“Surviving Rape Is a Whole World of Maybe, But Maybe Nots” — On the “I Was Raped” T-Shirt

Heather Corinna in the “I Was Raped” T-Shirt, used with permission

When the t-shirts got here, and I put one on to take a quick photo, checking in the mirror to make sure that despite the fact that I was two days late on washing my hair, I wasn’t too disheveled, it was an interesting experience. It was like myself was telling myself a hard truth directly, but gently. With a quiet, but clear, understanding. Rape is something that those of us who are raped are told at every turn to doubt happened to us, to explain away with a rapist’s “misinterpretation” of our nonconsent, to do our best to rid our memories of the experience, to the point that even someone like me, who also works with other survivors, who has done an epic amount of personal processing for over a very long period of time can have days and times where I, too, wonder if somehow, in some way, I managed to imagine what happened to me. Maybe that blood was from something else: maybe I just had hemmorhoids I didn’t know about. Maybe that soreness is from falling off my bike and I just don’t remember when. Maybe the reason I don’t remember all of that assault isn’t because I got knocked on the head, but because nothing actually happened. Maybe no one wants to believe me because I’m crazy, and this is all some sort of delusion. Maybe all of those body image issues, that overdose, all that poetry I wrote in my teens was about all that OTHER stuff, and that other stuff caused me to believe I was raped. Maybe when he shoved my head in his crotch, he mistook it for his own hand: maybe while I was choking on what he wanted and I didn’t, he just didn’t know I couldn’t breathe. Surviving rape is a whole world of maybe, but maybe nots.

So, sitting there, looking myself in the eye in the mirror with that t-shirt on did cause me to cry, and even if I never wear it anywhere else, even though I have, at other times, been able to acknowledge and accept what happened to me, that moment was powerful for me. I deeply could look at myself in the mirror and accept the woman who is there and everything that made her who she is, even when some of those things are incredibly difficult and not things I wished for. I was proud of her, and she made me feel strong and able, both for myself and for the work I do where I need to help others find strength and resilience. I can do that at other times, too, but I’m always grateful for any new tool to help me do that, because some days, the ones I have don’t work or don’t take me to a new place.–Heather Corinna

I write this post as a survivor of rape, in support of all girls and women everywhere, throughout the world, who have also been raped*.   We are legion.  Almost every woman I know personally has been sexually assaulted or raped, and I know hundreds of women.  By far most of the women I know who have been raped never reported it.   A tiny number did report their rapes and nothing ever came of their reports.  I know of only one woman, personally, who reported her rape and saw the perpetrator brought to justice.

Most of my friends, family members, loved ones who were raped or sexually assaulted never told a soul about it for years, or decades, for most of their lives, usually until someone they dearly loved was also raped and came to them devastated, and they could no longer remain silent for the grief, rage and anguish.  Most of us never told anyone we were raped because we rightly feared we would not be believed, we would be blamed, we would be ostracized or shunned in some way, we would become the butt of jokes, we would be thought to be, or made to be, sluts, it was too much information, it tainted us, it dirtied us somehow.   Our fear was appropriate, because we saw what happened when occasionally our womenfolk did tell others they were raped.   We saw what happened to them.  Or we feared telling anyone because we grew up hearing all of the jokes about rape, seeing cartoons about rape, or being told it was impossible for a woman to be raped.  I remember a man telling me this when I was a teenager, explaining to me that it isn’t really possible for a man to rape a woman.   To illustrate his point, he asked me to imagine that one of his fingers was a needle and another finger was thread.  He moved the “needle” finger back and forth as the “thread” finger attempted to enter the needle’s imaginary eye.  This all made perfect sense to this man, Bill, who told the story with such ease and confidence, I imagined he must have repeated it often to approving responses.  I imagined he heard it first from another man and that this was probably something men say to each other when one of them has been accused of rape.   I wonder how many women Bill raped.  I wonder how many rapists he encouraged or comforted by telling them this story.   The reversals in the imagery defy the understanding of decent people:  women as hard, cold, metallic, rigid, in control like needles, able to draw blood, able to penetrate, the rapist as thread, a filament, light, helpless, harmless.  In a world in which men have power, for the most part, and in which they teach one another and girls and women that rape is impossible, why report having been raped?

