Editor’s note: Trigger warning — this article contains detailed accounts of sexual assault.
John Doe was a virgin.
He did not understand what it meant to take advantage of a sexual situation, because he had never been in a true sexual situation. This does not excuse the fact that he raped me, it simply emphasizes that he formed his opinions about sex through misogynistic ideologies and a society which teaches its men that sexual pursuits are more important than the consequences they cause or people they hurt.
I remember going over to his dorm room on a Saturday night, maybe naively thinking that we would just be talking and hanging out. I barely knew him, and was not interested in becoming intimate with a near stranger.
We had been talking all week, making jokes and keeping our interactions light and friendly over Snapchat. There was nothing that indicated I’d be subjected to his overpowering grip and assault. We met a week earlier through mutual friends who had all vouched for his character, encouraging me to talk to him.
Is it so wrong to think that there are still guys who are only looking for a first date? Men who believe in getting to know a woman, possibly even loving a woman before turning to the pursuit of orgasm?
I believed in the morality of humans when I shouldn’t have, and thought I could be valued beyond my body, so I went to him.
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The whole encounter took less than an hour, and I remember descending the stairs of Sellery with tears in my eyes and an emptiness in my heart.
We talked for maybe ten minutes before he turned off the lights and began kissing me. I reciprocated until I was uncomfortable, saying, “You can’t just do that.” I was referring to him subtly penetrating my body as if I may not notice.
His response was not, “Oh, sorry, do you want to continue?” He just said, “I know.” Then he continued without hesitation.
I found myself in shock, not knowing how to take back my body or even communicate my discomfort with that level of intimacy. As I was about to stop him and speak out against such disgusting mistreatment, he finished and it was all over. I bawled through the short walk back to Witte and sat in the arms of my roommate as I explained how violated I had felt.
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The girls who knew him were extremely surprised, saying they didn’t believe he could treat anyone so disrespectfully. Though they were trying to make the point that I couldn’t have seen the rape coming, it made my stomach drop wondering why I was the one he thought he could use that way.
If all of his friends saw him as an honorable guy, what about me indicated I deserved less than respect? I still wonder this on an almost daily basis, and find it astonishing that our week of interactions has left such a lasting and profound impact on my life.
Three days after being raped, for what I thought was the first time, I went to the emergency room because I had lost the will to live and my depression, which had been manageable for the past five years, turned volatile.
I felt so alone, and started to believe that this guy could accurately determine my worth. I remember denying the connection to myself. This simple incident, which happens to so many women, couldn’t be the reason I was in the hospital. Admitting the depth at which it pained me was not something I was capable of dealing with in my mental state.
Though my encounter with him certainly didn’t help the throbbing sadness I began feeling at a near constant, it’s important to acknowledge he is just one of many factors contributing to my hospital visit — not in his defense, but in defense of the truth.
My stint in the psych ward was life changing, and I began to overcome the weight of my mental illness in tandem with the loss of my body. It wouldn’t be until this year that I finally began unpacking the treacherous feelings of the rape I was convinced would destroy me. It wasn’t until six months later when I got a message from him on Tinder, trying to hit on me.
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He was asking about where I lived, pretending we had never met before. I called him out, saying he must remember me as the girl he lost his virginity to just six months earlier. He quickly turned his tone to a half-assed apology, and until rereading his words to write this article, I believed he was genuinely sorry.
Upon rereading the messages we exchanged, I finally understood that I had accepted this apology as a way to heal when in retrospect, it was just a bandage over a gaping hole in my reality.
This was not my first time being raped, and I often wonder if it will be my last. My fears and experiences are shared with one in four women on campus, as well as one in eighteen men. Take a second to understand that.
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At a university of 43,820 students, approximately 18,842 of them will go through this degrading, terrifying assault at some point on this campus. That doesn’t even account for the people like me, who have multiple encounters with rape.
This brings me back to my first point — John Doe was a virgin. He was not the kind of guy anyone suspected, not even his closest friends.
If John Doe is a respectable citizen, where did he learn such disrespectful behavior as a cultural norm? These are questions I cannot answer.
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This list of unthinkable queries goes on as I wonder why men like Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas sit on our Supreme Court, making decisions that will change the course of history. These are the men that will be praised in our children’s textbooks, and these same children may even hope to emulate them someday.
When will our culture value human rights over individual success, and finally teach our people to do the same? Hopefully, it will start with the perpetrators who created these thousands of victims, but that’s no guarantee.
So, let it begin with survivors. A professor of mine was telling our class one day that by being educated at an American institution, we are among the top one percent of the world in terms of the power we hold. This is true for every one of the 18,842 victims which statistics suggest exist on this campus, so let’s take that power and speak out against these injustices.
We are capable of great change — every student at this university, and truly every human on this planet, so use your knowledge. Not just the survivors, but all of us.
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If you are someone who’s caused sexual assault, there is no reason you can’t apologize to the person, or people you’ve hurt. Even if you are removed from this debate on a personal level, you too can stand up and speak out against these terrible injustices.
Use the vast expanse of resources and privilege that you’ve been born into to fight back for those who can’t. It’s too often I hear people feel bad for all the blessings they’ve received, believing themselves to be undeserving of the potential they have. But this potential is a random roll of the dice that has nothing to do with who you are, but rather where you were born on this planet.
So instead of feeling bad for your stellar luck, capitalize on it. Change the world with it and start by sharing your story, and the stories of others.
All 18,842 of us understand what it’s like to have the power taken right out from under you, so go forth and take it back. Let’s stand up, not because we have to, not because it’s our fault for what happened, but simply because we can.
