13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 4

Read all the chapters in this series at this tag. 

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Chapter 4
“You hold all the power when your rapist starts lying to protect your feelings.”



After I decided that I would be a whore when I grew up, I changed exactly one thing about myself and it changed everything about who I was, I let go of my self-consciousness and started to operate with the confidence of a woman who had diamonds inside her panties. I was a shy child, an argumentative pre-teen but in my teenage years I decided I would start acting in accordance with the job I intended to have one day. I threw out all the clothes my mother had bought me up until that point because my mother’s agenda in dressing me was to cover up as many parts of me as possible so that no one would find out that I was overweight and I started dressing only in ways that made people so uncomfortable that they were the ones who had to look away.

My mother said it was vulgar the way I let the less-than-perfect shape of my arms show or back show but to me it wasn’t about that. I already knew how to fuck well enough to get paid which to be fair for a woman is often at any age that she’s ready to ask for money, but what I mean is that after that encounter with the Woman in Red at the bus-stand I realised I had given away a lot of my power to the man who took my virginity. I acted so mousey and helpless around him, even though, I had the thing that he wanted and he was the one who kept coming back for it; I try not to blame myself too much about that since it was only the first time I was dealing with a real-man in a sexual capacity, I was young and let’s not lose sight of this, he raped me. If his intention with the rape was to take away my innocence then the joke’s on him, I never had any to take, it was sort of like robbing a minimalist social-worker. If the intention was to just fuck, I don’t see why you would pick an inexperienced child who could have just screamed or gotten you in trouble. It just doesn’t seem like you decide to rape just because you are horny, at the heart of it there is some violence to rape.

Rape isn’t necessarily accompanied by other acts of violence like we have been taught to believe by the only type of rape that the fourth estate deems reportable, but somewhere within what can even be a coercive act held together by manipulation or blackmail as opposed to a weapon, there is violence. It’s the violence of invasion and so it’s hard to contend with there being any form of female-rape that isn’t driven by misogyny of some kind. I may never know what exactly made him decide he could just assert access on my body but the more I considered all things, the more it seemed like I should consider why it was me and not somebody else. I know most therapists and support groups will tell you that the victim contributes nothing to being chosen but that’s not true, and I don’t mean that the victim is to blame, but men like that choose girls like me for a reason. He had to have been watching or spying on me beforehand to have that clear a notion of the fact that I was sexually awakened and he had to have known that gaining access to me was easier because he knew the workings of our household. He also made the deduction that it would be easy to get me to not fight back, and while he was right, I still don’t understand how he knew he would be.

Aside from that though, I began harbouring, what may have been a delusion that he wanted me, specifically, because there was something special about me. Once again, I can almost guarantee that every therapist would warn against looking for your self-esteem in the intentions of your rapist but that belief made me feel powerful. It made me start looking at him as a person who needed me to provide whatever it was that he wasn’t getting elsewhere even though the truth was probably that he was a man who wanted to continue getting the things he got elsewhere everywhere else he could get them too but it helped me to believe that he loved me because I was special. Linking the need to be special with the desire to be loved is a very dangerous game that inevitably leads to the belief that you must be brilliant to be loved and while in that bargain you might actually turn to brilliance, you will always wonder if it is enough to be loved and it may never be. I knew that I didn’t love him and I suspected that my belief that I enjoyed having sex with him might have been true of me with anyone else. I decided that if I was going to be a whore, I had to have sex with another person to know what it really felt like when it was my choice.


…….



There are some peculiar roadblocks to being a fourteen-year-old girl on the prowl. Primary for me, was that I had no interest in fucking anyone in the only place I was allowed to routinely socialize, which was school, so I didn’t know exactly where to turn to look for men. The only man I had been with had found me and my only other foray into strangers had been randomly texting people I didn’t know to the end of storytelling. I wasn’t still doing that by then because the thrill of lies had been replaced by the taste of something real and even though it was like eating caviar out of a dog bowl, I liked it infinitely better than my imagination. Fantasy is a great thing but it is a sanitized thing in which you get to control the actions of everyone involved and it pales in comparison with its sister reality. Reality is messy and surreal, but ask any thrill-seeker and they will take the roller coaster over the VR experience every single time. You put yourself through fantasy but reality puts you through itself, and if I had learnt anything about myself it was that I preferred being put through things.

