Hey, Can A Woman "Ask To Get Raped"?

there is little consensus in this nation as to what proper consent is, or of what the state thinks proper consent is

Quote:

there is little consensus in this nation as to what proper consent is, or of what the state thinks proper consent is

Hell not a small percent of women who are label as sexual assault victims in those surveys do not agree with how such behaviors is define by the surveys authors.

Vague laws mean what ever the state says they do, and that is a problem.

But ya, there is little consensus in this nation as to what proper consent is, or of what the state thinks proper consent is.

Ya, if I remember right one study had 60% who had been legally sexual assaulted thought that either the guy had done nothing wrong or that they both had so the guy should not be blamed

1) A person is guilty of rape in the first degree when such person engages in sexual intercourse with another person by forcible compulsion where the perpetrator or an accessory:

(a) Uses or threatens to use a deadly weapon or what appears to be a deadly weapon; or

(b) Kidnaps the victim; or

(c) Inflicts serious physical injury, including but not limited to physical injury which renders the victim unconscious; or

(d) Feloniously enters into the building or vehicle where the victim is situated.

Jul 3, 2014
Judge says man who raped sleeping woman is not a “classic rapist,” just “lost control”

Want to see a "classic" rapist? Look around you. Most rapes are committed by a person known to the victim
by Katie McDonough

A British man was just sentenced to five years in prison for raping an unconscious woman. According to a report from the Hull Daily Mail, it took the jury just over two hours to unanimously conclude that Lee Setford was guilty of raping a woman who was asleep on his couch. But here’s what the judge told him upon sentencing, “I do not regard you as a classic rapist. I do not think you are a general danger to strangers. You are not the type who goes searching for a woman to rape.

“This was a case where you just lost control of normal restraint,” Judge Michael Mettyear continued in his assessment of Setford. ”She was a pretty girl who you fancied. You simply could not resist. You had sex with her.”

Not a classic rapist. Simply could not resist. Not a danger. This is everything that is wrong with how we view and talk about rape, and this is hardly an isolated incident. There are scripts that most people assume all rapes should follow, and roles that rapists and victims are both expected to play. The persistence of these myths about who counts as a “classic” rapist — and who makes for a good victim — is astonishing considering how much we know about perpetrators of sexual violence, particularly in the United States.

Want to see a “classic” rapist? Look around you. Most rapes are committed by a person known to the victim. Nearly 40 percent of rapists are friends or acquaintances with their victims. The sooner we erase the image of the shadowy man hiding in the bushes or stalking women in darkened parking lots from our collective consciousness, the better. Not because stranger rape doesn’t happen, but because this singular vision of sexual violence erases a majority of the crimes being committed.

And this erasure has consequences. It’s what allows ignorant people like George Will to pretend that most sexual assaults are just “ambiguities of the hookup culture.” It’s what allows politicians and law enforcement to ignore the experiences of survivors on college campuses, in the military, in prisons and every other place where sexual violence occurs. (Which is everywhere.) It dismisses the women and men who told their assailants “no,” but were ignored. The wives who told their husbands “no,” but were ignored. The sexual assaults that don’t involve a weapon, but instead feature much more insidious forms of coercion. This is what sexual violence really looks like, but these aren’t the stories we tell ourselves about sexual violence.

This gaping hole in our understanding of rape also creates an environment in which victims doubt their own experiences because their assaults don’t match the myths about rape. These same victims also internalize the messages — repeated again and again in our culture — that blame them for the violence committed against them, whether because of what they wore, whom they were with or what they had to drink.

Our culture’s failure to acknowledge rape as rape — even when a victim is intoxicated, even when a victim has a sexual history with his or her rapists, even when the rapist looks like such a nice guy with such a promising future — is also the reason that we’re so dismissive of genuine attempts to reform the system. The general response to a California measure on affirmative consent was either a dramatic eye-roll about progressivism run amok or outright anger. As if minimal efforts to ensure that the person you want to have sex with wants to have sex with you were feminist hysteria or the end of freedom as we know it. Every month a new column gets written that uses the same callous tone and boring talking points about “regretted sex” to dismiss the first campaign against sexual assault to be taken on by a sitting president and frame the activism that has emerged in response to epidemic levels of sexual assault on college campuses as a threat to the career prospects of perpetrators.

