Why It (Always) Counts

TRIGGER WARNING: sexual assault

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I was sexually assaulted by a fellow classmate in middle school. But for a long, long time, I didn’t think I was.

For a long time, I didn’t realize it. I didn’t think about it “like that”. Even when I did start to think of it as something—not “like that”, but something—I didn’t think it counted. In the grand scheme of things, within the broader constructs of feminism and the Me Too movement, it didn’t seem like it mattered very much at all.

This was for a number of reasons. For one, I was always on pretty good terms with the person who did it. He was my friend—of sorts. At the very least, he was friendly to me. He gave me this weird smile sometimes that made me feel small and strange and a little freaked out, but he was always decently nice, and he was friendly with all my friends. He liked video games, and he hated math. He wasn’t this bad guy, this rapist, this demon. In a great deal of ways, he was a lot like me. He was just a regular kid.

He would also touch me inappropriately during class, every single day, from behind me when I was sitting at my desk.

It wasn’t violent. It wasn’t aggressive. But it was every day, without fail.

I didn’t like him. I wasn’t attracted to him. I didn’t ask him to do it. I didn’t want it to happen. But it did.

So many of the times it happened, I never even told him no, which brings up my second problem: how was it sexual assault if I never said no?

I may not have explicitly asked for it. I may have pushed him away once, twice, even countless times, and he still kept doing it anyway—but that wasn’t a big deal. He wasn’t forceful. It wasn’t hurting me. It didn’t count.

He was just a kid, just like me. He must have just liked me. He must have just deemed I was attractive enough to do that to—he would be the only one, and I think I knew that. He must have wanted to do it, so he did—it was that simple. And I let him. It happens.

I think I knew that, too. That boys will be boys—sexual creatures, unlike girls. Boys are the ones who do the sex, the fucking, the groping; it’s girls who receive it. Sexual things are done to girls. They go along with it, if they’re cool—and I really wanted to be cool.

So really, it was never his fault. Really, it was mine, for not being more cool about being touched without my permission.

But was it? Was it really without my permission? I never grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him and told him, hard and firm to his face, to stop. That would have been silly, ridiculous, dramatic.

But sometimes, I would push his hand away. Sometimes, I would laugh awkwardly and tell him to stop.

He would laugh, too. But he would never listen.

The first time it happened, I was so shocked that I felt like I couldn’t move a muscle. It felt electric and nauseating and so, so strange, this barrier between me and him, between me and my mental constructs of sexuality, this big, scary, all-enticing demon, finally being crossed, and I had no say in it.

When he groped me for the first time, beneath the silence and the shock and the shame, I felt oddly empty. I’d always pondered about what my first sexual experience would be like around that time, and here it was—completely not what I’d expected, with this guy who I thought was, to be frank, quite unattractive.

Even more frankly, as I was in the midst of my bisexual awakening and had realized I had both an attraction to and a preference for the same sex, I’d always pictured it with another girl—even, maybe, the girl I had a crush on.

It wasn’t with her, though. It was with him.

And for some strange reason, that made my heart feel like it was sinking in my chest.

In an attempt to calm myself, to play it cool, I thought to myself that the physical feeling, if I would have known it was coming, was sort of nice. My body liked the contact, even if my hands were shaking and my mind was reeling and my lips were silent and still.

I must like it, then. I must have wanted it. I must have invited it. It was fine. It was the way things were, and are, and it was the way I was, to sit there and take it. And if it’s not the way things were, or are, it’s still not assault. It doesn’t count.

Most of the time, I never said anything. It was always during class. I stayed away from him after class, steered clear of him completely. I could control what happened outside of that room. Inside, I felt like I couldn’t. I didn’t want to bring attention to him, or to myself. I didn’t want to make a scene. I didn’t want to hate him. I didn’t want him to hate me. Still, I wanted him to think I was cool. That it was nothing.

But it wasn’t nothing.

I was the kind of kid who was described as “too good”, as in I was afraid to be loud, afraid to take risks, and always willing to let everything slide. I was terribly anxious all of the time, and I was a “pick me” not in the typical male appeasement sense, but in an all-encompassing, gender neutral sense; I was willing to people please to such ridiculous extents just for some validation, just to slap some glue on my shattered self-confidence. But I didn’t realize how detrimental this was to myself, and to my own safety, until many years after this situation, and several others like it.

My anxiety, coupled with my people pleasing tendencies, stopped me from seeing this boy for what he was: a creep. He was a creep for touching me without my consent. He was even more of a creep for disregarding me when I pushed him away, or when I told him to stop. Unwanted touching such as this classifies as sexual assault, even if neither him or I knew it, or saw it for what it was at the time.

In those moments, I felt dehumanized. I felt confused. I felt weak. I felt like I didn’t have a say. I felt hurt. I felt betrayed. And I felt afraid to express any of it. I don’t think anyone deserves to feel that way, at any age, ever.

Just because I was unwilling to make a scene in the classroom, or because I was too nervous to speak up to the kid the way I wanted to about what he was doing, doesn’t make what happened any less wrong. I was groped without my permission every day, and due to my fear and my disposition, I got used to it. It wasn’t until another girl saw and spoke up for me that it stopped, and her strength and confidence absolutely struck thirteen-year-old me.

Every day, people face unspeakable sexual trauma. People, especially women and femmes, are brutally assaulted, raped, and tortured for sexual gratification in heinous, despicable ways.

That never happened to me. For me to even contemplate putting myself in the same boat as those people, those survivors, even in the same category, felt ridiculous. But it’s never ridiculous to see a situation for what it was, and what it was was wrong.

When I was sexually assaulted again years later in high school, I dealt with it extremely poorly. I didn’t respond the way (I deemed) a “normal person” would. There’s no right way to deal with trauma, and we cope the way we cope and do what we have to to survive, but I didn’t know that then. Still, I hold onto a lot of shame and self-resentment, even now, for how I dealt with those situations and feelings that came later.

And I realized that those things—the shame, the fear, the silence—were born in that classroom, in those moments, with that boy who wasn’t “like that”.

I don’t resent that boy. To an extent, I feel for him. I hate that he thought that acting that way and doing those things were okay ways to interact with girls, because it’s not the reality of the world. Consent should have been stressed to us in sexual education, yet it never was, not at all.

My takeaway from all of it is that shame and fear are powerful feelings, but they should never blind you for seeing situations, and people, for who and what they are. And they should never stop us from protecting ourselves once we learn that we can, and that we should.

Show yourselves compassion, always. ♥️