Violent /// Girl

Content warning: Explicit discussion of my sexual assault and its relationship to the evolution of my individual kinks. I also use many naughty words.

You read the title, and the content warning, and you chose to read on. I'm sorry if you feel uncomfortable while you're reading the rest of this essay, I can't do anything else for you. If it helps, I'm a little uncomfortable too. This one is a little personal and I've never written about the events herein before, but I promise we'll keep it fun, light, and sexy (eventually). Sometimes things just have to get worse before they get better, and I think it's worth talking about in this day and age.

In 2020, I was sexually assaulted by my then-boyfriend. I was really high at the time- it was actually one of my first times ever trying marijuana edibles, and I didn't know how they would impact my body. It was at that point where I was touching my face to determine if I could really feel anything at all, or if the sensations were just illusory. Yeah, really high.

I think we were watching The Office- I believe the episode where Jim and Pam meet halfway between Scranton and New York, where he proposes? Sorry, spoilers, but if you haven't watched it yet, you probably were never going to. I haven't rewatched the show in several years- not because of the rape, I just don't have the cash to shell out for Peacock.

Who wanted a streaming service just for NBC, anyway? We used to have it all on Netflix and it was great! 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, all of it behind another damn paywall. It's like we built up this beautiful Lincoln log cabin, piece by piece of all the media we wanted for a reasonable price, then the corporations had to come in and destroy everything. It feels like every time we get a good thing going, some asshole turns up and kicks my fucking blocks everywhere.

Anywho- my boyfriend knew I was high, but he wanted to have sex anyway. Maybe the vibe of sitcom love got him all hot and bothered? Could be, but probably not. Maybe I was doing something sexy in my inebriation. He was stone cold sober, so while I don't know, I'm sure he would remember.

I hope he remembers.

He took me to my bed and pulled my clothes off. I wasn't even fighting him, I was just trying not to puke in my own bed from the sudden motion. I don't think I knew what was happening at that moment, everything was garbled, and the TV was still on, which I recall being concerned about. It was the middle of the day, so I think I was confused about why we were going to bed. Yeah, really high.

Then everything gets a little hazy. That's the complicated thing about memory- it can't possibly stay as sharp as it was forever. I'm a few years older and a few hundred joints more experienced with weed, so everything has a bit of a dull edge to it. I say that about my experience here, but that's not really true- it has a chipped edge.

Everyone says that dull knives are the most dangerous, but that's not accurate. I would rather have a dull knife than a chipped one, because a chipped knife has an uneven cut pattern, so you don't know where it's going to go. You push too hard and you can fuck your hand up in a big way, or break the blade more, and end up with shards of metal in your lasagna.

That's what this memory is to me, a chipped blade sawing back and forth, shooting metal spikes into the Italian cuisine of my brain. It is unique and painful in its own way, and no two cuts are the same. My brain will focus on different parts whenever I think about it- the confusion about my hand getting caught in the sheets, the pleasure of him pushing inside me, the pain when he held me down when I tried to get up and get away from him.

I remember being too scared to tell him 'No' when his hand was wrapped around my throat.

We'd been dating for seven or eight months at that point- a mistake compounded by lockdown -and he was one of the only people in my COVID pod. He was sheltered growing up, a momma's boy, an Evangelical Christian by upbringing, but swore he'd left it all behind when one of his many friends insisted on calling him "choir boy". We had sex after the first date. Sue me, I'm easy, and we went on a road trip for our fourth. I trusted him immediately, because he was just that kind of guy you couldn't imagine doing something wrong to you. I was a transplant, he was from the area, so I appreciated having access to his friend group.

He was a nice man with nice hair and a nice smile, he had a lot of friends and a good job, and he was the first person to ever fuck me without my consent.

He pulled out before he came, which was polite, but he didn't wear a condom to begin with, going against our previously-established policy of using protection, which was rude. He left me on the bed with my tummy covered in his jizz. I was still incredibly fucked up, my whole world was spinning and I experienced an acute sense of wrongness. I felt like I had done something wrong, made him upset or set him off somehow through my behavior. After he finished, he went to the kitchen and took my last Fresca from the fridge and drank like half of it.

