Just saying the word Rapeseed makes me uncomfortable. I know it’s, like, some type of food thing, but I’m sure there’s a better thing to call it than actual fucking rape seed. Rape is a really fucked up thing, just saying the word elicits an emotional response, and we often try to pretend it doesn’t happen in order to save ourselves the discomfort of discussing it. I don’t want to write this, but I also kinda do. I feel like, maybe, it’ll be a net good to present this topic in this way. Maybe not.
Content warning: this is a discussion of sexual and emotional abuse. I do go into some detail, and treat the topic with a level of flippancy that some may find jarring. If you’re in a bad place maybe skip this one.
I have sexually assaulted two women in my life.
There. I said it. Now you don’t have to take anything I’ve ever said seriously, because I’m a terrible shitbird and you’re better than me.
I guess I should probably provide some context, if anyone is actually reading this I’m probably running out of time to explain before you decide to click away. I don’t blame you, reader, for being angry or disgusted or offended, or even over the sensational I’m so complicated bullshit and choosing to fuck right off and never come back; I don’t know if I would read a blog post that started out this way. But, alas, I find myself writing this fucking thing, so I guess I’ll do my best to make it worth reading.
I’ll get the first one out of the way, as it seems to me a bit easier to explain than the second. Spousal rape is real. There are an awful lot of people who deny it’s a real thing. Dennis Prager, beloved dipshit-darling of the billionaires who actually run the United States, has written multiple articles promoting the idea that once a woman, and necessarily a woman because these are the people who vehemently defend heteronormativity, marries a man she resigns her sexual agency; that once you become someone’s wife you forfeit your bodily autonomy and you need to accept the dick whenever and wherever and however your man decides to throw it at you. Dennis Prager literally believes and promotes the idea that men have a divine, and legal, right to do whatever they want with their wives’ bodies. Dennis Prager, and all his minions, and all the mother fuckers just like them, literally believe that being married renders a man invulnerable to both the laws and the ethics regarding bodily autonomy, and a woman incapable of making her own decisions — though they usually consider all women incapable of making decisions in the first place and have all sorts of divine, historic, genetic, or even martial justifications for denying them their very humanity. Dear reader, be sure that, despite what Dipshit Denny and his fascist funbunch would have you believe, spousal rape is real and it’s a really big problem. I know plenty men who don’t think so, even if they only feel that way a little bit or wouldn’t admit it to anybody but their priest; I know plenty women who profess these beliefs as well, though I have to believe they’ve only adopted the outward appearance of the enthusiastic tradwife as a survival tactic — nobody wants to be raped, nobody deserves it either, so while I’m sure Dennyboy’s wife isn’t the greatest person in the world, my heart bleeds for her and all the other tradwives out there who are regularly assaulted and abused by their husbands.
One night, a long time ago, my wife and I were doing the sexy time in bed. I don’t remember any details, but somehow we started arguing about something. I don’t have any idea over what we were arguing, but if I had to guess I’d say it was something about money. The only time we argued, which was unfortunately fairly frequent, it was over money. We were struggling. We had kids and we were poor and I was just coming to terms with the fact that I couldn’t be a super cool punk rock artist and had to work an actual job. She struggled with that as well, but she handled it much better than I. There was a point in time when she had three jobs and still managed to be awesome as fuck, I could barely keep my shit together working one job and trying to stay in college. Anyway, we had been doing the sexy and the sexy somehow got interrupted by the outside world and she lost the mood. I, however, did not lose the mood and proceeded to guilt her into getting fucked by me. It was gross. She wasn’t into it at all, she lay there, unmoving, while I furiously pumped myself into her over and over until I briefly lost control of my body, la petite mort. The very next day I profusely apologized to her and attempted to express how disgusted I was, and she handled it like a goddamn warrior. It came up only a few times after that, and I think we had a mutual understanding, but to this day that is one of the few things in my life that I’ve done that I’d undo in an instant if I could.
The other time was another instance of me being manipulative to get what I wanted. There was this girl with whom I had a casual relationship. Back then it seemed like everybody was having sex with everybody else and it wasn’t a big deal. The words girlfriend and boyfriend didn’t really mean much, as my friends and I regularly swapped partners; I think some of us understood that sex and emotional companionship were separate things that often coincide but don’t necessarily rely on one another. I know some of us didn’t, I’m sure some of us just wanted to fit in and debased ourselves to gain the approval of the group. I’m sure some of us didn’t give a shit about any of it and just wanted to feel a brief connection in the hostile world we lived in. I’m a pretty boring person, I don’t go to parties, I don’t go to events, I don’t do daring sexual deeds with strangers; shit, I just cancelled plans for a dinner tomorrow night when I learned there’d be more than six people there! I’m happy being boring, for the most part, and even when I get through this expended spell of crippling depression and, frankly, debilitating anxiety I’ve been living with the past year, I don’t intend to do the heroically demented things I did as a randy teenager — I want to go to artisan cheese tastings and botanical gardens and gallery openings and shit like that.
