I’m a rape survivor. Its a hell of a lot better attitude than being a rape victim. It means I was raped, I came out the other end. Not the same, not breezy, but I came through it. And I’m not going to let it continue to victimize me. Its also a hell of a lot better than the passive voiced “I was raped.”
Just backing up the OP in that I’ve discussed sexual abuse with a ton of women and an alarmingly large number of them have been abused or know someone who has. It’s a big eye opener and pretty disturbing. The really unsettling cases to me are the ones where the girl isn’t even angry about it anymore, like she’s just resigned to being helpless and powerless about what happened knowing no one would believe her or take her side.
It’s pretty sad stuff and some girls can get past it and move on and be well adjusted normal people and you’d never be able to tell, but some girls you can tell it’s just fucked with their outlook on men and trusting people around them on a fundamental level.
I usually let them just talk it out as we cuddle because they don’t want advice about it they just want to spill it to someone. For my own psyche I just try to remind myself that the bad things in life are just all the more reason to appreciate the good things and times and people in life when you have them, and it reminds me that my own problems are usually pretty trivial things.
- TWTTWN
Since you addressed your question to me, CitizenPained, I will respond and tell you MY perspective on why I identify as a survivor and not a victim. Mind you, my reasons will not neccesarily apply to every single person who has experienced sexual abuse.
I was victimized, but I am not a victim. What was done to me did NOT ‘make’ me a strong woman; I was already a strong woman. That’s how I survived it. And yes, there are those who do not survive. I remember years ago, promising myself that if he ever actually raped me, that I’d kill myself. I never took such a drastic step, but some women do. Others are killed by their attackers. Some are killed by diseases their attackers inflict upon them.
I found whatever the strength I needed to survive within myself. And when I find the initiative to get out of bed everyday, to walk down the street, to not fear all men, to trust and to love and yes, to have sex consensually because it is a reclamation of MY body and MY sexuality, it’s because I am a survivor, and not for one moment am I going to stop calling myself one because some stranger on the internet ‘hates’ that I do. And if you go on ‘hating’ that I consider myself a survivor, well, I didn’t ask for your opinion, and I don’t need your permission. I am simply out of fucks to give. Or, if I may put it more succintly:
IT’S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
My two cents to the OP…
I think the level of hatred and revulsion that we, as a society have for sexual abusers is altogether counterproductive to ending abuse. Most children who are abused are abused by someone they know, in particular a family member, someone they deeply trust that is enmeshed in their life whether they like it or not. Such was my situation and of course when I finally told my family that I had been abused, they could not accept it specifically because of the way the humanity of abusers is distorted in our society. It was much easier for them to just decide I was either crazy or vengeful than to accept that this other person they loved was a sick monster.
Well, he wasn’t a monster. I’ve no love for him any more but he wasn’t a monster. He was himself a victim of abuse (his mother) and domestic violence (my mother), and a deeply confused and conflicted person with a selfish streak just wide enough for him to psychologically justify abusing his adopted daughter. If people realized the vast spectrum of experiences and circumstances that can lead to abuse I think families in general would be a little more supportive of the victims. As my mother told me, ‘‘I feel like you’re trying to tear my family apart. You’re trying to make me choose.’’
Well, no, I wasn’t. I actually didn’t have a choice at that point whether to tell or not, since a social worker had called social services after promising me full confidentiality. I was 23 before my Mom divorced that man - six years after I told her the truth.
So I know it feels natural and stuff to rant about cutting off the balls of the guys who do this, but I think it’s damaging to our cause. Sexual abuse is a crime of dehumanization. I can’t fathom how engaging in further dehumanization (of the victim OR the abuser) is going to help anything. I’m sure there are plenty of people who haven’t abused that are nonetheless wrestling with impulses to do so. At present there is absolutely nowhere those individuals can go to receive support without sanction. As much as I blame him for doing this and my mother for looking the other way, I also blame the witchhunt mentality that surrounds this issue.
That mentality has a secondary effect - it infantilizes the victims (particularly women, as women are perceived as the primary victims here.) If you look at the way sexual abuse and assault is portrayed on television you’d think being assaulted was the end of the goddamn world. Words like, ‘‘ruined, wasted, life destroyed’’ do not help a traumatized person who is trying to find a way out of it. Many of those who experience sexual abuse as children grow up, learn to accept what happened, learn from it and move on. In that sense it’s comparable to many major life events. In my life it’s not even the most important thing that ever happened - not even close.
Second, this is not just a ‘‘woman’s issue.’’ It’s not because of something inherent about men. It’s about something inherent in humanity. People abuse and denigrate the ones they can easily dominate - making girls and boys about equal targets for sexual abuse. The sooner we figure out that there aren’t really ‘‘women’s’’ issues or ‘‘men’s’’ issues, just people issues, the better off we will be.
As a result of one of these threads in the past, I talked to my husband about the rape attempts that had been made on me. He hadn’t known about them, they happened a long time before I even met him. And he hadn’t realized that a great deal of my touchiness about the subject is because of my personal experience. I told him to ask his sisters, and maybe even his sisters in law about this, and just things like getting catcalled…and he was amazed. He hadn’t realized what women go through. And I think that most men don’t realize this, until a woman that they know experiences it, and is willing to talk about it to men.