Who fucking does that? He knew I love Fresca, and he stole half of it anyway. It's my favorite soda- I know it's marked as a "soda water", but it's just soda. It's aspartame fluid that lubricates the gears of my brain and probably fills me with cancers as yet unknown to mankind. But like, have some fucking class dude, don't take a girl's Fresca. He fucked me twice that day- the first time when he actually fucked me (as I've mentioned above), and the second when he stole my god damned Fresca.

I don't remember if he left right away, or if he stuck around and finished the episode of The Office. Maybe he rewound it and watched it from the beginning? He came in to check on me a few times, asking me if I was okay, getting me a towel, gentlemanly stuff, then he was gone for- some engagement I don't remember. It was only after laying in bed for a few hours that I realized he didn't think he did anything wrong. My poor sweet baby boyfriend thought we'd had a consensual sexual encounter, banged one out, and left.

I cried on the floor of the shower until the hot water ran out. I almost called my mom. I had the unenviable task of dealing with the spins while I was rubbing expensive lotion on my forearm bruises to- okay, I'm not sure what I was trying to do with that, I was still in the process of sobering up. I don't think lotion takes away bruises, but I wasn't thinking clearly at the time.

The worst part of it? I dated that guy for another three months before I broke up with him (pro tip, if you feel wronged by someone, you can break up with them on the spot). Due to some misguided sense of loyalty, I did a whole self-gaslighting campaign. I convinced myself I was in the wrong, that I had wanted to have sex and I was just high enough to not remember it. It made total sense, that's totally something weed does, right? I stiffened my chin, and I moved on.

But my hands would shake whenever he touched me.

But my legs wouldn't spread when he wanted to be intimate.

But I couldn't stop myself from crying whenever I got in the shower.

Oh, and that was a typo up above. At the end of those three months, I didn't break up with him, he broke up with me. I tried to have conversation after conversation about what happened. I tried to communicate that I felt violated even while I tried to tell myself that nothing was wrong. I couldn't find the words that made him understand precisely what had transpired, and why I physically couldn't bear to have sex with him.

He was a nice boy, he apologized every time. He said he didn't realize, that he didn't know, that he wasn't that kind of guy. But every time, he had a look in his eyes, an exasperation with me to be sure, but also a sneering, leering ugliness I hadn't noticed before. Every apology had a "but" attached to it. Every statement received a qualification for why it wasn't actually his fault.

He didn't get consent. I don't think he thought he needed it with me. Eventually, he started getting mad when I wanted to talk to him, to know he cared that I was hurting, to know that he loved me. He heard me say I didn't feel good about the sex we had that night, and it was an attack on his personhood, maybe even on his masculinity.

And he broke up with me.

So yeah, that's my story. Like everything with domestic partner violence (although we weren't domestic per say- I suppose "relationship sexual violence" would probably be more appropriate), there are two sides, and you're only getting mine here. I'd try to reach out for the other side, but I've forgotten his number, and I don't particularly want to reach out via social media five years later. Maybe he thinks of himself as a good guy all this time later, maybe he's reformed and atoned for his actions, maybe it's somewhere in the middle and he thinks of it as a mistake but not an actual violent action.

I've tried to put myself into his shoes many times, but I find myself incapable. I would never have sex with an incapacitated partner unless we'd talked about clear consent rules ahead of time, and I certainly wouldn't have changed the use of protection (which was explicit before then) during that encounter. Nevertheless, I don't know what was going on in his brain, and I'm sure that I never will.

While I was emotionally destroyed at the time, it's been half a decade, and I'm all patched up now. I've dealt with more horror in the interceding years, and through the liberal application of therapy, have become a totally different person. What rankles me now is that I didn't even get to have a righteous moment of indignation, to tell him how I felt and have him apologize in a real way. He would always talk over me or do one of his half-apologies. He got to fuck me how he wanted to fuck me, then dumped me when I made a big deal about it.

I'm sure the whole situation was significantly impacted by our age- I was in my early-mid twenties, he was a year or so younger. Time has probably made me think back fairly uncharitably, and I recognize that. I think it was only his second relationship, whereas I was on my third or fourth, so we were barely able to speak with any kind of authority on relationship issues.

But as with most essays I write, I would be remiss if I didn't relate things back to my writing, my kinks, my inspiration. Sexual history is indelibly linked with who you are, how you feel, and what gets you off. I'm no exception, and I'd like to dig a little bit deeper into that in the second half here.

Lincoln logs scattered all over the floor. Metal in my bolognese. Half a bottle of Fresca I never got to drink. A sachet of expensive lotion rubbed into finger-shaped bruises.