Mettyear is a British judge, but he sounds pretty similar to the Georgia judge who overturned a rape verdict because he didn’t think the victim “behaved like a victim.” Or the Louisiana parish that argued a 14-year-old girl in a juvenile detention facility “consented” to be raped by a corrections officer. Or the nationally syndicated columnists who think that rape is actually just “regretted sex” or “hookup culture.” Our culture is more capable of having empathy for rapists than for rape survivors, it seems.

It’s totally backwards, but it’s the dominant way we talk about and respond to sexual violence. But the sooner we move past this idea of the “classic rapist,” the sooner we can start doing something about rape.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/03/judge_says_man_who_raped_sleeping_woman_is_not_a_classic_rapist_just_lost_control/

And this erasure has consequences. It’s what allows ignorant people like George Will to pretend that most sexual assaults are just “ambiguities of the hookup culture.

A woman's chance of being raped in the U.S.: 1 in 5


A woman's chance of being raped in college: 1 in 4 or 5

here is a classic illustration of how sloppy (false) the numbers are. Given buy the same person in the same article as fact:
Quote:
A woman's chance of being raped in the U.S.: 1 in 5

A woman's chance of being raped in college: 1 in 4 or 5

The reported numbers should be ignored till/unless we get some better numbers...preferably backed several high quality scientific studies which are somewhere around agreement.

The reported numbers should be ignored till/unless we get some better numbers

Reported rapes is at a plus thirty years low however somehow we are now having a rape culture and a rape crisis.

More than a Million Rapes in U.S. not Counted in Statistics Due to Police Mislabeling of Sexual Assaults
Wednesday, July 02, 2014

As many as one million rapes were wrongly recorded by police departments across the country over the course of more than a decade, according to a new academic study (pdf) on the underreporting of sexual assaults in the United States.
http://blogs.law.uiowa.edu/ilr/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/A5_Yung.pdf

The mislabeling of rapes often begins at the point of first contact with law enforcement, when 911 dispatchers receive calls from victims, Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, found.

Writing in the Iowa Law Review, Yung discovered that nearly 70% of all police departments in 2012 relied on dispatchers—many of whom lack proper training—“to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.” He also determined that police officers sometimes fail to write reports after interviewing rape victims.

Also, it’s been found that police departments occasionally destroy their records and mishandle evidence, which sometimes results in the dismissal of rape cases. Additionally there is a massive backlog of rape kits, which hold evidence of possible rapes, waiting to be tested. There are 400,000 untested kits in the U.S., some sitting and expiring in storerooms. Furthermore, many cities and states don’t keep records of these kits or the rape exams themselves.

All of these factors have contributed to the undercounting of rapes.

Yung estimates that from 1995 to 2012, between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assaults were wrongly categorized by local police, which forward their numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nationwide crime estimates.

He also found that among large cities he studied (those with populations of 100,000 or more), 22% of the 210 police departments studied had “substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data.”

Consequently, many calls of reported rape have gone down as something else, which has skewed national statistics on this crime.

Also, it’s been found that police departments occasionally destroy their records and mishandle evidence, which sometimes results in the dismissal of rape cases. Additionally there is a massive backlog of rape kits, which hold evidence of possible rapes, waiting to be tested. There are 400,000 untested kits in the U.S., some sitting and expiring in storerooms. Furthermore, many cities and states don’t keep records of these kits or the rape exams themselves.

All of these factors have contributed to the undercounting of rapes.

Yung estimates that from 1995 to 2012, between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assaults were wrongly categorized by local police, which forward their numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nationwide crime estimates.

