This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
TW: Sexual assault
I did not consent the first time I had penetrative sex.
It was with a woman and I did the penetrating.
I have almost no memory of it, other than a faint recollection of her voice and sensing her presence above me.
We worked together. She and I had been dating, had fooled around a little. I had actually planned to meet her at a bar that night after she got off work but she was running late and I’d had too much to drink so I told our friends/co-workers that I was heading home and to tell her I’ll see her later. I stumbled the several blocks to my apartment and passed out on my bed.
She told me in the morning when I woke up next to her that my door wasn’t locked so she let herself in. And then gushed about our night together. A night I didn’t remember.
Somehow I got her out of my apartment while maintaining some semblance of composure. It helped that I had planned to leave on a solo road trip that morning, my first real time off since I’d started my job nine months before. After she left I made sure I had everything I needed and booked it out of town.
I needed to not think about the terrible thing I had done.
I remember my father once telling me a story about when he and my mother were dating.
They were both in college. I think they were sitting on the roof of the porch of his fraternity one night or something. They were very much in love. And they were both virgins. They had discussed sex, I think my father told me, but that was all. But this was a beautiful moment. And my father says he turned to my mother and asked if she wanted to. And she said “not yet.” So they continued to wait until they married.
This story and its lore around penetrative sex very much informed how I pursued romantic and sexual relationships in my life. It led me to consciously strive to never compel someone to do something they didn’t want to do. I was terrified of overstepping in that realm. To me, and to much of our culture, this was honorable. And compulsion in a relationship is admittedly ill-advised. But this mindset still had misogynistic underpinnings; my upbringing very much put women on a pedestal, objectifying them. Consent is important, but in the context of control, not partnership. As the man, I was meant to be in control.
My college girlfriend and I got drunk one New Year’s Eve and I attempted to go down on her. We had fooled around before but nothing beyond mutual masturbation and dry humping. I don’t remember specifically whether I had asked or whether she had asked or given me any sort of signal. Yet, I still proceeded. And she started sobbing and I suddenly realized what I was doing and stopped and apologized and held her and apologized and I don’t know how but eventually we fell asleep.
We broke up six months later. For many reasons, not least of which was that I had moved halfway across the country for my first job after graduation. But I was sure that what I had done that night began our sundering. I had lost control. I was the monster.
Sexual violence and victimization have, sadly, always been a part of the human experience. Women have been the most visible victims—be it through cultural mores, legal frameworks or physical differences. Most of civilization has long considered women “less than” in comparison to men and such a concept lends itself to the dehumanization of a group.
Men—as fathers, brothers, husbands, religious or temporal leaders—have long controlled and compelled women. Not always with malice, but malice is not necessary for coercion.
Feminism and the growing empowerment of women has chipped away at the outright disenfranchisement of women and dismissal of claims of being forced into sexual acts and experiences among other things. And yet, that disenfranchisement persists. And, alongside it, the idea that men are the dominant partner in any relationship with a woman.
Men, our culture says, welcome all opportunities for sex. Men are not supposed to be upset when they “get some.” Men are the ones who need to be restrained. Men are always the ones in control. Men are always the monsters.
I knew what I had done to my college girlfriend; my almost immediate mortification at the time did not undo what had happened. I was to blame. Because I was the monster.
Those same feelings came flooding back when I woke up that morning months after that break up next to a woman who told me I had been inside her. At no point did I think to accuse her of breaking into my apartment or of violating my trust much less my person, despite those things being very true. No, this was my fault. I got drunk and lost my faculties. I left my door unlocked. I led her on somehow. Hell, I didn’t even have the decency to remember fucking her.
I lost control. Again. I was the monster. Again.
This is where our culture’s penchant for doing everything possible to reduce sex to this magical, transcendent, life-defining act while not talking about it specifically does everyone a disservice. I did not receive an abstinence-only education in sexual health through school or family. However, there was very little discussion about consent and the nuance that it comes with. Same goes for boundaries and how that can include some acts and not others. Anyone participating in sex, not just women, needs to consent and be clear about their boundaries. And that there’s nothing shameful about those boundaries or sex itself, period.