I had been writing erotica before my first brush with sexual violence, but I took to it with a vigor which belied my earlier attempts in the aftermath. I didn't leave my apartment very much for a significant period of time (ironically getting a lot more into marijuana), and wrote a bunch of stuff which is too poorly-formatted and uninspired to ever see the light of day. I was a bit upset, I was a bit intrigued, pleasure and pain in equal measure triggered by my experience as I lay in the same bed where it had occurred.

You could say my tastes grew more extreme. Freeuse, noncon, violent hentai which objectified the female form, amongst many others. I was already into incest and breeding, but those just became stars in the constellation of my sexuality. I needed to explore myself, and explore what turned me on (an instinct therapists later determined was an effort to reclaim my sexual independence).

A lot of women have fantasies about sexual violence- call it the "Romantasy Effect" all you want, but it's always been a unique part of the female sexual oeuvre (E. L. James and Sarah J. Maas are hacks who somehow became the voice of female sexuality and I hate it). We deal with a lot more sexual violence than men (somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 women will experience rape in their lifetime), although I'm by no means discounting male-victim sexual violence, and I think that that has forced its way into our collective subconscious. Media and fiction normalize it, and we may or may not internalize that normalization, which I discussed a bit when I wrote Bad /// Girl regarding male-pleasing tropes.

Violence, in my mind, is much more clear-cut than the male gaze. I don't think there is really a question that the media landscape portrays overbearing male sexual desire as normal, so women being unwilling recipients of that desire is also normal.

Some part of my brain craves transgression, that self-destructive impulse to want my own victimization specifically as a facet of my sexual fantasy. That said, I want to insert a disclaimer here as clearly as I can: Women do not want to be sexually assaulted. I did not want to be sexually assaulted, and would not like it to happen again (although it has happened to me again since that first time). Any involuntary pleasure that sexual assault survivors may feel during the act, or which results from a fantasy of sexual violence, is completely immaterial from the reality of sexual violence as one of the worst violations in humanity's arsenal.

I've never fantasized about my ex-boyfriend raping me, but I'd be lying if I said I'd never fantasized about being raped. Hand to god, that's the honest truth of it, and I'm only comfortable admitting that under the cloak of pseudonymity. Fantasy, however, has a rose-colored horny tint thrown over everything, it's not real (except that one fantasy we all have with the giant millipede from the King Kong remake). We cannot and should not brain-police our fantasies, and likewise, having fantasies does not mean the reality is anything less than painful and profoundly, debilitatingly destructive to body and mind.

I do sometimes feel bad when I write bad characters doing bad things. I write violent, manipulative people because I find them to be catalytic points- the most interesting part of the story, regardless of what story they're in. I write characters (usually women) made into objects of desire, toys and tools to fit a purpose of sexual gratification. It's not something I think of as worthy of losing sleep over because (as I've mentioned before), it makes me horny, and I don't think many things that make you horny in the sanctity of your own mind can be morally "wrong". However, it does give me pause to reinforce sexual violence as normalcy within the media landscape. Prescriptively, maybe I should be writing stories about nice people who always get consent, and have clear moral lessons about the importance of doing so, but I confess that I have no intention to turn down that particular path any time soon.

I sometimes wonder what my fantasies would be like if I hadn't experienced sexual violence. Would my tastes have become quite so exotic when compared to the normie flavor of the week? Would I have even sought to share them with the world, as an attempt to express and wrest control of my own deviance away from a man who no longer knew nor cared? Thus, then, we return to the core of every sociological debate: Nature vs. Nurture. Am I a freak because I have always been a freak, or is it because a nice man decided to change my mind by force? Answers on a postcard, please.

I don't think I have a good answer for these questions. I was certainly changed by my rape, certainly impacted by how it hurt me, but I don't feel as though I have been robbed of a future I would've otherwise had. I am who I am now, and that's the only person I would ever want to be. All the fucked up kinks and tastes that come out in my writing are included in that statement, and I don't think I feel like apologizing for it.

Maybe you've experienced sexual violence, or have been violated by something I, or someone else has written. If so, I'm sorry, you didn't deserve that. Either way, I hope you found this a little interesting as an essay, and didn't feel too discomforted by my musings.

Go be yourself, heal yourself, and give yourself a little bit of slack for the fantasies that get you all wet and wild in the safety of your own brain.