He also found that among large cities he studied (those with populations of 100,000 or more), 22% of the 210 police departments studied had “substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data.”

http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/more-than-a-million-rapes-in-us-not-counted-in-statistics-due-to-police-mislabeling-of-sexual-assaults-140702?news=853572

How Did the FBI Miss Over 1 Million Rapes?
Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis.
Soraya Chemaly
June 27, 2014

Earlier this month, a 911 dispatcher in Ohio was recorded telling a 20-year-old woman who had just been raped to “quit crying.” After she provided a description of her assailant, the caller went on to say, “They’re not going to be able to find him with the information that you’ve given.” This incident had its viral moment, sparking outrage at the dispatcher’s lack of empathy. But it also speaks to the larger issue of how we are counting rapes in the United States. Sixty-nine percent of police departments surveyed in 2012 said that dispatchers like this one, often with little training, are authorized to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.

That’s important, because miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don’t have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults.

Yung used murder rates—the statistic with the most reliable measure of accuracy and one that is historically highly correlated with the incidence of rape—as a baseline for his analysis.

After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period.

That’s more than 1 million rapes.

The estimates are conservative for two reasons. First, in order to consistently analyze the data over time, Yung looked only at cases defined by the FBI’s pre-2012 definition of rape (one established in 1927): “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” This definition did not include anal or oral rape, cases involving drugging or alcohol, or the rape of boys and men. The Federal Criminal Code was recently broadened to include these categories. Second, the FBI and crime experts estimate that anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of rapes are never reported to the police.

Yung’s analysis, which focused on cities with populations of more than 100,000, found that 22 percent of the 210 studied police departments demonstrated “substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data.”

“It’s probably true that in all cities there is undercounting,” explains Yung. “However, forty-six outlier cities appear to be undercounting on a consistent, high level, which makes sense because you have to show [improved crime statistics] results year over year, and you get into a trap where you have to improve upon already low numbers.” Even worse, the number of jurisdictions that appear to be undercounting has increased by 61 percent during the period studied.

How are police departments undercounting sexual assault?

One of the primary ways is that officers discount victim testimony, categorizing complaints as “unfounded” or reclassifying allegations of rape as “noncriminal” minor offenses. In 2013, a 196-page report by Human Rights Watch documented widespread, systemic failures in the Washington, DC, police department’s handling and downgrading of sexual assault cases. Last month, an externally run audit of the New Orleans police department found that 46 percent of forcible rapes were misclassified. The New Orleans study indicted the department for having submitted rape statistics that were 43 percent lower than those from twenty-four comparable cities. And in Baltimore, reported rapes showed a suspicious 80 percent decline between 1995 and 2010, compared with a 7 percent national reduction. Yung also reveals that officers sometimes simply fail to write up reports after rape victims are interviewed.

Second, police departments have been found to destroy records and ignore or mishandle evidence, which leads not only to undercounting but dismissal of cases. Many of the jurisdictions showing consistent undercounting are also, unsurprisingly, those with rape kit backlogs (there are more than 400,000 untested kits in the United States). Many cities and states don’t even keep accurate track of the number of rape exams or of kits languishing, expired or in storerooms—but when they do, the numbers improve. The arrest rate for sex assault in New York City went from 40 percent to 70 percent after the city successfully processed an estimated 17,000 kits in the early 2000s. However, it is only in the past year, after embarrassing and critical news coverage, that most departments have begun to process backlogs. After being publicly shamed for having abandoned more than 11,000 rape kits, the Michigan State Police began testing them, identifying 100 serial rapists as a result.

Third, police departments continue to ignore rapes of women thought of as “fringe,” including prostitutes, runaways, trans women, drug addicts and people considered transient. Women of color in particular face difficulties. For example, for years, women repeatedly went to the police in Cleveland to report that Anthony Sowell had raped, beaten or otherwise violently assaulted them at his house. Little was done until 2009, when police finally found eleven decomposing bodies of women there.