Anyway, I went on my road trip. It was to the Oregon coast; I had not yet had a chance to see it since moving west. The novelty of that experience—of seeing sea stacks, hearing crashing waves, smelling salt, feeling impossibly fine sand on my feet—helped me forget what happened just before I got behind the wheel.
Once back at work, I managed to compartmentalize the experience and the feelings that festered with it. And I avoided her, which, thankfully, I didn’t have to do that for long; she was fired several weeks later. She left town but returned several months later, as she had left some of her stuff in a storage unit and needed to collect it. I found out in passing and made sure I was out of town at the time. On one level, I considered myself a coward, running away from facing up to what I did. Even monsters can have some self-awareness.
“Forcible rape” was one of the initial eight violent crimes the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation began tracking in 1930 as part of its efforts to consistently quantify and analyze crime across the United States. Until 2012, forcible rape was defined in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” Rape of a male, as far as national crime reporting went, did not exist, and that was also the case at the state criminal law level. Needless to say, this ignored male victims of sexual violence as queer men are just as capable of victimizing other queer men.
State laws around sex crimes began to be reformed in the 1970s to be more gender neutral as did the FBI’s 2012 update to its forcible rape definition: “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This was an improvement, yet, still fell short—only someone who was penetrated was defined as a victim. Our heritage of viewing penetration as the dominant act—an act naturally endowed upon men—continued to narrowly frame who was the aggressor and who was the victim.
This and many other culturally-enforced misperceptions and concepts around sexual coercion were the focus of a 2014 paper in the American Journal of Public Health that looked at sexual victimization data from five different surveys conducted by federal agencies over a two-year period.
The researchers, both women, acknowledge early on that female sexual victimization was ignored for centuries, remains entrenched in societies around the world and that “sexual victimization is rooted in gender norms and is worthy of social, legal, and public health intervention.” But just as female sexual victimization is a cultural hallmark, so is the false belief that men cannot be sexually victimized.
Among the paper’s findings:
“...in 2011 the CDC reported results from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), one of the most comprehensive surveys of sexual victimization conducted in the United States to date. The survey found that men and women had a similar prevalence of nonconsensual sex in the previous 12 months (1.270 million women and 1.267 million men).”
“…multiyear analysis of the BJS National Crime Victim Survey (NCVS) found no difference between male and female victims in the use of a resistance strategy during rape and sexual assault (89% of both men and women did so). A weapon was used in 7% of both male and female incidents, and although resultant injuries requiring medical care were higher in women, men too experienced significant injuries (12.6% of females and 8.5% of males).”
Many sexual victimization studies and surveys exclude specific populations of men, namely those held in juvenile detention, jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers. And those studies and surveys that do engage with those populations frequently fail to quantify the real impact of sexual victimization of respondents due to not just gender norms but risk for retaliation.
Agencies and media reinforce pre-existing notions around sexual victimization in how they describe and report on sex crimes. This ranges from providing extensive data and analysis around female sex victims while making little or no mention of male sex victims to callous news reporting such as “a 2009 CBS News report about a serial rapist who raped 4 men [and] concluded, ‘No one has been seriously hurt.’
All of the above and much more feeds into the existing social construct that insists men can’t be victimized sexually, the researchers said. It reinforces that “female-perpetrated abuse is rare or nonexistent, male victims experience less harm, that for men all sex is welcome…” It inculcates “jokes about prison rape, the notion that ‘real men’ can protect themselves, and the fallacy that gay male victims likely ‘asked for it.’”
…it is time to move past the male perpetrator and female victim paradigm. Overreliance on it stigmatizes men who are victimized, risks portraying women as victims, and discourages discussion of abuse that runs counter to the paradigm, such as same-sex abuse and female perpetration of sexual victimization.
