What Brock Allen Turner and I have in common
The Internet is all shock and righteous anger right now over the case of Brock Allen Turner, the despicable little creep who raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and his father, who wrote a terrible letter defending his son in which he described the rape as “20 minutes of action.”
As is always the case when these too-frequent stories come to light, I’m outraged by our profligate rape culture and the myriad injustices it breeds. But this case also raised a flicker of something more personal for me.
Brock Allen Turner and I have something in common: we both learned that rape was okay from our fathers.
When I was a little girl, my father had a habit of snatching me up and planting wet, slobbery kisses on my cheeks. This disgusted me, but when I protested, or wiped his drool off my face, he’d whine, “you don’t want to kiss your daddy?” and I would feel horrible about myself.
When I grew into a teenager, he would often walk into my bedroom early in the morning without knocking (when he knew from prior experience that I would be sleeping naked or masturbating) to demand that I get up immediately and do whatever it was he wanted me to be doing.
My father never tried to have sex with me, but his boundary pushing taught me that if a man wanted something from me, I didn’t have the right to hurt his feelings by saying no.
He put rape culture into my bones, where it would eventually inform the events and choices that defined much of my late teens and twenties.
One night, as sometimes happens in college, I got very drunk. That night was a blur of sweat, red plastic cups, ping pong balls, and laughter.
Then, much later, I woke up reeling and fuzzy headed with my skirt around my ankles in the bed of a man I’d been dating for less than six months. It took me until I was hunched over the toilet vomiting to remember a flash of him sweating beer, pulling my skirt down around my ankles, pushing me onto my knees on the cold floor of his dorm room, bending me over the bed, and clumsily stuffing himself, semi-flaccid, inside of me.
As I retched, I felt something sticky trickle from my stinging labia and down my thigh, and I realized it was semen. I thought, “he hasn’t been tested.” That was the deal. He was supposed to have been tested before we had sex without a condom.
You would think that I’d have broken up with him. A woman who had any sense of her worth or her rights would have done so immediately, but my father taught me differently.
It would take six and a half more years of having sex with him; sex I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want, before I could finally extract myself from that wasteland of a relationship. It took another three years after that before it dawned on me that the episode sophomore year was rape, and it was the reason I’d been so unhappy with him all those years.
My father never had sex with me, but he set me up to tolerate violation by men, to accept it, and to confuse it with love.
I’ve never told my father about this because I don’t think he’d believe me; and even if he did, I don’t think he’d understand the role he played. Just like Brock Allen Turner’s father refuses to do. Just like all the other fathers who are still teaching their kids, through sins of commission or omission, that what men want matters more than women’s humanity.