Fourth, people making complaints are often harassed out of pursing them. In 2012, the police department of Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, was held liable in a case in which police accused a reporting victim of lying during her interview, at one point telling her, “Your tears won’t save you now,” and failing to pursue the investigation. In St. Louis, victims were strongly urged by police to sign Sexual Assault Victim Waivers absolving police from responsibility to investigate or report the crime as a rape to the FBI. Yung points out in his report that until relatively recently, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department defied the law by using so-called “corroboration requirements” and reporting only those assaults deemed, in the words of LA police and prosecutors, “winnable” in court (“corroboration requirements,” referring to evidence supporting victims’ claims such as bloody clothes or bruises, have deep roots in jurisprudence but are no longer legal in most of the country, including California).

Victims of sexual assault still encounter hostility, doubt and aggressive questioning. When they do not conform to officers’ preconceived ideas about how rape victims “should” act, officers’ implicit biases come into play and, as a result, victims often feel they are the ones being investigated. These issues are often compounded by racism. Native American women, who suffer the highest rates of sexual assault in the country, describe being questioned about mental illness, drug use, alcohol abuse and more when reporting assaults. While some jurisdictions have substantially improved their policies, with many women reporting compassionate treatment by police, many others continue to report the opposite.

These preconceptions, rooted in myths about rape and a still-powerful cultural predisposition to blame victims, are serious and consequential. Police officers display the same implicit biases as the general public, a tendency also evident at colleges and universities, where campus police are often more focused on investigating the credibility of victims than in whether or not their vulnerability was exploited in a predatory way. Studies show a strong correlation among police officers between rape-myth acceptance, sexist attitudes and an unwillingness to process or investigate reported assaults.

Interestingly, the longer an officer has worked in a sexual assault unit, the less likely he or she is to believe in false claims. A majority of detectives with between one and seven years of experience believe that 40 percent of claims are false—in some cases that number is as high as 80 percent. But among officers with more than eight years’ experience, the rate drops precipitously, to 10 percent. On campus or off, these beliefs persist, despite the fact that rates of false allegations of rape are well understood by criminologists and other social scientists to be between 2 percent and 8 percent, in line with false allegations of other crimes.

The other aspect of bias is that it informs not only attitudes toward victims but also those regarding perpetrators. Racism and sexism conspire both in police assessments of the credibility of victims and in the targeting of potential perpetrators. Estelle Freedman describes the sex- and race-based historical roots and contemporary legacies of both of these biases in
her sprawling examination of rape in America, Redefining Rape.

While police departments are not immune from these legacies, change is possible. In 1999, the Philadelphia Police Department improperly handled 2,300 out of 2,500 rape cases. As late as 2003, the unit investigating sex crimes was jokingly referred to as “the lying bitch unit.” In the wake of widespread criticism and protest, the department began a partnership with the Women’s Law Project to improve response to sex crimes, in an approach that subsequently became known as “the Philadelphia Model.” Both Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and WLP executive director Carol Tracy testified at a 2010 Senate hearing that reviewed police handling of sex crimes, and in 2011, Ramsey convened a Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) summit. The resulting 2012 report, Improving the Police Response to Sexual Assault, which included research and commentary from multiple jurisdictions and advocacy groups, concluded that while progress is being made, many of the problems that existed in Philadelphia persist in other police jurisdictions.

Two weeks ago, Tallahassee police chief Michael DeLeo agreed to allow PERF to review and analyze his department’s policies, largely because of critical coverage of his department’s egregious mishandling of the 2012–13 sexual assault case involving Florida State University football player Jameis Winston. Almost all of the common procedural failures responsible for undercounting were illustrated in that case, so it is unlikely the complaints against Winston were included in the FBI’s annual count.

If we are to improve the handling and reporting of sexual assault crimes, external audits are critical, as is training of police departments by advocacy groups like the WLP. The fundamental approach of most police departments hasn’t change much in thirty years: training is not uniform or reliable, and often comes only at the behest of community advocates. Last year, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, whose membership comprises 21,000 departments, received a $450,000 grant from the federal Office on Violence Against Women to conduct training. While heartening, that comes out to roughly $22.50 per department.

