Believe Us

Tonight was hard for me.

I was out with some friends and one of them (a man) joked that having mustard put on his food “was like getting raped in the mouth.”

I didn’t take that well. I pointed out that having a condiment you disliked put on your food and being raped were not comparable. I said that if you hadn’t been raped, you couldn’t joke about it (and those who have been probably don’t want to joke about it). He disagreed and didn’t back down. I fled to the bathroom in tears.

I found myself wondering why I was so upset. “Jocelyn,” I asked myself, “what about what was just said is making you retreat to the corridor of a bar, in tears?” And if I’m being honest, it was because someone tried to do exactly that: “rape me in the mouth,” several years ago, and I had never acknowledged it. Without getting graphic, but being factual and anatomical, someone—-a person I trusted—-decided that since I was drunk, I must want his penis in my mouth. So he tried to put it there. I was drunk, but I did not in fact want his penis in my mouth, or anywhere near me. So I stubbornly kept my mouth shut. He kept trying; I kept resisting. And eventually he retreated home, unsatisfied. I later found out that he had jokingly complained to his friends afterwards, “I kept trying to put it in, but she wouldn’t open her mouth!!”

I wish that was the only time someone tried to do something to me I didn’t want done. But a year or so later, someone decided that either I had had enough alcohol, or they had put enough drugs in my alcohol (I’ll never know which, because both hospitals and police refused to test me without ‘proof of that a crime had been committed’), that they could take me home. Not bring me home; that would imply desire. But physically take me from the restaurant we were at, in a taxi, to their apartment, where I did not want to go, simply because I could not physically resist. I don’t remember going to their apartment; I don’t know how I got there. The only memory that persists, through the drugged/alcohol haze, and through the haze of time, is a vague sense memory of me shoving him away and running, then wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city, alone, disoriented, at 4 in the morning. I was ‘lucky’; I got away, physically unharmed.

I don’t like the term victim. I try to avoid it when talking about the clients and populations I strive to serve. I certainly don’t use it with myself. I like the term survivor. But I’ve never used it with myself because to me, survivor implies that you’ve gotten through some sort of violence, some sort of very real physical threat to your personhood; and I’ve never felt I could claim that.

So I’ve never known what to term myself. And tonight, I realized I don’t need to categorize. What happened to me traumatized me. That much is clear from my visceral emotional reaction to my friend’s flippant statement. I don’t need to categorize myself into victim, or survivor, or any other label. And neither does anyone else. What happened to us happened. It affected us the way it affected us. We persist and we break down and we heal. Labels don’t matter. Stories matter. People matter. What happened to me—-what happens to anyone—-doesn’t define me. But it is a part of my story, and it needs to be told. And people need to be willing to listen; and not just listen, but believe. This is true for everyone, but especially men. When we tell you that it’s not okay to compare a disliked condiment to mouth rape, believe us. When we tell you it isn’t funny to joke about drugging someone’s drink, listen to us. And if you say ‘not all men’ but then do nothing when you hear or see others doing these things, start standing up for us.