Helen's Story

Here is something very few people know about me-I hate pale blue bathroom tile.

There are many very personal details about me on this blog. I talk a lot about sex, and I have no problem with doing that here. When it comes to sex and sex topics, pretty much anything goes with me (and…er…has done, too). But there are a few things that I will not do in bed: no Fido. No little Lars. Bless the beasts and the children, and protect them from the rigors of the bedroom.

And I will not have anal sex.

This is not because it is a religious problem with me. It’s not because I find it repulsive. It’s not due to the whole silly adage that “if it goes out the hole, it doesn’t go in” (if you believe that one, perhaps you should strike off blow-jobs, folks. And since no one wants to strike that one off…)

The reason I do not have anal sex is not only do I not find it comfortable, but I was raped that way when I was 19.

I was living with a partner at the time, and one day in the shower, he forced it. I remember that we were arguing at the time. What about, I am not sure-it seems irrelevant now that there are bigger issues. The steam of the shower was strong, the argument was heated, and something made my partner snap. He grabbed me and pushed me against the wall, holding my head against a towel bar (WHY do people put towel bars in the shower? Why?). He was a weight lifter, and much stronger than me, and since I was on the curved end of the bathtub and struggling to hold my purchase on where I stood, I wasn’t able to wiggle around much.

And then he forced himself into me. Anally. I remember searing, blinding pain. He grabbed some shampoo to aid in getting it in easier, and the pain was accompanied by stinging the likes of which I had never felt. It was as though I had been sliding down a slide of razor blades and landed in a pool of alcohol. I had this weird, heavy weighty feeling inside of me like I had to go to the bathroom.

He held my face hard against the towel bar and all I could see was the shoddy caulking job that held the towel bar on the wall, bits of lumpy grey caulk with protruding bits. I could see the clear shower curtain, and the open bathroom door.
And the pale blue tile that my face was held against.

I think I croaked out the word no. Or maybe I didn’t. I can’t really recall, and if I said anything, it is unlikely he heard me anyway. I remember that the front of my body was outside of the spray of the shower and I was freezing. The back of my body was scalding hot from the steam and perhaps the pain, which was very, very real. He finished, and got out of the shower.

And I just stood there.

You know that scene in “Leaving Las Vegas” where the prostitute who has been raped anally just sits in the shower and bleeds? That is exactly what I did. I just stood there and bled, dripping out a mixture of bright red blood and semen. I stood there until the hot water went cold, and then I finally I got out of the shower, dried off, and went about my life.

We broke up very soon after. And even though I live across the Atlantic now, a restraining order I have against him still stands. The truth is, I don’t hate him and I don’t wish him ill. I actually don’t even think about him. The last I heard he had married and had a kid. And you know, I hope he has a good life. I don’t even wish any vengeance on him. If you rape someone, you obviously have issues-and my hope is that someday he gets his sorted out.

There are a lot of bloggers that have addressed the issue of rape, including Layne, Jim, Jamie, and many others. For a lot of people, rape is something that has been the pinnacle of trauma, and it changes the person forever due to the horrible forced sexual situation. And the truth of the matter is, rape is horrible. It is about complete and utter loss of control. It is about abuse, pain, and anger. It is violation the likes of which you can’t come back from.

But for me, being raped did not change my life. It is not something I think about, hardly ever, really. I am not burying it and hiding it, I just won’t let it own me. I know that I handle it a bit differently than most people-neither better nor worse, this is just the way that I played with the hand I was dealt. Everyone handles things differently. I have some issues with my life, but none of them stem back to this incident-for that's all it was-one ugly, horrible incident.

The thing of it is, I took a step back from what happened and said: Yup. That was a bad situation, and I never want to be there again. And what happened was this: he took advantage of my body. He tried to take away my security and peace of mind. He tried to take control and show me that he is stronger than I am. But he doesn’t get to have that. I am not going to give this guy my peace of mind.

