I orig­i­nally posted this in response to a con­ver­sa­tion about rape that was hap­pen­ing over at Alas, A Blog about rape, specif­i­cally about why some women have a hard time rec­og­niz­ing rape as rape. Some­thing about that con­ver­sa­tion – I don’t remem­ber what, and I don’t really feel the need to go back and read through the entire thread – made me think of the first time I had sex and how com­ing to terms with that expe­ri­ence raised for me some really inter­est­ing ques­tions that, while absolutely derail­ing in a thread about women and rape, were nonethe­less impor­tant to think about. This has been, con­sis­tently, the most pop­u­lar post on the older ver­sion of It’s All Con­nected, and so I am repost­ing it, with some small edits, here.

I lost my vir­gin­ity when I was six­teen with the eighteen-year-old girl who lived on the first floor of the build­ing next to my grandmother’s. As soon as our rela­tion­ship started to become phys­i­cal — and this was my first sex­ual rela­tion­ship ever — I asked her if she was a vir­gin. She told me yes. I told her I was as well and that I wanted to stay that way. My posi­tion had noth­ing to do with morals. I knew myself, and I knew that I was not ready for the level of inti­macy or the risk of unwanted preg­nancy that inter­course rep­re­sented. She told me that she felt the same way, and so our phys­i­cal rela­tion­ship con­sisted of all the things you can do with­out los­ing your vir­gin­ity. One time, how­ever, as she was mak­ing love to me, she climbed on top of me, and by the time I under­stood what was hap­pen­ing, I was inside her and both the power of the phys­i­cal sen­sa­tion, which was over­whelm­ing, and my own con­fu­sion, which was over­whelm­ing as well, made it impos­si­ble for me to find a place within myself from which to tell her to stop or to push her off me.

I did not like how empty I felt when we were fin­ished, and I told her so. I had thought – assum­ing we’d decided that we wanted to be each other’s first – that we would plan the loss of our vir­gini­ties, and so I fig­ured that the sex had hap­pened because we’d each, sep­a­rately, got­ten car­ried away in the moment. I knew that noth­ing in the way I’d behaved would have sig­ni­fied to her any­thing other than my enthu­si­as­tic par­tic­i­pa­tion, so I was not try­ing to accuse her of any­thing. Still, I was dis­ap­pointed that my first expe­ri­ence of inter­course was one I had not wanted to take place. I told her this as well, assum­ing that since she too was a vir­gin, she would at least under­stand how I felt, even if she did not feel quite the same way. What I wanted, in other words, was to talk about what had hap­pened, to make sense of it in a way that would bridge the gap that, to me at least, had opened between us. My friend, how­ever, responded in a way that shut that pos­si­bil­ity down pretty much com­pletely. If I hadn’t wanted to have sex, she told me, I should have told her to stop. Besides, who did I think I was kid­ding? I was no dif­fer­ent from any other guy. The only rea­son I’d said I didn’t want to have sex was that I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to do it right.

At that point, I began to won­der if she’d told me the truth about her own vir­gin­ity. When I asked her, she said that she’d lied about being a vir­gin because she knew that just like every other guy I would want to think I was her first. She’d lost her vir­gin­ity a cou­ple of years ear­lier, she told me, when two guys from the neigh­bor­hood got her drunk and fucked her a cou­ple of times each in a sin­gle night. Know­ing what I know now about rape and sex­ual assault, I real­ize she might very well have been telling me the truth. At the time, though, I was so angry, not because she wasn’t a vir­gin – I didn’t give a shit about that – but because she’d lied to me, that I didn’t believe her. Her story felt more like either a play for my sym­pa­thy or an attempt to claim a kind of moral author­ity of suf­fer­ing that would her put beyond cri­tique. In any event, we broke up.

