Fuck you, Hydrocortisone

The BBQ Pit
101

Honestly…it’s a non-event to me at this point in my life. It bothered me tremendously after it first happened because I was a virgin and I truly wanted to wait to have sex until I met someone I really loved. I felt violated and I felt ashamed. I felt like if I hadn’t been drinking that night or if I had been more careful about who I was with or if I hadn’t left with him…blah.blah.blah. Lots of “what ifs”.

I saw the guy a couple years back while waiting at a restaurant to be seated for dinner. I felt physically ill and had to leave the restaurant.

I ran into him socially a few weeks after what happened when I was out with my roommate and her boyfriend. My roommate walked up to him, threw a drink in his face and shouted to the entire bar that all the girls better stay away from him because he was a rapist. Her boyfriend decked him and told him if he ever came near me again he would do worse. We then all got thrown out of the club but I don’t think anybody regretted it. :wink:

Yes, I made some bad choices but I do remember bits and pieces of the night. I remember sitting on a couch talking to him and thinking that my head felt so heavy and like I couldn’t form the words I wanted to say. Like I was in a fog. I remember telling him I hadn’t had sex and that I didn’t want to until I knew I loved somebody. I don’t remember anything else until the next morning.

I’ve been drunk before and this didn’t feel like that.

He was extremely casual about the whole thing. In fact, when someone asked him a few days later if he and I were seeing each other he commented to them, “I would never date someone who slept with me the first night she met me.” :rolleyes:

102

Oh, and please do not think I’m equating tickling to rape. I just used that as an example of how one’s physical reactions don’t always match what you’re feeling.

In other words, the body receives a signal, and acts this way, even when you don’t want it to.

103

My rape was extremely violent. I was dragged onto an a empty lot beaten, raped, thrown into a canal and left for dead. I was 14 years old and it took years for me to be able to connect sex with love instead of violence.

I would never trivialize any person’s rape for being less violent than mine. They all bring hurt, humiliation, guilt, and fear. They take away your sense of safety and well being. It’s been 30 years and occasionally I still have a nightmare and wakeup in a cold sweat.

104

I think you asked a very common question very delicately, Aries28. (Or maybe that’s just b/c I’m an Aries, too, and now how we can charge headfirst into situations!)

I think, due to other situations in our lives, we see this hierarchy…almost, and I cringe to say it, competition. Generally, it works in the direction of one-upmanship (e.g. “I stayed up all night.” “Oh, yeah? I stayed up all night, and I ran a marathon today!” “Me, too, except I gave birth right before the finish line!”).

In the case of victims of abuse/sexual assault, I think it works in the opposite direction. As you become aware of the stories of other survivors, there’s often the feeling of your story/experience becoming more trivial, less traumatic. I know this is often the case in support groups, including online ones.

In any case, in my estimation, I would say you were raped, though I don’t mean to make you use the same word for your experience. In my mind, every rape has something about it that makes it horrific. In alice in wonderland’s case, I believe it’s thinking you know your attacker, being so terribly used by someone you care for. In the attacker-from-the-bushes-scenario, it’s the increased sense of vulnerability whenever you’re alone somewhere. In drugged, date rape scenarios, I think it’s the inability to put together a complete picture of what happened and feelings of doubt about your own experiences.

For my own part, I really cringe at the “unless you were raped, you don’t know” type of statements. I understand that they usually come from a place of great emotion, if not hurt, but I always try to remind myself that I don’t know what experience people are writing from. Maybe they know someone who was raped (sister, wife, best friend), maybe they worked for a rape crisis center. It’s always best to err on the side of caution, particularly when people are trying to empathize.

105

Aries28 IMO, when you told him you wanted to wait to have sex, that should have prevented him from doing anything with you. It should have been taken as a “No”, thus his actions afterwards, in my opinion were rape. However, if you don’t see it that way, that’s your right, and in the end only you can decide what’s correct for you. I’m glad you’ve healed.

