"she couldn’t get any farther away inside from her skin."

I was seventeen when I was sexually assaulted, and I'm still not sure whether I'm ready to write about it, but I think it probably is good for me.

We had been dating for probably three or four months and I apparently wasn't giving him what he wanted. I have blacked a lot of it out from my memory, but what I remember most is him saying, "I can do whatever I want to you and you can do nothing to stop me."

After it was over, I made us dinner. I felt nauseous, but I made dinner, and told myself I was overreacting, and not until years later did I realize that I was really not overreacting at all. Somehow, the horrible act wasn't the worst part, and neither was realizing how horrible the act was. The worst part was when I tried to tell someone and they dismissed me. I had spent months trying to build up the courage to tell someone what had happened to me... and they told me I had just regretted it and changed my mind.

The weeks following were what made me a feminist. I spent days locked away inside myself, wondering yet again if I had really just blown things out of proportion. Somehow, I felt guilty for what had happened to me, and looking back on it now, I had done nothing wrong.

"Why would you put yourself in that situation?" My friend's words ring in my head still, because that is rape culture personified. I was the victim; I don't even feel like a survivor, even now. I still feel like a victim. And even though I was the victim I was the one who carried the guilt, who carried the burden. Even now, I don't think he knows what he did to me. Our culture protects him. Our culture of rape jokes, and "boys will be boys," and "she was asking for it," has ensured that he feels no shame for what he did to me, while even now, as educated as I am, I can't shake the lingering feelings that it was somehow at least partially my fault.

Brownmiller wrote that rape is not a sexual crime, it was a personal one; and we talked about how the personal was political. My assault made my body a battleground, but even now I don't feel like a soldier. I feel like I was taken advantage of and then told that it was my responsibility to not let that happen. Could you imagine going to the funeral of a murder victim and hearing relatives say, "Well,
he was just asking to be murdered?"