As a teenager I had a pretty sexually liberated friend group, and for the most part it wasn’t weird. There was this one girl, however, that I wanted to sleep with who wanted nothing to do with me. She wanted to sleep with one of my buddies, and this dude was an awesome fucking person. Look, I’m not trying to paint a picture of raucous naked teenagers just indiscriminately fucking each other all over the place, I only had a couple handfuls of sexual encounters during this time; I just want to illustrate that we all were very flexible in our ideas of what healthy relationships looked like. So, this girl who I wanted to fuck was really interested in my buddy, and one night she made it explicitly evident to him. He wasn’t super into it, but I caught wind of their situation and started wheeling and dealing. I had made passes at this girl in the past, and she passed on them. That night, when she propositioned my buddy, was when I decided to strike. I begged my buddy to have a threesome with her and me. He initially declined, he just wasn’t trying to fuck, but I wore him down over the process of however long we were all consuming too much drugs and alcohol, and at the end of the night we engaged in group sex. She wasn’t ecstatic about it, but she was very partial to him; and I used that as my leverage to sexually take advantage of two of my friends. The details aren’t sharp, there are over twenty years worth of living and many years of heavy drug use hazing them, but ultimately I know for a fact that I manipulated two people I, allegedly, cared about into having sex with me.
Now, at this point I’m wondering why I’m even writing this. I’m sure you are, too. Am I trying to shock you, trying to get artist points by shamelessly baring my soul to you? Am in trying to gain a sort of sympathetic affinity from you, so that the next time you come across something I’ve written you’ll want to read it because, “Hey, I know this guy! He’s got some issues, but at the very least he’s interesting!”? Am I just writing this shit down in an attempt to exorcize it from my soul, so maybe it keeps someone else up at night? Am I actually attempting to examine the issue in a way that might bring some insight to someone else out there in TV Land? I don’t fuckin know. Yes, to all of those reasons, and also no, and who knows?
I myself have been taken advantage of on multiple occasions. There was a period of time when I frequently blacked out at parties and came to some time later in the aftermath of sexual congress, and other strange situations. One time I came to in the middle of it, and it was horrifying in a strangely cosmic way — not just because I was literally being date raped, though that was a type of violation I didn’t think I’d ever have to face, but the whole question of consciousness unraveled in my mind; the forced acknowledgment of the fact that I was regularly putting my body in the condition of being operational, even if in a diminished state, without a mind piloting it made me question the nature of conscious experience and even reality itself. I have been subject to verbal harassment, advances, manipulation and unwanted touching, but because I’m a decently athletic man I’ve always been able to stop it due to physical strength. I’m not telling you these things because I want you to feel bad for me or because I am bravely bringing trauma that I’ve long been keeping inside to light, or even because I think they are as bad as the things that I have done to other people; I am aware of the fact that I have been privileged even through the times when my personal wellbeing was at risk and I am not trying to discount any of the fucked up things I’ve done. I’m just throwing this in here because It’s all connected, or related at least, and I honestly think more people should be willing and able to honestly discuss these things, a lot of really bad shit happens that people try to sweep under the rug.
Sexual assault, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, manipulation; these are very bad things that happen every single day. Maybe, if we confronted this shit rather than just moving forward like it never happened, the victims wouldn’t internalize the grief and shame as much as they are basically forced to when society treats them like deformed aliens, maybe the people responsible for would be able to stop hating themselves and move forward trying to be a better person and heal the wounds they’ve caused, maybe it would benefit society if we stopped pretending that “boys will be boys” and all that weak bullshit that allowed at least two men with credible allegations against them become Supreme Court justices, not to mention multiple US presidents and many senators and members of Congress and probably at least half of every corporation’s executives. Maybe not though, I don’t know, but however you feel about the issue I’m sure you’ll agree that society has a lot of work to do.
I was about to start talking about how much I hate my body; about the fact that I am uncomfortable being naked even when I’m home alone. I read an article a while ago about learning to love yourself. Some woman explained her process of teaching herself to be comfortable in her own skin by dancing naked around her house, and that has been on my list of things to do for quite some time. I thought it might be interesting, and relevant, to include that with this brief discussion of myself and my history with violating sexual boundaries. I think there is a lot of crossplay between the issues, people who have been abused in the past are very likely to have a warped and even painful self image. But, I don’t really want to go on rambling about myself right now, and I suspect you’d appreciate it if I postponed it as well.
Thanks for spending some of your time with me, I sincerely appreciate it. I apologize for subjecting you to whatever the fuck that was.
