I am so sorry. Thank you for sharing your story.

One of the reasons why I wrote this story in the first place was because I was seeing a very clear disconnect in how men and women describe and discuss rape. If we don’t use the same definition to describe an experience, how will we ever achieve the understanding and cooperation to prevent it?

For many women, sex is a very emotional experience and there are some men who can’t relate to that at all because they are not wired that way. They downplay the impact that their actions have on their female partners because feelings are so subjective and easy to dismiss in others because they are not quantifiable in anyway. There are no standard measurements for feelings or for emotional damage and that’s one of the reasons why trauma is so difficult to treat.

We seem to be making progress in changing the dialogue around rape but we still have a very long way to go.