Sexual Terrorism
"Near one in the morning on a Saturday night, a young women is walking quickly down the street. As she passes the porn shops and strip clubs, she stares at the ground in hopes of avoiding making eye contact with the drunken men standing around. Despite her efforts, cat calls, whistles, and crude comments are thrown her way. She turns off the main street and onto a darker and less busy one, and her fear grows as the light shrinks. A block away from home, her fear is realized and she is raped. The man on top of her enters her with a sharp and painful thrust, pushing apart her vaginal muscles, and thrusts into her, pounding away at her to his pleasure, violating her. She doesn’t resist--it has been hammered into her head that to resist means to be hurt or killed--so she submits. Her rapist lets her go near sunrise, and she briefly thinks about reporting it. She decides against it, knowing that the will media blame her for what she was wearing, for walking home alone at night, for being an attractive woman--anything they can say to make it her fault. Instead, she quits her job the next day because of the late hours, and avoids going out at night alone anymore. Her fear of sexual terrorism keeps her in her place as a woman in patriarchy--at home, submissive, and afraid."
I wrote this four years ago, in my first semester of university, as an introduction to a paper on sexual terrorism. I never thought reading it would make my stomach turn with recognition.
No, I'm not afraid to walk around at night. The person who raped me was an acquaintance. And I've always avoiding making eye contact while walking down the street at night and become more aware of my surroundings in desolate, poorly-lit areas.
The feeling is the same though. The reasons I didn't report it. My avoidance at making friends with men for the rest of my trip. My inability to enjoy casual or rough sex ever since. It affects your life. It changes your behavior. The threat of rape does too, of course, but the occurrence of rape, ah, now I know exactly what is at stake and the stupidest things makes my heart beat fast with fear.
I'm not going to avoid the things that remind me of him. The list is long and include whole ethnic/racial and linguistic groups of men. Actually, it would include being in anyway sexual or physically intimate with men. But as much as I want it to be, the violation wasn't over when he ejaculated in me and on me, furthering my humiliation with his bodily fluids.
No, it continued.
It continued with the questions at the emergency room and the demand that I report it. It continued with the way the pharmacist looked at me when he filled my prescription for Valtrex and antiretrovirals and Plan B, just in case. It continued with my self-confinement to the hostel and in internet cafes for the rest of my stay in Istanbul, keeping me in my place as sexual terrorism is supposed to.
Still, it continues.
It continues with the questions from my loved ones, as though the answers matter. It continues with the follow up medical appointments, where they stick needles in my arm and swabs in my vagina and take blood and cultures to see if his violation is going to make me sick of body as well as sick of soul. And as much as I try to keep it from impacting my life, and even if I've managed to reclaim sex and my body in some ways, the violation continues with its constant insertion into my life.
And it will continue for a long while, until the violation of the needles and the swabs because of the violation of his penis is over; until I can fuck someone exactly how I want without the thought giving me a panic attack; until I know he didn't make me sick.
It won't always continue though. I refuse to let him control my life as he controlled my body for those horrible minutes. This isn't courage, it's survival.
I wrote this four years ago, in my first semester of university, as an introduction to a paper on sexual terrorism. I never thought reading it would make my stomach turn with recognition.
No, I'm not afraid to walk around at night. The person who raped me was an acquaintance. And I've always avoiding making eye contact while walking down the street at night and become more aware of my surroundings in desolate, poorly-lit areas.
The feeling is the same though. The reasons I didn't report it. My avoidance at making friends with men for the rest of my trip. My inability to enjoy casual or rough sex ever since. It affects your life. It changes your behavior. The threat of rape does too, of course, but the occurrence of rape, ah, now I know exactly what is at stake and the stupidest things makes my heart beat fast with fear.
I'm not going to avoid the things that remind me of him. The list is long and include whole ethnic/racial and linguistic groups of men. Actually, it would include being in anyway sexual or physically intimate with men. But as much as I want it to be, the violation wasn't over when he ejaculated in me and on me, furthering my humiliation with his bodily fluids.
No, it continued.
It continued with the questions at the emergency room and the demand that I report it. It continued with the way the pharmacist looked at me when he filled my prescription for Valtrex and antiretrovirals and Plan B, just in case. It continued with my self-confinement to the hostel and in internet cafes for the rest of my stay in Istanbul, keeping me in my place as sexual terrorism is supposed to.
Still, it continues.
It continues with the questions from my loved ones, as though the answers matter. It continues with the follow up medical appointments, where they stick needles in my arm and swabs in my vagina and take blood and cultures to see if his violation is going to make me sick of body as well as sick of soul. And as much as I try to keep it from impacting my life, and even if I've managed to reclaim sex and my body in some ways, the violation continues with its constant insertion into my life.
And it will continue for a long while, until the violation of the needles and the swabs because of the violation of his penis is over; until I can fuck someone exactly how I want without the thought giving me a panic attack; until I know he didn't make me sick.
It won't always continue though. I refuse to let him control my life as he controlled my body for those horrible minutes. This isn't courage, it's survival.