In the meantime, as Yung puts it, “the sheer magnitude of the missing data…is staggering.” Of course, we need far more than improved police work, and undercounting is only part of the problem. Even when cases are properly recorded and investigated, the patterns evidenced in Yung’s analysis and the PERF report are reproduced in courtrooms, where rapists in most states still have the right to sue for custody of the children born of their assaults. And only 3 percent of rapists are ever imprisoned—that’s a crime we aren’t talking about.

Yung believes that these statistical distortions have significantly altered the nation’s historical record and understanding of rape in America. Accurate counts are vitally important—not only for the historical record, but because the data are used by academics, analysts, legislators, law enforcement officials, social justice advocates and media to determine trends, analyze crime, set policy and allocate resources. Law enforcement officials who are dedicated to addressing these problems understand that higher reporting numbers are a sign of trust in police departments.

Yung’s report, by the way, is titled “How to Lie with Rape Statistics: America’s Hidden Rape Crisis.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/180441/how-did-fbi-miss-over-1-million-rapes#

Real rape is very rare

There is nothing "sloppy" or inconsistent about those numbers. They refer to different time intervals during women's lives--one result refers to the chances of a woman being raped during her four years of college, with different studies finding it to be either 1 in 4 or 1 in 5, a non significant difference in findings, the other result is not limited by a time interval or to college women, it simply refers to a woman's chances of being raped in the U.S.]

we are told that the chance of rape over 5 years is the same as the chance of rape over a lifetime...this can not possibly be true

There is no reason that the chance of rape during a woman's college years cannot be the same as the overall chance of being raped in the U.S.

My own rape shows how much we get wrong about these attacks
By Richard Morgan,
July 1, 2014

[WARNING: This essay describes sexually explicit situations.]

“I made these for us to celebrate,” he said, sauntering out of the kitchen with two shot glasses full of a red concoction.

“Celebrate what?” I asked.

He cocked his head to one side. “You’re here!” he cheered. “You finally made it.”

I had been on a long, grueling bus ride up from Washington DC to his apartment in New York. It was already 9:45 p.m on a Friday last summer. I felt sore and had just taken a shower to rid the bus experience from my skin. I laughed and, holding the towel around my waist in one hand and the shot glass in the other, I looked at it. “What’s in it?”

“Gin!” I thought he said, more excitedly than he should have. Gin makes me sick. “That’s not really my thing,” I said. Then he pouted, comically and even adorably: “But I made it just for us.”

So I drank it and it was a bit sharp but really delicious, like tart watermelon. “You can hardly taste the gin,” I said.

“What gin?”

“You said there was gin.”

He laughed. “I said G.” He meant GHB, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, commonly known as the date-rape drug. Later came several more druggings, as he held Gatorade up to my limp lips with who-knows-what mixed in. I spent the weekend — about 60 hours — semi-conscious and didn’t leave his apartment until Monday morning. Sometimes I think I never left his apartment, that someone who merely looks and sounds like me walked out.

I had received anal sex twice in my life before that night. By weekend’s end, it was 17 times, according to my fog-of-war count. Eyes squeezed shut, the tally was the only thing I focused on at times — like a ticking clock in a solitary confinement cell. Every addition to the tally meant I was one moment closer to the end. He moved out soon afterward, which helped erase the existence of that place for me.

I was raped. I had met him a few weeks earlier at a house party, and we had hit it off. He was handsome: 30, well-built, tall with long black hair, a surfer’s laugh, and great taste in “X-Men” (Gambit). He was not some lecherous old man. He was not a sexually repressed loser. There was nothing about him that was “rapey” (a word I detest). The sex itself was — I can’t really say it was “good,” because that’s far too moral of a word and far more than he deserves, but it was highly skilled. He knew exactly what he was doing, exactly how to stimulate me. What he didn’t know was when to listen to me saying “no,” when to stop, when to realize that my kicking and punching and shoving and screaming and writhing was not just some sick
roleplay while he blasted Lady Gaga’s “I Like It Rough.” He covered my sobbing mouth with his hands. He hushed me and called me “sexy,” as in “You got this, sexy.”