Eventually, I found my answer in the son of my tennis instructor. I’ve played tennis my entire life even though I have a deep hatred for the sport. I play it because I am convinced of the value of having a lot of skill. It doesn’t matter if you like tennis, horses, German or marketing, it’s just safer to learn all of them. Women today live in a strange era where we are allowed to freely compete for any position but we must bring everything we possibly can to the table just to be able to be considered for the same position they would thoughtlessly give to any man who can wear a shirt well-enough. We must also be able to be cook a meal, raise a child, make the world a more beautiful place and apply winged eyeliner with the skill of an artist. We must be able to laugh along when men make fun of us for wearing too much make-up or worse, accept it when other women decide they are better than you because not applying a night-cream to their faces somehow makes them smarter. We’re either defending ourselves to the patriarchy or to other feminists who don’t adhere to the same principles of equality as you do. We’re either sacrificing relationships for careers or resigning to a lifetime of never chasing our glory in the interest of our children and all because someone decided that a man could do it all, but a woman who tries to is a monster. My father used to talk about women like that when speaking in praise of his mother.

“She wasn’t trying to have it all,” he would say, “She knew what she wanted to do and she did it well.”

What he meant was that she didn’t have the gall to have both a vagina and dreams. My grandmother was raised by a reasonably liberal man who even allowed her to attend school for the first twelve years of her life with her best friend. When she was twelve, my grandmother’s thirteen-year-old best friend married a man that was chosen by her family, he was a farmer and was poised to take good care of her by every standard of marital mathematics. His family had land, no other male heirs and in terms of dowry they didn’t demand anything that her family could not afford to give, which, I guess, is a good thing in that context but never fails to make me mad. A week after her friend’s wedding she was sent home in disgrace with second-degree burns on both her hands because she could not make parathas to the satisfaction of her husband or his mother, and they figured the only fitting punishment for failing at that fundamental tenant of being a woman was to have your hands burnt in sizzling oil. My grandmother’s father saw that as a warning to correct his education of my grandmother by pulling her out of school and teaching her more womanly skills like making parathas and mending shirts.

A couple of years later she was married to my grandfather. She had eleven children within that marriage and nine of them survived childbirth. She spent the rest of her life bearing and raising those children without any attempt at having it all which pleased her eighth-son, my father, immensely. She was a wholesome woman, by his standard. One who never complained about being beaten, attended religious services, cared about her appearance without being vain and didn’t dream bigger than she was allowed to. I, on the other hand, as a woman am everything my father hates, in theory, because not only do I always intend to have it all, I refuse to participate in the charade that success comes at the cost of love or vice-versa. The only obligation any of us should have, is to be exactly ourselves and see where that goes.


…….


For me, that started in the arms of the son of my tennis instructor. I met him when he came to the court to meet his father in the middle of my lesson one day. The Instructor introduced me to him as his most promising student even though I had lost every tournament I had ever played and we both knew I was never going to win any. He was chewing gum and he pulled a strip out of his pocket and offered it to me; it was spearmint. I took a piece and smiled at him. He told me he was studying engineering at the local college and had only just started his second year. I told him that I was interested in becoming an engineer too someday and maybe I could pick his brain about it sometime. I have never had the remotest interest in engineering, but I needed a safe way to get his phone number without being too obvious about my intentions. He said he would love to guide me and, on that pretext, I fed his number into my phone. After he left, I couldn’t really concentrate on my lesson because I was only interested in figuring out how to go from being a number on his phone to the girl in his bed.

