*trigger warning: specific vocabulary could trigger emotions around rape, sexual assault, etc.
I was raped.
But I’m a virgin.
Let that process in your brain and read again. I was raped but I’m a virgin. Rape, defined by most dictionaries, is the unlawful sexual intercourse or any other penetration with or without force, by a sex organ other body part, or foreign object, without the consent of the victim. That’s what happened to me.
I had a boyfriend at the time, we had been together for three months and then I started “not doing stuff for him” (his words, not mine). He got tired of it and broke up with me. I was fifteen, wasn’t the most popular girl and my teenage mind thought it was the end of the world. He called me up one day, said he wanted to pick up some of his stuff (I had borrowed jackets, CD’s and books) and that’s when it went wrong. When his dad dropped him off I said hello, I smiled and then I welcomed him into my house.
This wasn’t the first time he would be in my house. But it was the first time my parents would leave us completely alone downstairs. They trusted me. When my ex-boyfriend grabbed his stuff I said: “That’s it? You do know that your reasons are weird and don’t make sense right?”
He looked at me, I will never forget the way he looked me from head to toe, and grabbed my wrist. He said that he was a guy, he had needs too and that I was being selfish. I was confused, everything happened in a blur because quickly he had pushed my hand down his pants.
Touching him wasn’t foreign, we’d done groping before, but the way he was speaking to me was foreign. He said that no other guy would ever find me attractive, that I was lucky he did. That hurt and brought tears to my eyes. In a blink of an eye, I was forced to perform oral sex on him, I cried, not enjoying it one bit, but he wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t until he heard a door open – probably my parents’ – that he stopped. In the time my dad came downstairs and greeted him I was crying, my dad thought I was sad over the break-up, and I kicked him out of the house.
I couldn’t speak, for years I couldn’t fathom hearing the words oral sex again, couldn’t think of doing it with someone else, I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t until a friend of mine recenlty said to me: “yeah, it’s understandable…you were raped. You were forced to do something sexual you didn’t want to do, that’s what rape is.”
Most people think that rape is just the unwanted intercourse. We all grow up thinking rape is equivalent to unwanted sex so therefore coping mechanisms are different for each situation. What about when someone sticks their hand inside you by force? What about being forced down on someone? That is rape too. They’re not only taking a part of your innocence, they’re also taking your ability to understand what happened to you. You can’t see yourself going to therapy and saying: “I was raped but I’m a virgin” because for society that just isn’t a thing.
I’m telling you now, that it is a thing. If something like this happened to someone you know, or if you’ve been in this dilemma before, yes you were raped. Yes, you can get through this as soon as you accept that this form of rape is a valid form of rape and that the person should pay for their mistake – if that is something you want. I haven’t confronted my offender, I don’t want to, but as soon as I accepted what happened to me, accepted that I am in every right to say I was raped and accepted I am a survivor I felt so much better.
As the famous song says: I’m a survivor, I’m not going to give up.