Recently, a very dear friend of mine, during a discussion about the rapist Brock Turner, pointed out that my daughter’s generation will have the narrative of consent as part of her upbringing. That was never given to us, this narrative of yes and of no. “I thought rape was like, kidnapped in a van you know? Knife to the throat?” she wrote, and I realized in that moment how many assaults I’ve experienced over the years, events I’d never categorized as such until our conversation.
Rape was a shady, back-alley word, talked about in hushed whispers. You weren’t believed if you said you were raped, because rape was such a horrible thing that involved violence and strangers, or so it was assumed. I had no dialogue about consent given to me; my mother would hardly talk about sex as it was.
Those who were assaulted talked about it in nonchalant tones, shrugging off the event as if it had never even touched the core of who they were. When I was 14, I had a friend who was raped by a man in his 20s. He did less time in jail than the Stanford rapist, but to hear her tell the details of it in a cheery voice made it seem less important than it was.
I had friends who lost their virginity at extremely young ages to grown men, but the way they framed it, described it, discussed it never involved the word rape. It never involved the word no.
The first time I was assaulted, I was at a party, underage and drunk, two key words that are used to negate the experience of rape, its very existence or occurrence. I can remember every detail in vivid color because I wasn’t drunk enough to suppress that memory, but even now it doesn’t affect me. I am numb to it. I didn’t think of it as rape then, just something that happened because I was stupid and didn’t say no.
“[…] At the time I just thought that was the dynamic of men and women,” my friend added during our chat, and so had I. Rape wasn’t something that happened. If your boyfriend wanted to have sex with you, it happened, and that was the way it was.
This sort of framing, rape as "something that just happened," marked other moments in my life, but again, when I look back at them, I still cannot see them as rape. Such was the prevalence of sexual assault as a commonplace thing that it still affects the way I view my own past.
Logically, I know that these things happened, and I know the word for them, but I suppose I’ve grown numb to their existence as rape, because I was raised alongside the lack of consent. No one ever took me aside and told me I was allowed to say no, not even to my own boyfriends or my husband later. No one told me that if I didn’t want to have sex, I didn’t have to do it. And no one told me that my silence equaled an emphatic ‘no,’ that the quietude of my unwillingness meant that the sex that happened nevertheless was rape.
My daughter and her peers will not be robbed of their voice in such a way. “Now girls won't just blame themselves forever for what they couldn't control.”
It is all right to say no, we will teach them. Your body is your own, and if you say no, it means no. If you are silent, it means no. If you are unconscious, it means no. If you are drunk or asleep, it means no. Your clothes do not mean you are asking to be raped. Drinking alcohol is not an invitation to violate your body. It is not your fault if you are raped, it is the fault of the rapist.
These years mark the time of a vastly important dialogue regarding yes and no, and for the first time those of who have been assaulted in the past can participate, and perhaps in some small way, let ourselves be forgiven, let ourselves be healed by the knowledge that our daughters will know what is to give consent.
(quotes credited to Sarah Eaton with permission)