The feelings you described are VERY similar to the feelings I had when I was date raped. (This is what I meant about “degrees”) In that case, I’d said “No” and he did it anyway. The person who anally raped me was my first husband, he did it after he found out I was leaving him. I’d stopped sleeping in our bed. He did it to show that he’d always have power over me. He was “ungentle” and hurt me, he did more than anally rape me, but I don’t want to go into it.

I think that if a person feels that their date raped them, than who am I to say they lie? I think that it is for the people who take the report to sort out. I bear them no ill will, I know that “date rape” does happen.

Guin I know what you mean, and agree with you. You said it very well.

106

Dang I missed out on all the fun. I wish the mods would have waited.

I was actually considering sending a long exhaustive email about Hydro to the mods. In 200 posts he had nearly 100 threads to his name (only my natural reluctance to do something like that stopped me). Most threads obviously taken from whatever crappy tabloid site he happened to be reading. Always chosen as the most inflamatory he could find.

He was the utter embodiment of a troll. I was boggled that he lasted as long as he did. I think it was b/c he mainly flung around the word ‘liberal’ and the mods didn’t want to deal with another ‘why are the mods biased against conservatives’ thread. That and he rarely stuck around to fight people (which seems to inspire about 3/4ths of the warnings around here). Just pulled the fire alarm and sat back laughing.

107

Aries –

I was sexually assaulted when I was a kid (it wasn’t as far as a date rape, but that was a pretty near thing; I said ‘no’ enough and he backed down). It took me a really long time to come to terms with the idea that I could address this thing that happened to me as a bad thing that shouldn’t have happened without comparing it to the experiences of others and saying, “Well, it wasn’t that bad.”

I wasn’t actually raped, so it wasn’t that bad.

I wasn’t physically hurt, so it wasn’t that bad.

I wasn’t . . . etc., etc., so it wasn’t that bad.

It took talking to a friend who had had an experience that was “that bad”, and having her say that my experience was just awful, before I could say, “Okay, I was assaulted. It fucked me up” and not feel like I was trying to steal the support of people who were -really- raped, or whatever.

I still don’t talk about it much – in part because I feel that there’s a lot of cultural weight put on rape in particular as ‘a fate worse than death’ that carries over into sexual assaults, and I don’t want to be “The assault victim” in anyone’s head. It was bad enough without being turned into the defining experience of my life, y’know?

Part of what I needed to really work on my healing was the feeling that it was okay to think of myself as having been assaulted, not minimizing it because it wasn’t a rape, or didn’t involve a beating or a knife or drugs or what have you. It let me be able to work on the damage without feeling like I shouldn’t have been damaged in the first place, because it wasn’t that bad.

So, there’s my mileage. Thingy.

Pardon my complete incoherence, I’ve got the fucking flu and it’s screwing with my head.

108

I’m just going to chime in here and add that I don’t think date rape should be treated any differently than stranger rape. Maybe the trauma takes a different form depending on the situation, but it’s still trauma. I’d also like to commend all the people who posted on this thread about their rape experiences for their incredible strength and courage. Thank you.

109

Didn’t think you were, Guin.

Thing is, the body does what it does, as a reaction, without brain involvement .

Maybe the body goes through the motions of whatever the fuck physiologically happens during an orgasm, but it sure is no orgasm. I think a pre-requisite of ‘orgasm’ as opposed to ‘my heart rate/bloodflow increased and my muscles involuntarily contracted’ is, well, an orgasm is the climax of sexual pleasure. Your brain’s got to want it, or it’s just not ‘coming’.

110

Well, let’s see. I’ve been: molested as a child by a relative; flashed and groped on the subway; pawed in passing on a sidewalk (broad daylight by two laughing 20-something guys), and intimidated into intercourse when I didn’t want to by a boyfriend. Were any of them rape? Reasons to say yes and no on at least some. Certainly they were all forms of sexual assault, violating my innermost self. Did they damage my psyche? Yes, to a greater or lesser degree – the molesting, as you might imagine, most of all.

