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While We’re on the Subject of Rape
Let’s discuss recovery
A day before E. Jean Carroll was awarded $5 million in a civil suit against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation, I wrote about my own rape: My first sexual experience. On my 18th birthday. In a cornfield he drove into on the way back from the movies to my dorm at college. My head slammed into the steering wheel. Altogether, a grotesque perversion of what should have been my introduction to physical love.
Rape was a common thing in the early 1960s. When I look up the statistics, I find that things haven’t changed much in 60 years. One in three girls in the U.S. today is a sexual violence survivor, and one in seven boys.
Why “girls” and “boys” rather than “women” and “men”? Because the great majority of us were victimized at or before age 18. In fact, one in eight girls and one in four boys were under 10.
What can be said about this grotesque perversion? What did people say about my story?
One person who commented on my story wrote to honor me for overcoming my shame. And I did feel almost crippling shame after it happened. But the way I think of it now, in 2023, is that being molested sexually is a little like getting hit by a car while you’re standing on the sidewalk waiting for the light to change. The car shouldn’t be up on the curb…