When I wrote about men who are raped by women, for Details magazine in 2004, it caught the eye of Bill O’Reilly, who discussed it on his show. “If you’re lucky enough as a guy to have some girl come on to you in that manner,” he said, “but you don’t want to reciprocate, you stand up and you leave, unless the woman is 240 pounds and tackles you. The man is traditionally stronger and better equipped to leave the room.” There is a great disbelief out there, despite the numbers — from the CDC! the NIH! the Justice Department! — about how 1 in 33 men have experienced “a completed or attempted rape,” or 12.9 percent have been sexually assaulted. Mostly it’s by men they know. (I have a couple dozen mutual Facebook friends with my assailant.)

Some people still see rape according to the old cliche: vile men dragging innocent women into dark alleys and then brutalizing them. As we are
finally learning, the reality is much more complicated than the conventional-wisdom cartoon. Sometimes those women experience orgasm, which can be psychologically devastating. I was erect for much of my rape (at least the parts for which I was awake, but probably other parts, too); my assailant knew how to stimulate the physiological response of an erection — as opposed to the emotional or psychological response — even if I was crying or actively trying to think about unsexy things. I wasn’t handcuffed or tied up, but was in a version of dissociated shock. The invisible, immeasurable shackles of such a violation are immense.

From the bed, I could see the front door, but it was miles away and I thought, No, I won’t be able to get to the door, unlock it, open it and escape before he beats the hell out of me. And what was my option, anyway? To run naked and groggy through his halls and down Ninth Avenue? It’s amazing how much fear can make you want — really want — to appease a captor.

Rape may be as bad as murder, but, like murder, there are many kinds of rape. War-crime rape, date rape, rape as a ritual for pledging a fraternity, spousal rape, incest, rape with known assailants, rape with unknown assailants, police officers sodomizing a man with a broomstick. Rape contains multitudes. Any discussion of rape is going to require us as a culture to get much more imaginative about it. (Helpfully, the Justice
Department just expanded its definition to include men.) Every time we discuss rape as if it’s only men dragging women into alleys, we make the act of reporting it all the more uncomfortable, burdensome and alienating for women being raped by their boyfriends, or students being raped by their teachers, or men being raped by women, or men being raped by men. It is an act of theft on top of an act of rape.

What’s shocking about this limited perspective is, sadly, how much opportunity there is to see the full spectrum of rape in our culture. Not only are dozens of colleges currently embroiled in sex assault investigations — including James Madison University, which just punished three rapists with “expulsion after graduation” (or, as a friend noted, just “graduation”). There are the twin revulsions of Dov Charney and Terry Richardson. New York magazine put Richardson on its cover last month with the question “Is Terry Richardson an Artist or a Predator?” as if a person cannot be both. There’s self-described “Vine star” Brittany Furlan on the red carpet for Soap Opera Network’s Daytime Emmys coverage telling a male actor “We’re going to get you away from us before we rape you.” It’s a world where George Will realistically can defend writing that sexual assault survivors “make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges.” The Web site GOPrapeadvisorychart.com, which tracks Republican blunders on rape, is now in its eighth edition.

When male victims are discussed, it’s almost always about children — the Sandusky stories and all their perverse variants. For adults, in or out of prison, male-on-male rape is mostly thought of as an attack on a heterosexual victim, rape adding homophobic insult to injury. Yet rape is, ironically, always on the tongues of men. “I’m gonna rape you in Halo!” “This Monday morning is raping me.” “Paper jam? Ugh, I wanna rape this printer.”

