mean that you liked that I was raped. And please don’t share it. Yes, I want to put a familiar face on the issue of rape, but unless we have mutual friends, my story won’t mean as much to them. This is for people who know me, however you know me. So you can say you know someone who was raped and it sucks.

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So that's the unpublished fb post. It is sitting in my notes section under "draft" and "only me" who can see it. Maybe one day I'll put it out there with my name on it.