In the years that fol­lowed, I told this story to peo­ple that I knew and their reac­tion was sur­pris­ingly sim­i­lar to my ex-girlfriend’s. Not only could they not fathom that I hadn’t wanted to have sex – one girl that I told soon after it hap­pened kept con­grat­u­lat­ing me no mat­ter how many times I told her that I did not feel con­grat­u­la­tions were in order – but they found what I said about being con­fused and over­whelmed by the sen­sa­tion to be unbe­liev­able, and they accused me of try­ing to ratio­nal­ize away my own respon­si­bil­ity. (Remark­ably, there are peo­ple my own age who have that same response now, as if they really believe a boy of six­teen, whose entire expe­ri­ence of inter­course to that point con­sisted of pic­tures that he saw in mag­a­zines, would respond to a woman’s slip­ping his penis inside her with the com­po­sure of some­one who’d been hav­ing sex for some time.) When I was in my junior year of col­lege, though – which would make it around 1983 – I told my story to a woman who looked at me when I was fin­ished and said, “She date-raped you.”

Largely because the idea of a woman rap­ing a man was so alien to me, I did not want to call what had hap­pened rape, but this woman kept insist­ing: just because I didn’t say no didn’t mean I said yes; my girl­friend had not respected my bound­aries; she had taken advan­tage of my igno­rance and inex­pe­ri­ence; and, to top it all off, she’d tried to blame it all on me. Even­tu­ally, I began to see things the way my friend on cam­pus was telling me I should see them, and I started to think of myself as a date-rape sur­vivor, which fit very neatly into another part of what was going on inside me: I was just begin­ning to accept, and to accept that I needed to come to terms with, the fact that I’d been sex­u­ally abused twice when I was a kid. So see­ing what hap­pened when I lost my vir­gin­ity as date rape, rec­og­niz­ing that a woman could exploit me sex­u­ally no dif­fer­ently than a man, felt to me exactly right.

It took a long time before I started to ques­tion whether that woman in col­lege was right to char­ac­ter­ize my first sex­ual expe­ri­ence as date rape, and what moti­vated my recon­sid­er­a­tion were the ques­tions peo­ple asked me when they read what I’d been writ­ing about the expe­ri­ence. They wanted to know why I didn’t make more explicit the implicit char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of my girl­friend as a preda­tor. That seemed right to me. If she’d raped me, then she was a preda­tor and not to call her one was not only to be dis­hon­est with myself; it was to col­lab­o­rate in my own vic­tim­iza­tion. Yet every time I tried to write it that way, I failed. Because the truth that she was not a preda­tor. Yes, she vio­lated my bound­aries; yes, she was manip­u­la­tive and deceiv­ing; but I don’t think she was try­ing to prey on me. Cer­tainly, she was not a threat to me in the way that the men who molested me were, and so I could not hon­estly say that I’d sur­vived my expe­ri­ence with her in the way that I had very obvi­ously sur­vived my expe­ri­ence with those men. Rather, I think my girl­friend was strug­gling, at least in part, with the ques­tion of how to be sex­ual with me, to show me her desire, to give me the ben­e­fit of her sex­ual expe­ri­ence, in a way that would not make her look “loose and easy;” and she wanted also, I think, to be respect­ful of what she under­stood to be the typ­i­cal ado­les­cent male stance towards sex. So she “gave me” what she was sure I really wanted, sav­ing me from the embar­rass­ment of admit­ting that I didn’t know what I was doing.

That she was clumsy in try­ing to nav­i­gate her way through all these issues is clear, and the result was that my trust and my bound­aries were vio­lated. At no time, how­ever, did I feel that I was to her a con­quest of any sort, not as the stereo­typ­i­cal notch on her bed­post, not as a vic­tim on whom she’d cho­sen to prey; and so to sug­gest that what she did was at all anal­o­gous to what the men who molested me did, or what men and women who rape and/or oth­er­wise sex­u­ally abuse their vic­tims do, seems to me to mis­rep­re­sent all of those expe­ri­ences. It fails to dis­tin­guish between out-and-out pre­da­tion and what hap­pens when the social script you are used to fol­low­ing, that you have been taught you are sup­posed to fol­low, goes awry.

I some­times wish I could talk again with the woman from my col­lege who con­vinced me I was date-raped, not just because I would like to tell her that I think she did me a dis­ser­vice, but because I would be inter­ested to know if, like me, she sees thing dif­fer­ently today than she did back then.