Have I let these experiences define me? For a long time, the molesting screwed up my life, and the other stuff aided and abetted. I’ve worked through it, though, to the point where “lie back and enjoy it” crap just makes me snort in disgust, roll eyes, and pass on to higher intellectual pursuits like, say, watching paint dry. But I remember the pain, the shame, the self-disgust, the bitterness, the helpless rage – a whole shitload of nasty baggage that I carried for far too many years.

How any person – man or woman – reacts to and handles such trauma is intensely personal – there’s no one “right” answer. The molestation hit me especially hard because of unrelated family dynamics. (I perceived my status as the kid who cleaned the catbox, for example.) Would I still carry memories and healed-over scars from the other, lesser assaults had I not suffered that particular violation? I’ll never know. I’m just grateful that these parts of my past no longer dominate my present and future.

111

Not true - I have defiled some Japanese schoolgirls that came back afterwards for more. :eek: :confused: :smiley: :wink: :cool:

112

Yeah, the just love those slimy tentacles…

113

I understand the effort to calm people down in their responses here so that they don’t get banned. And I understand that threatening someone with rape or wishing rape on someone (other than the metaphoric use of fuck you) isn’t tolerated.

But I do hope that no one who has been the victim of rape will ever be banned for an angry response to what could easily be seen by her or his therapist as a secondary psychological rape perpetuated, whether intentional or not, by the kind of question that Hydrocortizone posted.

I am not a therapist nor a victim of rape, but I think that trivializing that anger or suggesting silence is counter-productive.

That’s just my opinion and is offered with respect to the powers that be. (And acknowledging the power that isn’t.)

A couple of people have continued to ask why Hydro’s question wasn’t just assumed by other posters to have come from his ignorance. If it did come from his ignorance, it is one of many to spring from that same source. He has been informed, prompted, reminded, taught and corrected. But he forgot to say thank you or sorry one too many times.

114

On one hand, I don’t understand how people who have actual substance to contribute get banned over petty squabbles with mods and Hydro commits his obvious trolls without much problem. Maybe he’s a villian mod-sock (just kidding power hungry/picked on as a child mod).

It’s not one or two, but every opinion he posts that seems to draw contempt from everyone else. That’s a coincidence?

On the other hand, I can’t help but laugh at how uptight most of you can get over words.

I do understand that people who have been raped might be offended by Hydros comments but there are places where you can control whether or not you’re ever assaulted, your own mind.
And no, I was never raped so I can’t say I’ve been there but if people made it through slavery they did it because they held something no one could ever physically control.

115

DreadCthulhu, I know that you’re just playing out your online persona, but this is NOT a joking matter. If you want to make all sorts of tentacle rape jokes, email me and I’ll send you a link to a webcomic with a forum about it. But rape jokes are NOT suitable for the SDMB, especially not in a thread where rape survivors have shared their experiences.

Lynn
For the Straight Dope

116

Would that be a certain “Ghastly” webcomic???

117

I have some small experience with the subject at hand.

I figured 'Cortisone’s words were those of someone with no clue whatsoever what he was talking about.

Either that, or a troll.

I incline towards the latter, simply because one’s inability to process the enormity of the question would tend to mark one either as a troll… or someone with the double curse of “insensitive” and “not too bright.”

Kinda like Clayton Williams, in fact…

118

Zoe, look for the thread where techchick was banned, and you’ll see why we’re telling people to calm down.

Yes, there are naturally going to be some pretty bad reactions to hydrocortisone’s OP. However, at the same time:

I know this may sound cold, but that doesn’t give someone license to Be A Jerk here.

And honestly, flipping out so badly you start threatening people is NOT a healthy response.

And it’s exactly what the jackass wanted-he was a troll, he was trying to get reactions. Don’t give them to him.

119

Well hopefully the Mods will take that into account. The OP and Poster were so intentionally offensive that some serious blowback was to be expected. Not that this provides and exemption to the rules, but the circumstances hopefully would be taken into account.

120

Everyone here is aware he was banned yesterday right?

The issue of Hydro is moot now.