Well, it’s her choice. I don’t like either survivor or victim so I don’t use them. Sad to say when men to open up about this stuff there’s another can of worms - all you can really do is listen and be trustworthy.
I’m a man. I spent 2 years (roughly, it’s hared to recall exactly) being sexually molested by an “aunt”, one of girls my grandmother fostered when I was living with her. The girl at the time was probably 12 or 13.
I was 5 and 6 at the time.
I didn’t think of it as sexual abuse until I was in my 20’s, and I was trying to figure out why almost all the women in my life that I had had serious relationships with, or even just had had sex with, were sexually abused. It messes up your head. It destroys boundaries, and fucks up your self worth something awful.
I am 36 now, and I am still trying to come to terms with how it has affected my life.
It is a horrible horrible thing to have happen, to anyone of any gender.
I also think that those who carry the “any unwanted sexual advance, no matter what, is rape” banner are hurting the cause.
Ten percent is way high for the number of sexual abusers among the general male population, methinks. No cite, not because I am not willing to provide one but because I am looking for one.
Can you provide an example of the people you’re talking about?
It depends on how you class “sexual abuse.” At one end you have the sociopath who breaks into strange women’s bedrooms and rapes them at knifepoint - yeah, definately sexual abuse.
Somewhere in the middle you have the frat boy who has sex with a girl who has passed out. He knows her name and she WAS flirting with him earlier.
Somewhere at the far end you have the seventh grader who lifts up the skirts of his female classmate. Or the ninth grader who writes “Madison is a slut” on the bathroom walls. I don’t think these should be in the same class as violent stranger rape - but they are sexually abusive situations.
Abuse is a pretty large spectrum of activities. When you start classing in “unwanted sexual teasing” - we’ve pretty much all - male and female - abused someone sexually and you get pretty close to 100%.
That’s in the middle?! Maybe that’s part of the problem.
Well, not the exact middle. But it isn’t getting raped by a stranger at knifepoint. Nor is it my eleven year old son pantsing some other kid in the hallway at school.
I think it’s as bad as getting raped by a stranger. Arguably worse because now you don’t have to just go through life worrying about the creepy stranger in the bushes but also about the guys you meet at party and seem nice but could be rapists/sociopaths underneath it all.
I don’t think it is - in the mind of the guy who RAPES. I think in the mind of the guy who breaks into a woman’s home and puts a knife to her throat and rapes her, its a sick power trip.
In the case of the drunk frat boy, they are both drunk, she was flirting with him anyway (and to many a drunk frat boy, flirt is indistinguishable from “she wants me” and “she wants me” is indistinguishable from “she’ll have sex with me.” To him, she gave consent earlier and he is now just following through.
Which is why when you talk about the number of men who commit sexual abuse, you end up with a wide range of numbers. I hate to admit this, but I know a LOT of guys who had sex with women who were insufficiently sober to grant consent when they were young and stupid. I’ve rescued drunk girlfriends, and I’ve stumbled out of rooms narrowly escaping the fate.
(My rape was date rape, but I was sober, sleeping, but sober).
It seems to me that classifying sexual assaults by what was in the mind of the person doing the assaulting would have the tendency to downplay the impact on the person assaulted. In fact, that sounds like exactly the approach that’s historically caused a lot of rapes to be trivialized.
Isn’t the number of people whose persons have been violated, and the number of people who have caused that to happen, a better metric than the number of people who felt especially power-trippy while they were violating somebody else’s person? If we’re trying to count the number of men who have committed sexual assaults, it seems like a terrible idea to include any subjective measure of how entitled they felt while they were doing it.
Sure, but its also why you get guys who think 10% is a stretch. Use a broader classification of sexual assault, and you’ll get 100%. Narrow it down to get rid of juvenile sexual teasing but include unwelcome touching and comments of a sexual nature, you are still way above 10%.
Cause if anyone thinks only 10% of guys have committed sexual assault, and you include the “brushing up against a girl accidentally on purpose in the elevator” or “watching your neighbor undress because her blinds aren’t all the way closed” or “having sex with someone too drunk to actually consent” - you’ve been smoking something.
But who is including the brushing up against a girl by accident or watching your neighbor undress as examples of rape?
But intent matters when it comes to assault. For an extreme example, consider a man who has sex with a woman at a party, who unknown to him was told earlier that “you’re the entertainment for the party, screw with any man who asks and pretend you like it or we break your legs”. What happened to her is rape, but the man is not himself guilty of rape.
Extreme feminists. For that matter, I’ve seen them claim that giving your boyfriend/husband sex when you aren’t particularly in the mood to cheer him up when he’s unhappy is rape. Or that leaping on a man naked and ripping his clothes off as you bear him to the ground is rape by him, because he just kind of assumed you were consenting by your behavior and didn’t bother to ask out loud. Or that talking to a woman and convincing her to have sex is rape (because women are emotional and not logical you see :rolleyes:, so reasoning with them is assault like using your superior strength). Regardless of whether or not the woman herself considers it rape - they are the ones qualified to judge whether or not it was rape, not her.
The sheer volume of stupidity in that post is breathtaking.
:dubious: And apparently indescribable.