A young man who was defiled by a
woman and then decided to date her so
he could take control of the situation has
opened up about his experience.
He said:
Ten years ago, I blacked out and was
defiled by a woman who I proceeded to
date for the next year and a half of my
life.
Like most college freshmen, I drank too
much. And one night, I drank too much
and was pitched out of a frat house in the
dead of winter. I don’t remember much,
but I do remember being initially grateful
for all the hands that helped push me
home and into my dorm room that night.
I woke up in my lofted bed, and there
were about a half dozen people in my
room hanging out. My clothing was on
the floor, and I felt an invisible miasma of
shame engulfing me. Maybe it’s the
hindsight talking, but I had a premonition
that something wicked was coming.
Maybe it’s because my future defiler was
in the room. My eyes retreated into orbit
again.
I had met her at the beginning of
freshman year. My dorm room was in one
of three male-occupied floor towers. I
was lonely and glad for any friends I
could get. I had a long-distance girlfriend;
she had a long-distance boyfriend, and
being able to have someone to share
these things with shunted the pain. She
was nice to me.
And then she defiled me.
When I regained my bearings that night,
my friends were gone and gravity was a
mystery to me. She was in my bed, and I
couldn’t tell if my back was facing the
ceiling or the mattress, nor could I
identify whose sweat belonged to whom.
All I could feel was pressure, and after
coming to my senses I put together what
was happening. I felt impotent to stop it.
The morning that followed came with a
paradigm shift. I was embarrassed and
shells hocked and refused to believe it
had happened, even though she was next
to me when I regained consciousness. As
a man, I felt especially compelled to hide
what happened to me, lest I come off as
weak.
I asked her what had happened, and she
confirmed all the details, which included
consent and desire that seemed
impossible to fish out of the folds of my
brain.
At that point, I decided to own it. Because
if I owned it, it wasn’t embarrassing and
it didn’t strip me of my masculinity. I had
never heard of this happening to anybody
else, and researching it online made my
problem seem more real to me, which
was frightening.
Panic flooded me and all I wanted to do
was scrub my soul of everything that was
demoralizing and demasculinizing about
the experience. My interpretation became
consensual s*x, and I proclaimed that s*x
was awesome, even though I had no clue
what it felt like at all. I bragged to my
neighbors, who could hear her wailing
through paper-thin walls. The more I
bragged, the more the agony subsided.
I was steadfast to make the loss of my
virginity mean something. I immediately
broke it off with my long-distance
girlfriend. And my coping mechanism was
to make my defiler my partner, giving
purpose and intent to something horrible.
The path to admitting to other people
what actually happened to me was a tricky
one. But as I matured years after it
occurred, I was able to grasp that my
concept of masculinity was childish, and
only rooted in weird stereotypes.
Being able to admit that I was defiled
brought my life into high-definition levels
of clarity. Especially when everybody’s
response was the same—an awkward
pause, followed by a facial expression
that goes hand-in-hand with being upset.
And then I pulled the trigger and I
ended it.
One week after we broke up, she resorted
to violence. When the cops came to our
apartment and she refused to let them in
after they threatened to break down the
door, I felt like I was getting my first dose
of reality in nearly two years. Days later,
she was in another apartment a few
football fields away. From that point on, I
only saw her two more times on campus
before fleeing Ohio.
While I’m able to talk about what
happened to me 10 years later, make no
mistake: being defiled seriously damaged
me and had a profound impact on how I
engaged with women years after it
happened.
While it’s not something I think about
every day, it passes through my mind
every week through various triggers. It’s
never going to leave me, and I’d like it to
stay that way, as I’m not prepared to
reject the strong person I’ve become
throughout all of this.
To every man out there who has
experienced something similar: You are
not weak and you are not a boy. You were
not bested or conquered; you were taken
advantage of in a way that precludes all
gender conventions. Recovering from
r*pe is gender agnostic: it all begins with
being able to admit what happened to
you. However you choose to take that step
—be it through therapy or confidentiality
—is up to you
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