Well, rape. Once, under a set of circumstances too detailed to go into and not germane, I shared some of my funny rape stories with an audience. I had really never done this before–and before I get into the actual story maybe I should quickly get the funny rape stories out of the way.
Spoiler tag for those who don’t think rape can be funny under any circumstances.
[spoiler]First of all, these apply to me. Obviously YMMV. I was raped by a person unknown who broke into my house in the middle of the night and claimed he had a gun and would shoot me unless I did what he said.
Dark humor #1. I was asleep. Most people being awakened by a strange man in their bedroom at 1:30 a.m. would probably wake up and panic immediately. Not me. I thought it was my roommate trying a creative way to wake me so I wouldn’t be late for work (yes, I was hard to awaken).
Dark humor #2. Once I realized that I did not know this guy and that he apparently was serious, I went into kind of an almost-faint. But not quite a faint, because I still had my inner monologue going and it was saying things like, “Okay, I’m supposed to lie back and enjoy this–who the fuck said that? Please god get me out of this alive. Wait, I don’t believe in god…superman, maybe?” and like that. Along with a whole imagined scenario where I talked him into letting me go into the bathroom for my diaphragm, got my gun out of the toilet tank, came back and shot him. (I had an IUD, not a diaphragm. Didn’t have a gun. Wouldn’t have kept it in the toilet tank if I did.)
Dark humor #3. He said he had a gun. He held something cold to my head so I believed him. However, when he left he had nothing in his hands (he was using both of them to hold a t-shirt over his head, presumably so I couldn’t identify him. So where was the gun? Well, mostly likely it wasn’t a gun. Most likely it was …the tube of chapstick I kept by my bed in case I woke up with dry lips in the night. Great. Raped at Chapstick-point.
Dark humor #4. When the cops arrived I was in one of the strangest moods of my life, all things considered. I have to hope that they’ve seen plenty of things like this. But really, I was practically turning cartwheels in the living room. “I’m alive!” (I honestly hadn’t expected to be.) “He didn’t steal my stereo on the way out!” (Big point in his favor. I had lost a couple of really nice systems at that location.) In other words, I was completely nutso, but probably in the opposite way they’d come to expect. (But maybe not.)
Dark humor #5. Okay, anyone who went through the process of actually reporting this to the police knows what you have to go through in that case. A bunch of questions that don’t specifically deal with how to catch him but tend to point the blame toward the victim, and in fact even cast doubt on whether she is, in fact, a victim. So at one point my friend was there (the cops wanted her to leave but I said no), I was getting a little overheated because the cops were focusing on where I’d been all evening before getting home (at a bar), how much I’d drunk (not much, because I don’t really drink), and whether this person might have followed me home from the bar or been someone I’d turned down. When they said that my friend jumped in with, “Wow, you turned somebody down?”
Yes, she really said that. I should say, she arrived a good 20 minutes before the cops so she had even more of my craziness to deal with and she knew me–
Later (on the way to the damned hospital as a matter of fact) I asked her why she said that when they were already doubting my credibility as a victim, and she said, “I thought you were going to assault that cop. I thought you needed to lighten up.” And she was probably right.
/end of self-hijack][/spoiler]
After I told these stories, and even got a laugh out of the audience (Chapstick and “You turned somebody down!”) I felt better. I felt actually lighter, as if I’d been bearing around this dark secret for 25 years, even though consciously, or even unconsciously, I was over it. It wasn’t even a secret–if people were discussing rape I would mention it. Once a male coworker took offense about a news story saying a woman was raped but unharmed, or something like that, anyway he went off on how they couldn’t say she was unharmed now, could they, and I countered that well, no, they could. Because I had been raped, and I was “just raped” and not, for instance, beaten up or killed, so actually that was much, much better. So I didn’t avoid it or repress it but I did suppress it. I didn’t mention it much, because it made people uncomfortable, but talking about it helped me–maybe it demystified it, or something.
So, in a way I congratulate this lady for doing this now, and not 25 years from now. But I can see how people can find it disturbing and think yeah, she ought to get the fuck over it.
I’ve never understood what the man must think about the act before, during and afterwards. I mean, is it completely intentional? Does he feel remorse? Can a rapist be normal? Can a rapist redeem himself? Doesn’t he understand that he has done this horrible, unforgivable thing? Can a rapist ever be accepted by God? I guess these are a lot of questions. I should probably start a new thread. Feel free to email me with answers if you have the time.