CONGRATS TO THIS CO-ED WHO REVEALS THE
TRUTH ABOUT THE CURRENT ENVIRONMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION:
Sex on campus sucks. I wish I’d never
done it. But when I first arrived at my medium-size New England college with a
youthful outlook and a spring in my step, I thought quite differently.
I didn’t arrive on campus looking to engage in a crash
course of Bedroom 101, but it soon became clear that sex and hookups were
happening all around me. Despite my M.O. to generally be shy and keep to
myself, I felt pressured to fit in. And I wondered what all the fuss was about.
Everyone seemed to be having a blast exercising their sexual freedoms, and I
was on board with the idea that the sexual revolution put women in the driver’s
seat. I had just turned 18, and my life was ahead of me. What better time than
now to experiment? What could go wrong?
Now, only a couple years later, I see things differently.
I look back on my college sexual experience, and I can see how, overall, it
influenced me for the worse. Those years hurt me—in the sexual arena,
interpersonal relationships, and general self-confidence. Even as I actively
seek to heal from them with therapy and self-care, I still have a long way to
go. The repercussions of my campus sexcapades continue to haunt me to this day.
***
Lest you think I’m being dramatic or simply had a couple
less-than-dreamy rendezvous, let me get to the punch. In college I was
date-raped with a tranquilizing drug. It’s not just that one incident that
makes me chalk up my college years as a bust; it’s that I feel the culture on
campus gradually wore down my defenses, making me more vulnerable to that
violating experience.
Allow me to give the necessary disclaimers. I told nobody
back then, and I’ve told hardly anybody even now. I’m not seeking
self-aggrandizement or to “bring any men down.” I have literally no
incentive to make this up, as I pen this pseudonymous article. This month The
Atlantic includes campus sex
among the “big ideas” discussed in its yearly issue, and I thought
that now is as good a time as ever to contribute my firsthand account to
the national conversation. My only desire is that sharing my story might
shed light on some of the issues that make sex on campus a continual issue of
national attention.
In the months since the Rolling Stone fiasco of false reporting a
frat rape at the University of Virginia, news outlets have been whirring with
questions: Can we trust women who say they were raped? Why don’t women report
it immediately if they were really violated? I cannot answer all these
questions, but my story may offer some insight into why some women don’t always
report rape immediately. For me at least, it was because, like a frog in slowly
heating water, my sense of self-possession in sexual encounters had been dying
over a period of time. By the time the rape happened, my radar was gone. I
could hardly distinguish it from any other sexual encounter I had on campus,
much less report it as rape.
***
So what do I mean when I say the college sex scene was
fertile ground for my rape to take place? I saw disturbing trends that I found
to be conducive to unhealthy views of sexuality, especially for women. For one,
there was a palpable sense that men expected sexual pleasure from women as if
they deserved it. I can’t tell you how many encounters and near-encounters my
girlfriends and I would have when we’d get a look from
the guy that meant, “You’re going to follow the script, right?” Get busy pleasing me. My college experience led me to
embrace a worldview that male pleasure is king. It goes without saying that a
woman’s sexual pleasure was cursory if even applicable in college hookups. Tied
up as it is with emotion and patient mood-building, female sexual pleasure
(often elusive for those who’ve never been in a long-term monogamous
relationship) was rarely found in hookups.
Further, as soon as word got out that I had a sexual
encounter with anyone, I got a reputation as being “available” to all
of that guy’s friends. I’m not even talking about having sex, which, thanks to
my embarrassment at my inexperience, I didn’t engage in until a couple years
later. I’m talking about any hookup at all. Early freshman year I had a sober
sexual experience with a guy a couple years older than me. For the next few
years, all of his friends tried to chum up to me, as if expecting to be next in
line. I became a walking billboard for solicitation. The sense of expectation
affects you over time, and slowly my sense of self-possession was wearing thin.
Surely this couldn’t be the sexual freedom everyone was talking about . .
. unless it means free to sexually please men?
***
Another disturbing trend I experienced in college that I
believe contributes to a problematic rape culture is a sense
that no doesn’t always mean no. All it took was one
late-night study session with a guy friend who encouraged me, “Don’t
worry, we’re just friends; it’s not like that,” to see how much it really
was like that. After it got late,
and I was tired and fell asleep, he decided to put his hands down my jeans.
That was just the first of many encounters and (as I
became less naive) near-encounters that taught me that men just can’t help
themselves. Real or distorted, this became my view of things: Men may say they
won’t go there, but ultimately they will go there. I couldn’t trust that an
upfront and clear no would stick. You can sleep here tonight; don’t worry, I won’t
make a move. Or, We’re friends; this isn’t a date. After it happens a dozen times,
you get the picture that at some point men just can’t control themselves, and
you can’t change that. If you want to fit in, you have to get used to it.
Over time, I grew passive in these encounters, letting
men have their way with me. Contrary to how the media portrays it, I was never in the driver’s seat. Perhaps it was
because I was shy by nature and didn’t have much experience, but when an
evening led me to a sexual encounter, whether expected or unexpected, I didn’t
know what to do and just went along with it. When I didn’t want it, I’d prefer
to get it over with fast instead of having conflict. Any sense of explicit
consent was becoming murky.
Even when I wanted to express myself sexually and not be
as passive, the campus sex scene educated me with yet another disturbing
trend—the idea that pornified sex is the go-to for robust sexual
expression. College students need go no further than their campus “Sex
Week” (as schools such as Yale have become famous for) to see the adventurous
sex toys and apparel that make for exciting times. The message: Don’t be
boring. Be like porn stars.
As a result, girls like me who are wondering how to get
in the driver’s seat and enjoy sex (because it’s not supposed to suck, right?)
are spoon-fed pornified scripts. If you tried and failed to like porn, you’d be
like me—a twentysomething who’s passive in bed and has only the quality of
being “young and inexperienced” in terms of sexually attractive
attributes going for me. Great.
***
Then just before summer one year, I’m drinking and
cavorting with some friendly boys, and I ingest something unexpected. I feel
tired and less in control of myself. As my consciousness fades, that boy who
was eyeing me all night takes the wheel.
Yes, I was raped that night. But when it comes to me
owning my sexuality, that had been worn away slowly for years. I believe it
made me all the more vulnerable to that rape. I am still dealing with the sense
of violation I experienced that night. But also very powerful and damaging was
the campus hookup culture that conditioned me to embrace unhealthy sexual
views—that men deserve sex, no doesn’t always mean no, and real life should
resemble porn.
My experience with sex on campus was the opposite of what
I expected. What I regret the most is that, when it comes to my youthful chance
to explore my sexuality in a healthy way, I’ll never have that back. Now I have
to start from square one, trying to unlearn the unhealthy habits that campus
sex taught me. Wear protection, everyone says, as if that’s all that matters.
But condoms didn’t protect my heart, and contraception doesn’t pay my therapy
bills. How I wish someone had told me about the need to protect myself from
being used.
By Alice Owens
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