I remember the first time someone stuck his hand down my pants when I didn't want him to.
My roommate and I were mugged and molested on Page and Ashbury while walking home from a movie at the Red Vic. I must have been twenty.
"Rape Scenes" from Susie Bright's Sexual Reality
What I remember most was that my assailant was a full head shorter than me. He looked to be about fourteen, and he had the tip of his knife pushed against my breastbone. I was scared stiff, unable to move, pleading.
Our two mugger boys were so inexperienced that one of them handed my roommate's keyring back to her so he could use both hands to unfasten her pants. She blew the silver whistle that hung off her keys— and as if she had fired a warning shot— the armed and dangerous brats ran like rabbits.
It was over. I felt like shit, and I continued to feel like shit for months. I moved out of the neighborhood.
I also remember the first time I had a forced-sex fantasy. I was quite young and had gotten my hands on a naughty book, one of those "pseudo-textbooks" in sociology. It featured “true tales of juvenile delinquency,” and I found it in the library, mis-shelved.
I had never seen the word “delinquent” before, and it sounded pornographic to say the word out loud.
One story described a teenage girl pinned to a cross, just like Jesus, on a grassy hill outside her suburb; all the boys in her school had their way with her.
Another story was about a little girl who didn't obey her parents' warnings not to talk to strangers. She was kidnapped walking to school by a couple who sequestered her in their apartment and introduced her, day by day, to various sex acts which she first resisted and then (of course) became addicted to.
I was attending Catholic school at the time and my head was already filled with stories of romantic martyrdom and the wages of sin. The juvenile delinquents' dramas played over and over again in my head at night as I rubbed myself through layers of sheets, pajamas and underwear, always coming very hard. I never left that neighborhood.
I didn’t acknowledge having perilous fantasies until I was in my twenties. In a women’s studies college course, our teacher asked us if we had experienced arousing “rape fantasies.”
One girl tearfully raised her hand and said this was true for her. My heart beat so fast it was all I could do to stay put. I was just as ashamed as she of these fantasies, but I would never have admitted them. Our professor was quite kind to her, if misinformed.
Our professor comforted the girl by saying that, as women, we had been brainwashed by the patriarchy to eroticize our subordination to men. She said these fantasies were very common, which is true, and that we could "overcome" them by exposing our fantasies to feminist analysis and by our increasing self-esteem.
She was wrong on that count. In fact, I knew she was wrong later that same night...
Continued in Sexual Reality, "Rape Scenes"
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