Thanks for this, alto. Charlotte’s piece is great, very insightful. Now someone needs to write the story of the rapist who isn’t an athlete. Because an athlete didn’t rape me or, what we later came to find out, 3 others. Those 3 were the ones brave enough to take evidence to the police. There were others. Statistics prove that usually for every 1 outcry, there are 40 more victims. I pray they won’t be victims for long but resilient, courageous “thrivers” who live life long, well and happy lives.

This is deadly serious business.

My rapist had well connected parents in a state next to mine. They made a deal with prosecutors to let him stay in a private facility for the mentally ill for 3 months. 3 rapes, 3 months? I don’t know. His mother approached my father to do the same. Why sully my reputation? Why drag me through the publicity and shame? Why indeed?

My dad knew I had already tried to kill myself when she approached him the same day the doctors told him what I would have to go through to try to get my bladder to work, again, maybe. He insisted on a 5 year commitment to a state facility. He told me that next summer. I was raped in early January. We never spoke of it again until the summer of 2005 when he was dying. Out of the blue, I saw pain in his eyes. He’d been in agonizing pain for months. I reached for his morphine before I noticed this pain was different. He took my hand and apologized for “protecting" me. Even he, overprotective of all 3 of us, had come to understand he had helped rob me of my voice. What happened happened. I have no regrets. I am happy with who I am and I never loved my father less. His actions I understood. I was furious he bore pain inflicted by my rapist. Every person who loved me did.

I am sure the rapist never bore pain, shame or sorrow or any other feeling that arises from empathy. He might have felt regret that he’d been caught. I was told he never came so close to killing until me. I suspect he came closer next time. After all, to his mind, who would care? In his eyes we are not people. Why should he pay? Or change? Had I or anyone else said “No” stronger or more loudly or insisted that I get pleasure from an act I never sought, he wouldn’t have suddenly said, “Wow! I respect you! You bet!” And neither woukd those who put girls in fear in the “grays” of Sherry’s response. People do not feel fear out of the blue. It is a primal instinct.

What you and Charlotte make clear is that people do not matter to “him” so nothing one says, no matter how one acts or what one may demand will lead him to want to change himself. And we shouldn’t have the onus placed on us. Because it is only his fault.

This isn’t about sex or making love (duh) but about power.

Here, at last, is the point I wanted to make in my original screed: we can’t change anyone but ourselves.

That’s a lesson it took me almost 50 years to truly absorb and I wasn’t learning it about rapists. I was learning it about everyone. I truly thought everyone wanted to be better. “Better” or whatever word one wishes to substitute is subjective. Everyone has autonomy. Everyone is responsible for themselves.

And why would anyone change when they are getting just exactly what they want?

If the act of rape or, let’s say, cheese making, gets them what they wish, why would someone saying “no” make any difference to them? If it gets to that point, it is already way too late. Why would insisting to a rapist that we want to experience pleasure, too, matter? Why? We aren’t people to them.

But I know I am preaching to the choir, my singing friend.

I had hoped this might somehow pass with my generation, not the Clinical Malignant Narcissism deemed incurable because that creature will always persist. I had hope that the perverse idea that a victim is at fault for not saying the “magic words” to stop an illegal, immoral act that most don’t commit or defend.

Abra kadabra…

Sherry Caris, as usual, is teaching me a lesson: that perverse idea, at least, is more cultural and pervasive than I understood.

I tend to avoid these “rape wouldn’t happen if only…” conversations because they are always the same. And they make me sad.

I have told my story to others who are clearly struggling with its aftermath be it date rape, violent or “gray” and still are strong enough to write it on Medium. Women and men and boys. It rips my heart. I prefer to write about healing and hope because I know it and I want everyone else to know it, too, and to know it can be theirs. As long as we keep changing the subject to how the victim could have avoided the crime, that is a hard thing to do. so I avoid those made up stories, usually.

I believe people can change. I certainly did from better to horrid to hero. But what the hell is going on when all these years later it is still the fault of the “non person” that the rapist assaults?

Empathy weeps as does decency.

There is a reason the Jesus told those men with raised stones to toss theirs 1st but only if they, themselves, had never sinned. There is a reason that Joseph Welch said, “Have you no sense of decency?”

I believe it is time for us, as a world, to use the Golden Rule always and first. I realize that sociopaths won’t but it is time for all of us who aren’t sociopaths to speak out, to sit in, to speak up, to do what we must to give voice to decency and justice. And not just in cases of rape but in cases where justice is lost to privilege, greed and power.

I can’t blame another for anything I do. I can’t grow and “become” until I see and accept who I am, good and bad.

I must work hardest to see and accept and when I feel defensive. Rather than attack, I must stop, withdraw and be exceedingly self-honest, until I battle through to a better me.

Those who can’t feel defensive won’t but those of us who can will grow and use our voices for those who have lost theirs or have theirs but want ours, too. We all must do the harder thing, the right thing. Social justice will usher in God’s Kingdom on earth. Jesus said that, too. I just paraphrased it. We must love with agape love, the love that transcends, not love bound in ego.

Thanks for writing the harder thing, for speaking up.