When There Were No Words

I was sexually assaulted by a rich, entitled, drunk white dude over thirty years ago, and as I’m sure is the case for every woman who suffered the same fate, every time a Brock Turner or a Brett Kavanaugh turns up in the news, it’s painful. But each time sexual assault comes up in the headlines and I devour every bit of breaking news and analysis I can get my hands on, I gain new perspective, even though I have spent countless hours in the past decades ruminating on what happened to me.

Here are a few things that rise to the surface this time:

The evolution of terms to describe sexual assault has moved at a glacial pace…and this week it feels like it’s actually regressing.

Back when I was assaulted by a college classmate in 1986, there wasn’t a term for what happened. The lack of a term made it all the more difficult to process. After it happened, I know I was in daze, I know I was confused (confusion, I know now, can be one of the nastier tricks sexual assault plays on survivors), I know I felt awful, and in retrospect I was clearly dealing with PTSD. But at the time I didn’t have a term to describe what it was to be forced by someone I knew to have sex. ‘Rape’ was something that happened in dark alleys, perpetrated by strangers. Female leadership at my college, just a few years earlier, had shrugged off reports of rape on campus as “just a girl who got drunk and woke up with regrets” (or something to that effect). Rape didn’t happen at nice places like Middlebury College.

The thing is, humans need language in order to understand the world around them — words make the world real. Words provide currency for the human experience, and that currency unites us.

One way I can describe what I went through in the first few years after the assault, trying to process what happened, is that, cliche though it sounds, I was alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

The lack of a word was that isolating.

Then came the term ‘date rape’.

At last I had something — something! — to use to describe what had happened to me.

The problem was it was all wrong, and I knew it. Using the term not only made me uncomfortable, but was even more confusing. ‘Date rape’ implies that at least some point in the interaction between the perp and the victim, there was some semblance of a match, of willingness, of enjoyment, of engagement. It suggests that something that should have been good went oddly, almost unaccountably, wrong. Buried within the term ‘date rape’ is the notion that the victim should have detected the probability of things going south. Should have known. Should have gotten out. Shouldn’t have gone out in the first place. Buried within the term is victim-blaming.

Over the years since ‘date rape’ fell out of the lexicon, I’ve probably used the term ‘rape’ to describe what happened to me no more than a handful of times. Because violence in the general sense of the word (beating) wasn’t involved, it feels like too strong a word for what I went through. When I use it with respect to what I experienced, I feel like I am snatching gravitas from women who are beaten as well as sexually assaulted — from women who are very violently sexually assaulted.

I suspect my squirminess with using the term, however, has less to do with the facts of the matter than it does with what should be outdated notions of what a rape survivor is. (For a brilliant take on the semantic underpinnings of the culture of violence against women, be sure to read this, by Lili Loofbourow.)

“I was sexually assaulted,” is a phrase I’m far more comfortable using, but let’s not forget that only in the past few years has the term ‘sexual assault’ become common parlance, a term general enough to capture a broad range of experiences. That broad range is still infuriating, but it’s better than nothing.

But still, for decades, so much of my struggle was rooted in there not being a word or a term to describe what happened to me. Trauma needs words. The right words.

So when, in the past few days, the term ‘rough house’ is bandied about as a term to excuse alleged sexual assault, I see red. (Plus…even if it was ‘roughhousing’ — what teenagers do you know ‘roughhouse’ that way?)

Just because you can’t remember everything doesn’t mean the memories you do have are inaccurate.

All too often, when women accuse a man of sexual assault, she is quizzed about every single detail, and the moment she can’t remember a detail, she’s accused of making the whole thing up.

But women who have been sexually assaulted will tell you that the memories of the trauma are like shards — painful, sharp bits and pieces. Each piece is real, but not all of the pieces are there. Just because memories of what happened decades ago seem spotty to someone else doesn’t mean it never happened. In my case I remember the year, the date, the the day of the week, what words were said, the gray light in the room as dawn broke, where the stereo was in the room, and the fact that I had to go to the bathroom. I remember with whom I had lunch the next day, and where. I remember thinking, as I ate that lunch, that there was a hole in me. But I do not remember what I was wearing the night it happened or who else I saw that night.

Doubt that that’s how it really is? Then read what a former sex crimes prosecutor has to say in The Washington Post.

It’s such a relief to be able to talk about this openly.

What happened to me more than 30 years ago was awful, and it devastated me. Carrying that with me all these years, and never knowing whom I could trust with that crucial bit of information about me, has been one of my chief burdens. Generally I have erred on the side of sharing rather than not, and I was probably more open about it than some people were comfortable with.

In my twenties, while drunk (yes, there was some self-medicating going on) and on the phone with my mother, I told her I had been raped in college. She never mentioned it again. But then, she raised me with the term ‘boys don’t like used goods’ so that’s no surprise.

It’s incredibly cathartic to see #MeToo take off the way it has, and I feel blessed every time I write about one of the most private, confounding, and damaging experiences of my life, and my friends pipe up, publicly or privately, with support and/or their own stories of assault.

I never knew the sisterhood was so vast and its bonds so deep, and for that knowledge I am profoundly grateful.

Never before has the political been so personal.

Yes, I’ve always been liberal, and yes, I’ve always been keenly aware of the importance of protecting women’s reproductive rights. But this time around, with the prospect of a man who mouthed ‘bitch’ with respect to Hillary Clinton and has now been accused of attempted rape landing on the Supreme Court and making decisions that would prevent women who gotten pregnant from rape from getting abortions, I literally have the chills. That is 16 kinds of fucked up, and I will not stand for it.

My vagina and I have always voted a big bad streak of blue, but this time, we are angry as fuck. Never before have I been so deeply committed to transforming America’s halls of power. I’m done with the white dudes, I’m done with the bro culture, I’m done with the good ole boy network. For the first time in my political consciousness, I am letting myself envision a government where white men — where assholes like Brett Kavanaugh — don’t have the upper hand, and they’re not the majority. It’s time for them to be what they should be — a shriveled, pathetic minority.

Brett Kavanaugh has touched nerve that even Brock Turner didn’t.

Well, that’s not totally fair, because the whole campus athlete thing made me want to scream (so let’s say they’ve touched slightly different but related nerves), but the fact that Brett Kavanaugh is my generation hits closer to a different home. What he allegedly did he did to a girl when she was fifteen years old happened when I was fifteen years old. And, when a year or two later I was suddenly dumped into the private school culture of the DC area (I went to a private all girls boarding school just outside DC), suddenly, there they all were: The Brett Kavanaughs. All of them reeking of Polo and entitlement and misogyny.

I am delighted by the fact that something one of those fuckers did in high school — that he was too drunk to remember or too careless to remember — is coming back to haunt him. Payback. Because that, ultimately, is one of the most massive injustices of being the survivor of sexual assault: the fundamental imbalance of the weight of the event in memory. What isn’t even worth remembering to the perp is often the most traumatic single event in the victim’s life. The reality of that massive discrepancy is beyond infuriating.

To the Brett Kavanaughs and Brock Turners of the world: We are coming for you.

We are sloughing off our shame.

The shame is now yours.