Email of the Day: Pretending it Wasn’t Rape by Anne Marie
Hi there, I was listening to episode 118 (Kulap Vilaysack Returns) and heard the survey from the woman who said she wasn’t sure if she had been sexually abused and that she went back to the man who she’d told no to after to make it her choice. I had to pause for a second to question whether I’d written that because it’s so similar to what happened to me. I was raped on a cruise while so drunk I couldn’t walk. I told the man no repeatedly and he said if I didn’t want to, I could leave. I was literally unable to leave and he ignored me saying no and did some really horrible things. I left scratches but he joked the next day that I was “aggressive.” I was mostly blacked out during the rape but I remember bits and pieces of it. He thought it was hilarious to tell me all the things “we” did and couldn’t understand why I was upset. It took me about 11 months to call it rape and I had sex with him later on the cruise trying to turn the rape into a vacation fling. One of the biggest turning points for me was reading a book called, “I Never Called It Rape.” It is an AMAZING book full of stories and survey data. I sat down in the middle of a book store and started crying when I read a statistic that said that many women have sex with their rapists afterward the same way the surveyed woman and I did. I thought I was crazy and no one could ever understand what I’d done and that it discounted what I’d been through. Knowing that my experience was “normal” and reading about acquaintance rape really helped me get through a terrible time.
All my best, Anne Marie
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