The terrible thing about being a gay man is that it is dependent on expression. If you’re straight and have never had sex, you’re a virgin. If you’re gay and have never had sex, you’re confused. How can you know you’re gay unless you’ve tried it? In the wake of my nightmare — and all the subsequent nightmares and daymares that have come with it — I wanted nothing to do with sex. But what is a gay man who doesn’t have sex? I wasn’t even sure what I became.

When I finally freed myself from that apartment — I flatter myself; the truth is, he was done with me — I took the next train out of town. I wanted to be as far away as I could. From the lobby of Union Station in D.C., I
sobbed into my phone and told a friend what happened. He might have saved my life by urging me into a cab to Whitman-Walker Clinic, where I began a 30-day anti-HIV drug regimen (I am HIV-negative, thank God). In the exam, when the nurse asked me to exhale deeply, I could smell his sweat and semen on my breath, and I began crying all over again, because I didn’t remember giving — or being forced to give — fellatio, and suddenly I realized there was a whole extra circle of Hell, hidden horrors done to my unconscious body with no way of ever knowing fully what happened.

I wasn’t going to write any of this. But even given all those statistics, I’ve never heard a story told from my perspective, and certainly never expected to be the one telling it. I had come to accept my life as a kind of ongoing closet: a secret room in which a plaything called Richard — called “sexy” — broken by some zealous child. But the untold stories are precisely the most important stories to tell. The more stories that are told, the less they can all be the same.

I know how dumb and selfish and even endangering this can sound, but I don’t want to charge my attacker (not everyone does). After the JMU assault, the survivor told the Huffington Post that “It was kind of hard for me to deal with. I just tried to diminish the situation. I didn’t want to bring it up, didn’t want to talk about it.” That resonated with me. I don’t want anything to do with him. I don’t want him in my life, even in a courtroom. I kept imagining, perhaps too cinematically, that he’d toss off some haunting quip as he was hauled away. I won’t let him. I won’t even let him have a name now. He’s a nameless demon who has taken so much that I don’t want to give him even the possibility of taking more.

Being assaulted changed sex for me. The total absence of intimacy during that horrible weekend restored my need for it. In the world of hook-up apps, where you can know the size of a paramour’s penis before you know his name — if you ever learn his name — sex becomes worse than casual, worse than carnal; it becomes transactional. Using Grindr and its ilk, men order guys over to their apartments as if they were specialty pizzas.

Afterward, the 30-day anti-HIV drug regimen weirdly helped things. I was certainly not about to be sexually active in that time. It enabled a kind of monasticism. My new rule became that I didn’t want to have sex with anyone I wouldn’t bring to a dinner party. I recently spent an evening with a guy that peaked with hand-holding. (It was everything The Beatles promised and more.)

So much — too much — of our collective gay story is about sadness and despair and downfall. “Giovanni’s Room.” “Dancer From The Dance.” “The Normal Heart.” “Angels in America.” “My Own Private Idaho.” “Philadelphia.” “Brokeback Mountain.” “Milk.” “Weekend.” When the two hot teenage boys in “Y Tu Mamá También” hook up, it destroys their friendship. Even “Will & Grace” ended with the lifelong friendship in decades of ruin. It’s an unspoken trade-off: gays can be in pop culture as long as they’re vacuous or miserable or both, as if we’re born with the gene for sad endings (#itgetsbitter).

I can’t offer a happy ending here. I don’t want the sort of closure that turns incidents like this into a neat three-act “Law & Order” episode. I’ve decided instead — and writing this is the first step — that the resulting self-awareness, and hopefully, beyond me, a truer social awareness of rape, is a sufficient coda. It would be pretty ironic for me to force my takeaway upon anyone else, but in the year since my trauma, I’ve rededicated myself to kindness and hope and intimacy, which has made me feel comfortable enough to realize that my story can serve a purpose, too. That, I pray, can at least be an everlasting happy beginning.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/01/my-own-rape-shows-how-badly-we-stereotype-perps-and-victims/