Years ago, she apologized. She convinced a friend of mine to get in touch with me. I think she sent it via email. I did not keep it. My friend encouraged me to forgive her. And I did. But I also told her I never wanted to speak with her again. And we haven’t.
I still do not know what to call what happened. Intellectually, I know that I wasn’t a monster. That time.
And yet, I still have a tinge of shame about it all. Despite knowing that I did absolutely nothing wrong, I want to take ownership for what happened. Because that is how I was taught—to take ownership for what my body has done, whether I’m aware of it or not. As the exchange typically went in my childhood home, whenever Something Happened, the kid would say “I didn’t mean to!” and the parent would say “Well, you didn’t mean not to.”
Our culture is obsessed with policing who, how, when, where and why people have sex. Bu it does a piss poor job of talking about it plainly. That’s the education I had to embark upon throughout my adulthood, especially since accepting my queerness and beginning to explore it. I’ve been very fortunate to interact with a lot of men who are clear about what they want and expect the same from me. It’s actually refreshing given how it was instilled in me to be reluctant to discuss sex with a woman, specifically when it came to personal comfort levels and boundaries. It helped me further process what happened to me and how it’s ok for me to be upset and angry at her.
But, even when you feel you’ve learned the right lessons, drawn the right lines around yourself, understand the consent you’ve given, even fully believe you are on the same page as your partner, things can still haunt you.
Things can still go very wrong.
Harry1 and I had broken up two months before. I was trying to find connections, build my own circle. I kept flirting with guys on Scruff, though sadly most of the ones I enjoyed chatting with the most lived too far away for any real possibility of meeting up.
Then Joe2 hit me up. At first glance his profile was a yellow flag (he had a profile picture but it was just from the shoulders down) but what the hell. Didn’t live near me but traveled here regularly because he grew up in the region and owned rental property. Our messages—be their topics horny or otherwise—weren’t remarkable nor concerning. He was like any other early middle-age queer dude just looking to have some fun when he was in town.
Finally, there was a time when I was available and he was visiting. We arranged to meet up beforehand at a brewpub for a vibe check and a drink. When I first saw him I was struck by his stature; I had not had the impression he was a short king. But, height is not a big deal for me; he had a cute face and we still had decent conversation. He paid the bill and said to follow him in my car to one of his rental properties.
I don’t know how to write about what happened next.
I have descriptors—held, pressure, tight, pain.
I have feelings—embarrassed, humiliated, ashamed.
I have what I wrote in my journal a few days after.
I don’t want to call it that. I know it’s not my fault. I don’t necessarily believe it, but I know it.
I’ve said it wasn’t traumatic.
Joe has tried to reach out once or twice since it happened. I’ve ignored him. Blocked him on Scruff, to be exact. I should confront him. But what if I’m wrong? What if I’m remembering it all wrong? In my own head I keep admonishing myself for letting it happen. I’m not a victim. I can’t be a victim. I was even looking to bottom. “That’s what I get for hooking up with a top dom short king,” I said to a few friends.
This is why there’s a final scene in horror movies that suggests the monster is still alive and well, just waiting to strike again. We just can’t learn our lesson.
NOTE
I want to thank
, and Harry for graciously being early readers of this piece and providing some very important feedback that led to some changes. I will be honest in saying I don’t know how I feel about this piece. But then, we often don’t know how to feel when things are unresolved.Pseudonym for my first boyfriend, who I wrote about a few weeks ago.
Another pseudonym.
I've been thinking a lot about the label "monster" that you applied to yourself since first reading this essay. I understand the impulse but feel it's unfair to use it in the instances as you've explained. I didn't detect intentional cruelty or malice.
I implore you: don't be so tough on yourself while excavating one's mistakes and learning from them is valuable but it doesn't require you to be the malignant perpetrator.
I am sad to learn that you experienced such a terrible encounter with a new man while you were exploring and making yourself vulnerable and hope it doesn't deter you from taking the leap to meet new, worthy men in the future. 🤗
The more open society becomes about topics such as the one you address here, the better.