MyStory Contribution: Jai

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From Jai:

The first time I heard the word “slut” I was in fifth or sixth grade. I still lived in The State Capitol and I was the best little Christian kid you could ever imagine. I was a lot like the kids in that horrifying documentary Jesus Camp even though my church was nothing like that. I was also obsessed with horses, I knew about sex, but I didn’t much care for boys or kissing or romance. My life was pretty sheltered, I wasn’t exposed to sex on tv or in movies. I read books that my parents approved of, I wasn’t popular and didn’t have a lot of friends. There certainly weren’t kids who liked me on the bus or in school. So when the phone rang that night and it was for me I was confused.

It was one of two girls my age who took the same bus but wasn’t in my class. She was really excited. She asked if I thought another girl who took the bus with us was a slut.

I paused. I had never heard this word before. She sounded upbeat, I had a large vocabulary but I learned it based on the use of the words. To me, given this context, slut sounded like a good thing. I still remember the wariness this question raised in me and I remember weighing each answer carefully before I committed to one. I even thought about asking what it meant but that would mean admitting that my vocabulary wasn’t as complete as I had bragged. Still, it sounded positive and I wanted to be included more than I admitted to anyone so I said yes, she was.

“Hold on,” she replied and the very girl in question took the phone.

“So you think I’m a slut then?” she demanded.

I hung up, shaken and confused. Then I went to ask my mom what “slut” meant. When she told me I was upset, I felt horrible and guilty for calling anyone that but I didn’t know how to deal with it. They had tricked me into saying something bad about one of them. Why would they do that?

There wasn’t any slut talk after that until I moved to The Small Town. I was 12 then, between 6th and 7th grade. Puberty had begun in 5th grade but I never felt like it REALLY started until that move.

My chest started aching in second grade (growing pains) and by third I was wearing a training bra. I don’t know how large my breasts were by the time I left The State Capitol but I can’t imagine they were small. This was hidden by the fact that I wore large t-shirts, really large. Enough material to hide in. But after moving I wanted school to be different. I wanted people to like me. I wanted to go back to The State Capitol and prove I was cooler than what the other kids thought. So I bought some tighter shirts and some baggier pants (I wasn’t really sure what was “cool” at that point so I went with a very sad idea) However, it was the tight shirts that did it.

Studies have shown that women with larger breasts, no matter how they display them, are often viewed as more sexual than those women with less in the front. No matter their actions they are treated as women of “looser mores” than those with different shaped bodies. And given that our breasts develop so young it isn’t a surprise that this attitude would do something to shape a girl’s vision of herself.

Well I came to this town before having a boyfriend. In truth, back in The State Capitol, no guy would have looked at me as something worth pursuing. In The Small Town I had a “boyfriend” within a couple days of schools starting but when I heard the rumors of what and I had supposedly done with him I broke it off, shaken. I never saw him outside of school. I never held hands with him much less kissed him.

Yet within a few months rumors were flying that I was a slut.

What was the difference here? What had been the drastic shift in who I had been in The State Capitol and who I was in The Small Town? I tried to fit in, I tried to wear clothes that showed off my body. But I didn’t realize they were showing off my body. In health class one of the girls I sat next to called me “torpedoes” and “bazangas” and other nicknames relating to my breasts. There were four of us at the table and the other girls laughed half of the time because they thought I was taking it in good stride but I didn’t understand what they were making fun of. I didn’t understand that I had large breasts. It might be hard for anyone to understand but I was literally so naive that I didn’t understand how large my breasts were or what that meant.

Looking back on it the ONLY thing I did to be called a slut was have those breasts.

Between 7th and 8th grade I met some girls who hung out with “the bad kids.” I realized that they liked me and accepted me so I started to fall in with the kids in town who smoked pot and drank and stayed out at night and made out with one another. They internalized the sexual slurs people threw at them so I decided I would too. It seemed like if I owned the word it couldn’t hurt me. If they said it and I threw it back at them then there was nothing they could do that would be worse than what I already said.

That summer I met a guy at a horse event and we started kissing. Bearing in mind that I was only 13, I told him that I didn’t have sex and he asked if I did oral sex.