So he may have fucked my body, but he sure as hell does not have the chance to fuck with my spirit.

What happened afterwards? Well, I bled for a few days, so much so that I even had to wear a maxi-pad. I had a funny crease-mark shape on the side of my cheek where my face was held against the towel bar. But that was about it, and physically and emotionally I just moved on. I have plenty of horrible memories about other things that I re-live and struggle with. This is not one of them. Because I just won’t let him hurt me like that.

The only lingering side effects from what happened are this:

I will not have anal sex.

I get viciously angry at men that hurt women.

And I absolutely, positively hate pale blue tile.

***This was re-posted with Helen's permission from her blog, Everyday Stranger.***

Lynn's Story

It was my sixteenth birthday, April 9 1990, and I had a lot to celebrate. I had already lived through years of abuse and neglect at the hands of my mother. I had survived being bounced between foster homes and some pretty heavy drug abuse. I had cleaned up my act and was doing well in school and for the first time in my life, I had some hope that I would actually have a future worth looking forward to. Thirty minutes was all it would take to change my life forever.

I had gone out to shoot some pool with some friends on the evening of my sixteenth birthday. Around 10:30 pm I managed to snag a ride halfway home with a friend’s parents. They dropped me off and I had about a 30-minute walk to my home. I was less than five minutes from home when I saw him. A tall, skinny, older man, walking towards me in the dark. He walked past me and then turned around and started walking back towards me. I crossed the street, but eventually had to cross back because I lived on that side of the road.

He approached me and asked me for directions to some fictional place. It all happened in a matter of seconds, he grabbed me and threw me down the embankment. I screamed and tried to fight him off and he told me that he had a knife and would cut my heart out if I continued to scream. He walked me through the darkness into a grove of trees, nearby. He told me to take off my clothes. He ransacked my purse and then told me he knew my address and if I told anyone, he would come back and kill me. He raped me. I have never felt fear like that in my life. As I lay there, I tried to memorize his face, his features. I couldn’t imagine surviving this and having him walking the streets. Never knowing if I might see him again.

When it was over I ran home and my foster mother took me to the hospital. I wrote an uncomfortably detailed statement for the cops, and my own doctor showed up to do the rape exam. I don’t remember feeling much of anything at that time. I was numb…in shock, I guess. A few days later, the cops showed up at my house with a photo line up and I picked him out. He was arrested a few days after that and sat in jail waiting for court.

Meanwhile, I still had to go back to school and try to finish the 10th grade and pretend that I was ok and nothing had happened. The administrators at my school knew what had happened to me and they cut me a lot of slack. I failed every one of my final exams that year because I just couldn’t get my shit together to study. The school passed me in every course, anyway.

The preliminary hearing was held in May and the trial was in June, (just before final exams). Somewhere in the middle of that, he escaped from jail. The jail that was a 15-minute drive from where I lived. I read about it in the paper before the cops called to tell me. Aside from going to school, I didn’t leave the house at all until he was caught two weeks later.

At the trial, I was on the stand for three hours. Two of those three was for cross-examination. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, to sit in that courtroom and look at the man who raped me, in the light of day, while his attorney tried to discredit every single thing I said. To speak every detail of what he did to me, because he didn’t just rape me. He made me choose what kind of oral sex he would have with me. He beat me and burned me with cigarettes and forced me to act like I enjoyed it all. And I had to tell the world every sick detail. I remember the Crown attorney telling me that I should be as detailed as possible because the judge we had hated rapists and details would improve the likelihood of a conviction.

He was found guilty and sentenced to 6 years that October. But that wasn’t the end of it. I found out after trial that he was a serial rapist and had raped many young women including his own family members. He had been tried before but had never been convicted. His victims were usually younger than me and had a difficult time identifying him.

