Am I Just Another Assault Story?
My partner and I were up late one night, after I had just put down a book that depicted a college rape scene. It was the story we are now trained to recognize: College Girl gets drunk at a party. College Boy takes her to his room. College Boy takes off College Girl’s clothes. She says no, or tries. He rapes her. She loses all her friends. He graduates on time. She doesn’t. End scene.
I closed the book and sighed. I didn’t cry, but I wanted to.
“Do you want to talk about it, or do you want space?” my partner asked, tentatively.
“I don’t think I really have anything to say about it,” I responded, after a long pause. “Because the truth is, I don’t have anything new to say on the subject.”
That fear, that feeling of not having anything new to say about sexual assault, has been following me for some time now. I experience it most intensely when I contemplate pitching essays about my assault to various publications, feeling the weight of imposter syndrome in each sentence I write and delete, write and delete. I start wondering if my story just isn’t interesting enough to share. I’ve never seen stories like mine in print before, so why should I think anyone would want to read it? It was traumatic to me, yes. And it affected my life, the way I see my body, and the way I understand male entitlement and privilege. But maybe it’s not something people can or should care about, not at a time when there are better essays out there, ones that are more gripping, following a clearer story arc.
“Look!” I try to say to editors, as if waving my arms frantically in the air. “My story is nuanced! I’m queer. I am a peer educator/raging feminist/women’s studies major and deal with the pressure of thinking I should have known better. I didn’t realize it happened for months. I confronted him about it, and when it was unclear if he fully understood, I confronted him again just to be sure.”
I find myself grasping at pieces of my story, the same story that I have been trying to sew together for the better part of a year to make sense of what happened to me, to my body. I have taken to calling it my “non-story story,” a narrative that isn’t particularly exciting, but rather a commonplace situation of repeated non-consent, coercion, and confusion. On some days, I can believe this non-story story is important for at least that one reader who craves a narrative that resonates. On other days, I’ll believe that I’m a self-centered millennial writer who thinks the world cares about my pathos and my writing as little more than glorified diary entries. And on the worst days, I start to believe that nobody cares about my story because this kind of thing just happens to everyone.
I start wondering if editors are as numb to these stories as I am, haunted by that morning a few months back when a friend sent me an essay she had written about her assault, which was similar to mine, that I read over a cup of coffee and fried eggs, as casually as I read the New York Times or scroll through my Twitter feed. I was outraged by her experience, yes, but that narrative — the hands, the subtly ignored no, the rallying cry — was not new. And now, I’m wondering if we have really reached the point where we see the phrase “college sexual assault,” feel a hint of anger, blink twice, and move on.
The statistics say one in five women and one in 16 men in college will experience sexual violence, but we know that statistic falls short. Sexual violence is woefully underreported, and that is especially true for male survivors. Not to mention, that statistic says nothing of how people who are queer, trans, non-binary, and/or non-white are especially likely to experience violence. But that statistic, the feeling that violence affects everyone I love, seems to run a central part of my life.
It’s always somewhere in the back of my mind, like when I hear the voice of the woman I volunteered with at a local middle school. Every week, we left campus to teach sixth grade girls about allyship and girl power, convincing them through construction paper projects and friendship bracelets that they, too, could be activists. While driving back one week, I mentioned the statistic.
“I feel like that’s just…really high,” my co-volunteer said.
“Well, yeah, it is,” I replied. We didn’t get along very well and didn’t talk much on our weekly commute.
“Right, but I’m saying I don’t think it’s true. Like, does that include people who have sex while drunk?”
“That’s called rape,” I wanted to yell. But I was a freshman in college. She was a senior and liked to remind me of that. We spent the rest of the ride in silence.
I hear my own voice at the kitchen table, talking with my mother over weekend cups of coffee, one of our last moments together before I left for my year abroad. She drinks it black, and I’ve been trying my whole life to get accustomed to black coffee, too.
“Sometimes I think about how I’m really lucky to not have been assaulted. Given the likelihood, it’s honestly pretty amazing that I haven’t,” I said, peering into my mug. She nodded, solemn at the thought. Neither one of us had realized at that point that I had been assaulted, maybe even more than once.
And I hear the voices of students — about 300 of them — at Take Back the Night my sophomore year, all of us screaming into the quad.
“One, two, three, four we can’t take it anymore!” I started.
“Five, six, seven, eight, no more violence, no more hate!” They responded.
My voice cracked at that line, “We can’t take it anymore.” My eyes filled with tears, not because I felt triumphant or powerful, but because I knew we would continue to take it. I knew this would keep happening. I knew it wasn’t just one in five or one in 16.
So many people have this non-story story, it seems, and that fear — that it happens to everyone — feels increasingly real.
Is my narrative, then, really that interesting? Intriguing? Necessary? Can sharing my story actually add to the conversation, or will it get lost in the sea of millennial, feminist bloggers, every one of us convinced that sharing will lead to healing will lead to smashing will lead to change will lead to having a voice will lead to liberation, safety, and peace?
Even if it is true that storytelling can help the cause, it seems as though the narratives currently in circulation cover many of the bases. There are the stories of failing to graduate, of months of depression, of trauma. There are the stories of police not believing victims, of colleges failing their students, of football players staying on the team. There are even the stories that make me feel like I am catching glimpses of my distorted reflection — uncertainty, caution, an inability to use the word “assault.” These narratives have complexity, characters, conflict, a clear rise and fall of action. These narratives are extremely important, and in no way do I mean to diminish them or their authors. But I’m left wondering if my non-story story — the one that’s not particularly interesting, the one in which the characters’ motives are unclear — fits the bill for publication.
And I grow increasingly concerned that we have a scenario now in which stories aren’t only overlooked by readers and writers because of how they are written, but rather because we are so used to this kind of assault. These non-story stories are so commonplace that we don’t feel the need to accurately represent them. We stop listening. We stop feeling.
We can’t take it anymore.
So maybe I won’t publish my narrative under the guise of its intrigue. I won’t keep trying to find complexities, pushing editors with the “nuance” of my essays. But maybe that’s why this kind of story needs better representation. Because it’s not new. It’s not unheard of. It’s not nuanced. My story hurts because it’s so common. It’s the standard sexual experience for young women, it seems. It’s the thing we share when laughing about bad sexual encounters over bottles of wine as no one wants to use the big scary words—not now, not while we’re all just trying to have a good time, pretending those moments simply meant we were desirable, lovable, consumable, unwilling to acknowledge that the “grey area” of consent often feels a little darker than grey.
So sure, maybe my story isn’t unique or interesting. And maybe I don’t have anything new to say on the subject. But maybe that’s why I have to keep writing about it.
