My boyfriend ‘sort-of’ raped me. But I didn’t break up with him
Monica tan
Some will be eager to tell me what happened was most definitely rape. Others will say I’m crazy to even compare it. And that’s why we need to talk about it
women in bed distressed
‘It was not rape, but my reaction was too involuntary, and its intensity too high, to say that nothing bad happened.’ Photograph: Patrick Coughlin/Getty
This is not my story of rape. But it is a story with rape-ish qualities.
The man and I had been fighting. We fought and then we made love, and as we did he said, “I want to come inside of you.” This was not dirty talk – it was a proposal. I told him not to, I didn’t want him to.
When he finished he said, “I did it, I came inside of you!” Then added, “fuck you” sticking his middle finger up at me. His face, pink with a slick of sweat, was full of fury and glee.
I don’t know how to write what happened next without sounding pathetic. All I will say is that it was an automatic reaction. It came on without consideration. I burst into tears. I ran into the shower, crying and said over and over again, “get it out of me”.
I call what he did ‘rape-like’. He called it ‘pushing my boundaries’
That’s the most violent bit of the story. I call what he did “rape-like”. He called it “pushing my boundaries”. You say tomato, I say sexual assault.
Everything else is messy. I didn’t even break up with him afterwards. Even though we’d only been dating for a couple of months and fought all the time. He drank a bottle of wine a day, talked about how much he loved my vagina in public, and was plagued with mental ghosts that tortured him but, apparently, also bestowed him the ability to change people’s energies.
None of that bothered me. I have a high tolerance for weirdness. He was under my skin. It was intoxicating to feel like a pinch of salt dissolved in his black, turbulent seas.
Eventually, he broke up with me. He resented how I reacted to his “boundary pushing” – said it made him feel like a rapist. And held up the fact I didn’t want him to come inside of me (I wasn’t on the pill) as evidence I didn’t really love him.
The trauma of being sort-of raped evaporated fairly quickly. I don’t feel like what happened was rape, or that I’m a rape victim. On the scale of sexual assault this incident, for me, lies halfway between a stolen kiss on the cheek and a full-blown rape. They are all different kinds of assault, but connected.
It would be easy to efficiently cut him down with the word “rapist”, particularly when I will not face any reprimands for my own imperfect behaviour during the relationship. But in fact I have nothing but compassion for my sort-of rapist, the same kind I reserve for every miserable man, woman and dog on this planet.
It was not rape, but my reaction was too involuntary, and its intensity too high, to say that nothing bad happened. Something happened. And it had the whiff of rape.
I suspect many of you reading this will be eager to tell me what happened.
“That was most definitely rape.”
“How can you even consider that close to rape?”
(Insert poll here.)
I will be the first to admit that previously in 2010, when two Swedish women accused Julian Assange of rape and sexual molestation – specifically that consensual sex turned into non-consensual sex without a condom – it raised two warring impulses in me: a default sympathy for sexual-assault victims, and an instinct that Assange sits at the center of an international conspiracy witch hunt.
Life exists in the noisy grey bits between a ‘no’ and full, enthusiastic consent.
Rape is a legal term: “unlawful sexual intercourse without consent of the victim”. But such incisive language belies real life, and doesn’t help us talk about all this. Life exists in the noisy grey bits between a “no” and full, enthusiastic consent.
The Swedish courts may eventually decide whether in the eyes of the law Assange is a rapist, if they ever get their hands on him.
But we should not allow the justice system alone to clearly delineate for us what makes a rapist and what makes, let’s say, a garden-variety dickhead.
Particularly when the outcome of not being able to talk about sort-of rapes is that, in reality, it ends up giving the perpetrators of lesser sexual offences a free pass.
There is nothing more dangerous than shutting down public debate around sexual assault and domestic violence with a dismissive “lock the perpetrators up and throw away the key”. Such violence is rife in our society – in many shapes and guises – and any hope for change demands we face this ordinary thing squarely in the eye, and find better ways to talk about it, as troubling and deeply uncomfortable as that process is.
Now that I’ve taken a small sip at the cup of rape, I understand just how terrible it is to have another human being rob me of agency, and mark my body as their domain. It has taught me to look beyond troubled legal definitions of “rape” and instead focus on how victims feel. Also it has made me seek to understand better the complications behind that very difficult question: what motivates the perpetrators?