I went back to court a few more times in the years that followed. The first time was to testify at another victims trial. To establish M.O. and for identification purposes. The next two times were for his dangerous offender hearing. Every time I went to court, it dredged up the old memories. I would have to re-read my statement and the court transcripts and re-live it all again. I told myself that any hell I went through was worth it as long as he didn’t hurt anyone else again.

He died in prison a few months before his release date. But I’m still here. Still trying to figure out how to live with the after effects. 16 years later and I’m only just beginning to understand what he took from me. I’ve been alone with this pain for a long time and I don’t know if I will ever be ok, but I do know how important it is to know that others have survived. To know that I’m really not alone. To know that it wasn’t my fault and I’m not tainted goods. To know that I have a voice and that the most important thing I’ve ever done was pushing past my fear and my shame so that I could walk into the courthouse and do everything in my power to not let anyone else be hurt like I was.

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Jenn's Story

I have never been actually raped but I have been attacked on numerous occasions and twice have had to have intervention.

There was a guy I went to high school with (he was actually a friend of my first love). I guess he figured that since I was with his friend I'd kick down to him too. He used to corner me and trap me every chance he got. I knew that he had date raped three other girls and I was always scared of him. But he'd always play if off like we were just playing around.

One time though (we were in EMS training together) while I was strapped to a back board, (we all had to be to get certified, it's supposed to teach you compassion for your victims) he climbed on top of me and started trying to get my shirt off, as though I would just be quiet??? I started yelling, because I couldn't move. I was completely helpless, which is the worst feeling in the world, and my boyfriend at the time, his friend, saw what was happening and literally threw this guy off of me. I thought he was going to beat him senseless.

When I finally got unstrapped and calmed down, my bf at the time tried to get me to tell him what happened. The fucker thought that somehow I had led his friend on. It was a mess. Anyway, about two years after that, long after we had broken up and each moved on, he apologized for not believing me and for being so blind as to the person his (by then) ex-friend was. The guy is now a firefighter who works in he same department as my dad and some of my good friends and a couple ex's. They all know the person he is and HATE him. They asked me to file charges against him (for several other things) but I wouldn't do it. I knew that the working environment he has every single day is far worse than anything the law could ever do to him...karma comes back around. His captain is one of my best friends.

The time that scared me worse than that (I still haven't fully recovered from the fear) happened when I was in Mexico. I guess that because I was rescued, I should be thankful that I was able to learn to take care not to put myself in dangerous positions. I never walk by myself at night, I don't go into unlit areas with men I don't trust explicitly, etc.

Anyway I used to live in Mexico for a month every summer, teaching english. We lived in Ensenada but on the way back to Cali we used to stop in Tijuana to shop and have lunch. I already knew not to go off alone and all that (hell I'd been going there for seven years by that point). But we were in a market on a side street and in the span of 15 seconds I had gone from looking at jewelry with a friend to being carried (yeah literally carried) off against my will by two big guys. I was fighting with them and yelling at them (in Spanish and in English) and kicking so they started dragging me instead. They got me down a dark alley and they started pulling me down some stairs. They were saying the awful things they wanted to do to me, in spanish, like I didn't understand them...it still gives me chills to think about it.

I was still kicking and screaming and when they had me most of the way down the stairs. (There was a big heavy door at the bottom. There was no way I could have gotten away.) A friend of mine had realized I was missing and he came running after me. He was yelling at the guys in English and then in Spanish for them to get their hands off of his wife before he called the cops. He forced them back and pulled me away from them.

I'm still not sure how he managed to get me away from them; it must have been rage. They took off since some of my other friends were coming up by that point. I was so scared and bruised from fighting with them, Ryan had to pretty much carry me back to our vehicles. He wouldn't leave my side for any reason the whole rest of the way home. I know in my heart, that if Ryan hadn't found me exactly when he did, I wouldn't be here to write this all down.

Still anyone grabbing my arm from behind is enough to send me into a rage and this happened several years ago. I still went back to Mexico after that (I still love Ensenada). But I refuse to go into TJ without a man I trust holding onto me the entire time.