Later that night, I sent him a message that with ease led to a conversation that had nothing to do with being an engineer. He had assumed, for whatever reason, that I was older than I was and I didn’t bother to correct him. That was another one of the peculiar hurdles of being a kid who wanted to be fucked. The people who want to fuck kids want them to be really young, and the people that don’t usually prefer that you also legally be a woman in addition to feeling like one. It’s harder to fake being older than you are but men are stupid in that regard, especially younger men, they will believe most things that come out of your mouth. Spearmint readily believed everything I told him about myself, none of it was the truth. To him I was a shy, mathematically-gifted sixteen-year old who liked pandas and hoped to travel all over Australia someday. I like pandas fine and I’ve never been especially interested in Australia and I wasn’t lying to him to hide who I was, I have just always enjoyed changing personalities like outfits. I didn’t know that I was practicing for the type of prostitute that I wanted to be but it turned out my most treasured skill was the ability to determine what a person liked and believable morph myself into that. Spearmint was after the kind of woman who would recognise his sensitive soul and fill the hole of his motherless existence. In other words, he was only special because he was first.

A few days after we met for the first time, we went on a date. I planned the date in conjunction with my tennis lesson so it could take place at the juice bar in the stadium. On our date I pretended to be a lot more conservative than I actually am, because he seemed to appreciate me for my bashfulness. I told him that I had never kissed a boy before which wasn’t a lie and shouldn’t be taken as evidence of sexual inexperience. I had never kissed Mr. Boiled Chicken even though, at that point, I had been sleeping with him for almost a year. You can force your dick in me but you can’t rape my mouth open. Spearmint thought I was the sweetest, most-innocent creature he had ever met, I told him repeatedly that I couldn’t even understand why someone so handsome as him would want to be out with me when he obviously must have so many other options.

After he bought me two pineapple smoothies and we talked for about an hour, he offered to walk me to the parking lot where the driver was waiting. Underneath a clump of mulberry trees on the way he held my hand and pulled me towards him.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked me.

A girl never forgets the first time a man had the decency to ask and I will never forget that moment when I realised men could and do sometimes know better. I leaned against the tree and nodded my head. He leaned against me with his entire body and kissed me for an entire minute, I could feel him grow hard against my belly. It was awful, I knew instantly that I hated kissing. It’s just strange to try to put your tongue in the mouth of another person, I cannot imagine what motivates this desire. To this day, I cannot understand why we do this as a species.

“I cannot believe I just kissed a boy,” I told him before I left.

A few days later he told me that he believed he was falling in love with me. This genuinely threw me off because I didn’t intend for it to happen, all I wanted was to put a dick in me that I chose. Still, I had grown to enjoy communicating with him too and even though I had not enjoyed kissing in the least, I had enjoyed the warmth of his body pressing up against me. I asked him why he loved me and he explained that he had never met a girl more sensitive and fragile.


…….



I read his messages in bed beside Mr. Boiled Chicken and even though the accusation of fragility filled me a with a bilious rage, I found myself smiling quietly into my phone.

“Why are you smiling?” Mr. Boiled Chicken asked me.

I shook my head and told him it was nothing. He pulled my phone from my hands and began reading through my communication with Spearmint. I was used to him acting in this entitled manner around me and I had learnt by then that the best way to deal with him was not confrontation but manipulation. I sat there and let him read through the messages and when he finally looked up from my phone, he seemed ensconced in a type of rage I hadn’t seen in a man yet. I had made a man jealous and I had no idea how powerful that could be.

“You’re cheating on me?” He asked me.

If I wasn’t better at holding in my feelings, I would have laughed in his face for about an hour, I still think about that moment sometimes when I’m having a bad day and really need some comic relief. Not only was he married but he was cheating on his wife with a girlfriend whom he was cheating on with me. Add a little utter lack of consent to that and a healthy dash of blackmail and you get the exact nature of his moral fibre. Maybe he sensed the judgement in me even though I tried to keep as wounded a face on as possible because he immediately changed tack.

“I just mean,” he said stroking my hair, “You don’t even know this guy, you don’t know his intentions....”

It was interesting that he should talk about the intentions of another given everything that had transpired between us. For a long moment we sat silently with each other, he continued to stroke my hair and I made myself look a picture of fear and dejection. I didn’t actually feel afraid of him anymore, I had over the past months kept meticulous records, pictures and notes about everything that had happened between us and even though he didn’t know it, he knew he couldn’t blackmail me with revelation anymore. I didn’t blackmail him but once I knew I could, all my fear of him just disappeared.

“What about your intentions then?” I said finally, “You are married, you have children, you’re over twenty years older than I am... Are you ever going to be with me completely?”

