My First Time

She had observed that it was from those who had never sailed stormy waters, came the quickest and harshest judgments on bad seamanship in heavy seas.

--Susan Glaspell

I was 14 the first time anything like that had ever happened to me. He was a cousin of Sean, my friend Nicole's boyfriend, and we were hanging out in her driveway on a summer night, just teenagers with nothing to do. He had been teasing and flirting with me all night, but then he grew more aggressive, more forward. Nicole and her boyfriend told me they were going to take a walk around the block--they wanted to have some privacy. I nodded that it was OK, we were right outside her house, and light from her open garage flooded the driveway.

As soon as they had left, he pounced on me, came up behind me and said, "I think you're scared." I didn't want to be vulnerable; yes, I was scared, but I didn't want him to know. "No, I'm not," I told him. "If you're not scared, you'd pull up your shirt." I told him no. "Then you must be scared," he replied. He inched closer to my back, wrapped his arms around me, and started groping me, running his hands all over my body as I squirmed, trying to push him off of me. He kept reaching, grabbing, groping; I kept trying to gain control, push off his hands, wiggle out from under his grip. He continued to taunt, "I think you're scared," as I struggled under his arms. Suddenly, thankfully, Nicole and Sean returned from their walk and he quickly dropped his hands off of me.

Afterward, I was scared and confused. At 14, I had a general understanding that these things happened, but I didn't expect it to happen to me, in my friend's drive way, by someone I knew. I knew what he did was wrong and gross, but I couldn't tell how wrong or gross it was. My idea of sexual assault was the stuff you see in movies: the lone woman walking down the street at night who is attacked by a stranger.

The boys soon left to go home and I told Nicole what he had done to me when she was on her walk. Being 14, she begged me not to tell anyone else; she was embarrassed because it was her boyfriend's relative, and being 14, I agreed because I wanted Nicole to be my friend and I didn't really understand what had happened.

This was not the most offensive thing a man has done to me, but it was the first.

Now, many years later, I am taking a class on violence against women. What I am learning is eye-opening and disappointing: Prosecutors of rape and sexual assault cases have a harder time persuading women on a jury that a woman was assaulted than they do men. Men are more willing to believe that the attacked woman was a victim. This seeming contradiction exists because women put themselves in the victim’s shoes and think that they would have done something differently. Women want to believe, just like I did in the driveway that night, that we are not as vulnerable as we really are. We want to believe that these things cannot just happen to us, that we can control these things by our behavior. We cannot.

Most people define rape in the classic movie scenario I believed in as a teenager. It wasn't until the late 80s/early 90s that "date rape" or "acquaintance rape" even became part of the vocabulary. The truth is, however, that the majority of rapes happen this way; most rapes/sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim already knows.

My class really hit home one day as I was reading through a few blogs and came across this entry by Amanda B., recounting her sexual assault years ago by someone she knew. Amanda's story really impressed me; I was amazed by her courage in retelling her story. But what sent goosebumps over my arms was finishing Amanda’s entry and reading comment after comment that began, "It happened to me too." One commenter summed it up well: "The scary thing is that this happened to you. The even scarier thing is that this has happened to most of your commenters… and me, too."

It broke my heart to see how many women this has happened to. Amanda’s blog is not about sexual assault; this entry was her first on the topic. The women who read her blog don't come to read about sexual assault or rape, they come to read about all aspects of Amanda’s life that touch on their different interests, maybe Amanda’s life in Mississippi, or her love of animals, or her relationship to her husband. And yet, these women who have differing reasons for reading Amanda’s blog have one thing in common: they are victims of sexual assault. What a thing to unite women.

It is my hope that women will begin to realize that having something bad happen to you doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s easier to think that assaults and rapes happen because the woman made a mistake; it’s even perhaps comforting in a sense to believe that we as women have some kind of control in these situations and are not completely vulnerable. But as long as women continue to be assaulted, women need to accept that the only ones who should feel guilt or shame are the ones who commit rapes and sexual assaults.

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.

--Ursula LeGuin