It was just like I was on the phone with those girls. I had no idea what oral sex was. So I said yes.

We french kissed. And it was gross. And I thought we had had oral sex because our tongues were wrapping around each other like slimy fishes rolled in wet carpet (or what I imagine that would feel like) I didn’t know exactly what sex was but I knew it had something to do with boys putting their outty bits in a girl’s inny bits. I couldn’t quite rationalize it with human anatomy but it seemed reasonable to assume that oral sex would be like that, only with our mouths. I never even THOUGHT people would put genitals in another person’s mouth.

Obviously this gross thing, french kissing, it was oral sex. And it was what my friends back home were bragging about.

When I got back I told someone that I had oral sex. As soon as I saw that look on her face I knew I had done something wrong. She called up three people while I was sitting there and told them what I had done. They all asked “… Really?!”

So… The town thinks I’m a slut. Now I just inadvertently confirmed it.

The next school year was hard. I started dressing like a bad kid. I wore really baggy pants and really small shirts. I bought my first dog collar in this grade. I experimented in SMALL ways with my sexuality (I flashed a few boys who asked) I didn’t have a boyfriend for the most of the year. I didn’t engage in real oral sex. I didn’t really do much of anything outside of show a couple boys my boobs.

That didn’t really matter. The rumors said I was pregnant, that I had an abortion, that I was sleeping with someone’s boyfriend or was teaching another person’s brother “bad things” or… the list goes on and on. Girls came to me to ask go advice for sex acts I had never actually participated in.

So it should come as no surprise when, between 8th and 9th grade, a guy decides that I have to go down on him. In an alley behind a church, in broad daylight. It did to me at the time but looking back on it I realize someone probably told him I gave it up already. I didn’t know that and I wanted him to like me. He was a year older than me and cute and lived down the street. So I did what he wanted.

It was gross. It was the first time I had really been around a guy’s penis. He came into his hand and I felt weird. But hey, this guy was going to like me, right?

A week later he invited me over to his house and tried it again. He also offered me pot for the first time. For the first time I smoked something. It didn’t really affect me but I decided I didn’t like giving him head. I tried it with a couple other guys around town, none of them liked me afterward and it was gross. Then one of them came in my mouth and I almost threw up. After that this guy did that every time. I really disliked it.

There was a lot of other shit that started happening in my life around this time (hey, high school right?) but after I decided that I didn’t like what he was doing I started telling him that I didn’t mind hanging out and smoking weed but “I didn’t want to do that anymore.” He would say ok. Every time he said we weren’t going to do anything more than smoke some drugs.

Only when I was stoned it still happened. There was never vaginal penetration but that doesn’t mean I liked what was done to me.

I felt massively helpless when this happened. I was literally trapped inside my head by the drug and couldn’t speak coherently. But I have always had this image of myself, strong and in charge. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that if something I didn’t want was happening I had no control over it. I must have had control, this was me, not some sad little popular girl. I was tough, nothing could hurt me unless I let it. This couldn’t be rape.

It was worse too. Sometimes he had friends or cousins over and when he was done with me he would send one of them in fuck my mouth. While I sat there and said nothing. At first each of them was nice and tried to talk to me but let’s remember that I was so stoned I couldn’t speak out loud. All I could think was that I didn’t want to be there. So when they tried to talk I couldn’t respond. Eventually they would just do their business. Afterward he would come back in. If I were undressed in some way they would help me put my clothes back on and then I would leave. They would kick me out, no matter what the hour. We didn’t sit around and watch TV or anything, I was just gone.

Looking back on it, if someone else had told me this story I would have said that was rape. You didn’t want it, you said you didn’t want it, it was rape. But it took me more than TEN YEARS to admit it to myself, to understand that I was raped. People who are raped say no, they fight, they are hurt by their attackers, rape is vaginal, it’s forceful, it’s mean, it’s evil. … It’s not just boys willfully ignoring the fact that you said “no” before you came over and before you smoked weed. It’s not boys you see every day in school and on the street. It’s jocks, it’s not geeks and skaters and all the punks. It wasn’t rape that happened to me. It was just me being stupid.

