What do you call someone if they're not a survivor?

[the_drifter]

So far today, two of my friends have posted with amazing bravery about being survivors of sexual assault. The things they said inspired me to make a post of my own.

I have been alive for 25 years and eight months, and as of today, I have never experienced sexual abuse or assault.

Comments

[anatsuno]

Thank you for this post - I have spent half the day mulling voer something equivalent and finding it extremely hard to formulate my own anger that my being untouched is LUCK, to formulate the trust that I have in the world because of it, trying to work out what the sheer integrity I have enjoyed as a goddamn privilege has brought me, how it has shaped me

[benefitz]

Thanks for writing. These are things that should be said more often. I'm lucky in a different way than you- I'm male, and at least mostly straight. I've been given the privlige to take my sexual safety pretty much for granted. I wish no one had to worry about their personal safety any more than I have.

[bironic]

This is a wonderful post. I have never been sexually abused or threatened, and yet -- even aside from your very valid point that this should not be a result of luck -- as a female the same age as you, I still feel nervous or fearful to walk in certain places at certain times, and that is utterly unfair. I need to shape my plans around worst-case scenarios; ask myself things like: Should I take the train into the city from the town where I work or from the town where I live, because at the station near where I work, I have to walk two blocks alone at night? Just now, I thought of your post and other posts today as I walked from my driveway to my front door, in what feels almost always like a perfectly safe suburban neighborhood, quickly and with keys in hand and without stopping by my mailbox at the street, just because there was a car idling at the sidewalk and I didn't know who it was. Why is it -- why should it be that a girl needs to imagine a man stepping from the car and accosting her, and assess the risk of walking the thirty

[misshepeshu]

Thank you. That was beautifully written. I have, by and large, been lucky. Aside from random idiots grinding up against me on a couple of salsa dancing occasions, which are at worst annoying, the only thing remotely resembling sexual assault that I've experienced was when a co-worker of mine sexually harassed me when I was 22. It was very mild by any standard--he didn't physically hurt me, he just touched my knee, said a number of really inappropriate, ugly things to me, and got me to give him a peck on the cheek. The last made me very angry in retrospect. At the time, I gave it to him just to make him go the fuck away; now, I wish I'd pushed him away instead, or quietly refused, or yelled at him, or punched him in the nose. Anything but give in. I was shocked at how strongly I reacted to it--for weeks, I felt dirty and awful, as if it was my fault, and I didn't want to touch my male friends for some days. And that part made me really angry, because my male friends were (still are) awesome, and the fact that one douchebag made me

[misshepeshu]

Addendum: given how strongly I reacted to my very, very minor incident, and how angry it still makes me feel when I think back on it, I can't even begin to imagine how much trauma survivors of true sexual assault undergo.

[msilverstar]

A very fine post, thank you for expressing it.

I guess you call us lucky. Not stronger or cleverer or better in any way than our sisters who are survivors, just luckier.