I waited for an outburst that didn’t come, for a minute.

“Do you know how much it hurts to think about you at night with your family?” I asked genuinely wishing I had put in the time to learn to fake-cry, “To think about you in bed with her while I lie here alone in this hell-hole?”

I looked over to see that he looked genuinely apologetic. Of course, he wasn’t, what he felt was an inflation of his ego when he realised that not only did all these women want him but he also had the power to hurt us all at once. He also felt the inevitable turn that relationship would take once I started to demand commitment. I didn’t know yet that you could tell a man you loved him and get rid of him entirely but I was learning. His reactions were like figures being computed on a screen in response to an algorithm. It’s a strange situation when you turn what could have been a one-night assault with a minor into a relationship and stranger still when that little girl starts saying the same things to you as your girlfriend.

“So will you ever leave your wife?” I asked him, “And if you do will it be for me or your other other woman?”

As I asked those questions, I started to feel genuine annoyance and anger, I suppose I was just generally irascible at that age. I tried not to feel those emotions at all, and now I rarely do, but at that moment, the clearer I made the picture to myself the more miffed I got by his expectations from me. The more unreasonable I felt they were, the more expectations I presented to him even though the idea of actually spending my life with him made me want to pick up the paper-cutter on my table and jam it right into my carotid.

“You know how it is,” he said finally, “You know my situation...”

That’s when I first realised it was over, the power had shifted in our relationship and he could no longer get it back. I no longer felt obligated, afraid, interested or worried about any consequences he would unleash unto me. There is power to being a child too, when you learn your rights, you can essentially do no wrong.

“Then you know how it is too,” I said to me, taking my phone from his lap, and placing it firmly on the nightstand, “And please don’t go through my phone again if you can’t handle it...”

“Sweetheart, don’t be like that,” he said referring to me as something other than his orphan for the first time, “Don’t be mad at me.”

I didn’t even know I could be mad at him. I didn’t know if I was allowed to do that but the moment I stopped waiting for permission and demanding things I didn’t even want, I had Boiled Chicken like repulsive putty in my hands.

“It’s just hard for me to think about you with other men,” he said to me, “Of course I know it’s not fair to think you will never be interested in boys your age.... I just, I love you, and I wish things could be different.”

“You love me?” I asked him.

“Of course I love you!” he said with the only look of sincerity I had ever seen him wear, “I love you most.”

“Out of three you mean?” I asked him, deliberately trying to hurt him.

“Don’t say that,” He said, “I love you, not them.”

And that was it, the nail in the coffin. It’s all over when your rapist starts lying to you to protect your feelings. I said nothing but I moved closer to him and put my arms around him. I didn’t know I was going to have sex for the first time the day we did but I knew that would be the last. He tried to be gentle with me, and instead of pushing me into the bed with a grip on my hair, he leaned towards my face to try and kiss me. I turned my head in a maneuver I have since perfected and his lips landed against my neck instead. He kissed my neck and I let out soft little sobs that I have also since perfected. Sex is the ultimate art form and I am a practiced artist now, but even then I felt the my prodigal self, being born. It was the first time that he undressed me entirely and the first time I felt a limp dick against my wet cunt. He fondled and groped my breasts for a while but soon enough it was clear that he wasn’t getting anywhere. I grabbed his cock in my hand and tried to squeeze it the way he had taught to me do but all that did was make it even smaller in my hand. Next, I got down on my knees and put the little thing in my mouth, it barely extended to the back of throat. I loved how it felt in mouth, soft and broken, unresponsive to the wet warmth. I sucked on it for a while, routinely looking up to see the combination of shame and determination on his face. Ultimately, he pushed me away and started to dress. I sat on the edge of the bed watching with some satisfaction as he avoided making eye-contact with me. When he finally did look at me, he was lacing his shoes.

“Does this mean it’s over then?” I asked him, even though it was unnecessary.

“Of course not,” he said rubbing off stains that didn’t exist from his shoes, “I’ll see you soon.”

I locked the door behind him and sat smiling on my bed for a long time. There’s nothing more humiliating than not being able to perform during a raping.