I spent ten years of my life with undiagnosed PTSD. I got caught in a self-destructive pattern and ended up dating a man who sexually and mentally abused me for three years in this time, I can’t imagine that did anything but intensify the PTSD that had begun festering. Later, when I moved to The Big City I took a job as an intern at a “happy-ending massage parlor.” I couldn’t handle that contact so I moved on to a job at a strip club. Strip clubs in my state are pretty sleazy, they aren’t fun parties like they are in other places where the girls get respect and men AND women will come for a good time. Thanks to my state’s laws their thin veils for closet prostitution. I am not saying this because I dislike strippers, I am saying this because I experienced it. While I never took the step to selling sex I did cross some other boundaries there and pushed my PTSD to a dangerous level.

Even then I didn’t confront it.

I quit the club after six months though I did a “amateur strip night” circuit for about another year. I started to grow more and more sexually healthy and tried to make the “things that made me feel bad” (I didn’t realize they were triggers yet) marginal parts of my life. I got myself out of the stripping scene and over the following year grew in confidence. I met a great guy, we got engaged. For a while I thought my life was perfect.

Then I started having rape dreams. I would wake up having panic attacks. I became obsessed with rape and “keeping myself safe from it.” Eventually this started to fade and I found myself able to, privately, admit that I had “been abused.” I was still not able to admit that I had not been at fault in any of the crimes that had happened to me. It was completely out of the realm of possibility. But that small step started to change some things in me, ultimately for the better. Unfortunately that meant that I didn’t feel I could be with my fiance anymore. It wasn’t that he was bad, it was that I just wasn’t the girl he had met. I was, probably for the first time in my life, starting to become a woman.

He didn’t handle the break up well. He was very depressed. We lived together for three weeks while I was looking for a new place. It would have been longer accept…

This guy, who had given me the healthiest years of my life, came home one night after I had gone to bed. I was in the bed, he had been sleeping on the couch. I heard him in the bathroom and continued to try to sleep. Then he came to the doorway of our bedroom and stood there. This man who taught me more about women’s rights and self-respect than anyone I had met came into the room. And even though we had broken up and he thought I was asleep he pulled the covers off me. And… He started to rape me.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My head was abuzz with shock. I could not (indeed still cannot) reconcile the man that was doing that to me was the same man I had lived with for three years. I couldn’t speak or do anything but lie there. I mean this literally. I did start to cry, very softly but a lot of tears. Tears had made him stop in the past (yes it had happened during good, healthy, consensual sex twice) but this time he just kept. He didn’t kiss me, he didn’t say anything. He didn’t make a noise while he was in me, even when he finished he didn’t make a sound. Afterward he got out and left. And I started to sob.

The next day I told my best friend and my mother. Neither one of them believed me. Well, they believed he had done it but they told me they felt sorry for him. I didn’t tell anyone else for a long time. I still have a hard time talking about it and have only come forward to those I trust. I feel like I should have gone to the police but… I don’t think I could do that to this man. While I am far enough away from the other incidents that I can see the boys who did them to me for what they are, this one is still too close. And it was three years ago.

It took a suicide attempt for my diagnosis of PTSD to come out. Suddenly the panic attacks and seemingly random bouts of gut-wrenching angry depression made a lot more sense, no longer seemed random. I saw the the anger and cruelty I lobbed at other women who claimed to be victims of sexual violence for what it actually was, a fear of admitting what I was going through. Because it had happened to someone else then it could have happened to me. And if it happened to me then I was a victim.

I am working on recovery and therapy. I still have a long way to go. I don’t know if I am comfortable calling myself a survivor yet, I don’t know that I am past enough of the hurt, but I am trying. And I am doing what I can to help those who have gone through similar experiences. It pains me to hear women tell other women that they should have known better than to put themselves “in that position.” It pains me to hear people say “if you didn’t fight back it wasn’t rape.” Or “if it wasn’t your vagina then you weren’t raped.” Because if I hadn’t believed that all those years ago maybe I would have gotten help a lot sooner.