Sometimes we didn’t tell because of, as Heather says, the “whole world of maybe, but maybe nots” which exists in the heart, mind and soul of those of us who have experienced rape.  Maybe if I had done something different, been somewhere different, said or thought or believed something different.  Maybe it wasn’t really rape, somehow.  Maybe it was real to me, but not to him.  Maybe he didn’t really mean it, he didn’t really know he was raping me, and so it doesn’t exactly count as rape.  Maybe if I’d only said “no” in a more assertive way, if I’d only been more forthright, if I’d been louder, if I’d said it enough times, if I’d said it at the right time, like, when I first him,  maybe, if I’d said, “Hey, you know, I don’t want to be raped, ever, just letting you know now that we’ve introduced ourselves,” then maybe it wouldn’t have happened, and given that all of this is so, maybe it’s actually my fault I was raped, because I didn’t do any of those things, or the things I did do were probably not exactly the right things. 

Women and girls do not tell.  And sometimes they cringe when they hear other girls and women tell.  Sometimes they become resentful, angry, for so many reasons including that hearing another woman tell brings it all up, brings it all back, not only the rape or the rapes, but the whole horrifying, devastating world of maybes and maybe nots that is the lot of those of those who have survived being raped, brings up the helplessness and the horror so that everything in them recoils, resists the memories they are wanting only to fade.

The “I was raped” t-shirt is a response to all of these experiences we have as survivors of rape and it is a strategy and tool of resistance.  Baumgartner’s reasons for creating the t-shirt, and for urging women and girls to wear it, are as follows:

• Because wearing it lets others know that they aren’t alone.
• Because wearing it invites conversation about a silenced experience that so many women and men share.
• Because rape is a crime that someone did to you, against your will.
• Because, as Maya Angelou says, “I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.”
• Because you shouldn’t be ashamed that you were raped; the perpetrator should be ashamed.
• Because being public shatters the very silence that enables rape to be so common.
• Because naming what has happened is the first step toward changing the reality of rape.
• Because legal redress is rarely served, so it’s crucial to find our own justice and acknowledgment.
  ~ Jennifer Baumgardner, “I Was Raped” project, 2008

On hearing about the t-shirts, my first thought was, I wish everyone who had ever been raped would wear one, the same day, throughout the world, to testify to the fact that we are legion, we are millions and billions of women, we are your wife, your daughter, your mother, your grandmother, your schoolteacher, your attorney, your doctor.   The result might be a scream of “Enough!  No more!” that would rock the world, so overwhelmed might all of us be over how very, very many of us have been sexually violated in our lives.  The denial would have to end.  The scapegoating and disbelief would have to end.  Rape, especially, would have to end.

But the response to this t-shirt has been controversial and discouraging.  My friend, Heather, above, has been attacked in the most disgusting of ways for promoting it and wearing it, including by television reporters who ignored her request that they not show her face in their reports, who not only showed her face but focused their cameras on her face, and including by bloggers who have used her image above without permission, despite Heather’s repeated statements that her images were not to be used without express permission.  I could say so much about these angry and hateful responses (and Heather does, eloquently, on her post linked above), but in the end, I just think the reason is, most people do not want to face the truth about rape, and that includes survivors of rape.  Certainly, that includes rapists.  Most people do not want to face the implications of rape and the pervasiveness of rape, they do not want to think about the fact that in this world, by the thousands and millions and billions, men rape women and women are left to somehow make sense of their brokenness, a brokenness that might last for all of their lives.

A couple of months ago a friend of one of my daughters was brutally sexually assaulted by one boy in the presence of five boys, two of whom had been her friends since elementary school.  The experience was devastating on every level, but particularly in that my daughter’s friend had such difficulty facing the truth of what had happened to her:  that boys she had known since she was a little girl, boys she had trusted who had been her good friends, could watch and joke as she was assaulted, could even egg her rapist on, and could go about their lives as though it never happened.  She did not want my daughter to tell anyone at first.  In struggling to help my daughter — who was also traumatized, as the loved ones of rape victims always are, not to mention some of the boys were also my daughter’s friends – decide what to do and how to help her friend,  we turned to Heather’s book, published last year, SEX.  In the book I found the compassionate, nonjudgmental, intelligent wisdom and counsel I have l come to expect from Heather, both personally and on her Scarleteen website.    It was poignant to me, because I also knew that Heather was struggling, that Scarleteen was struggling, I knew she was about to take a regular, poorly-paid, but activist-for-women job in order to keep a roof over her head so that she could continue to pour herself out as relentlessly as ever on behalf of girls and young women, including rape and sexual assault victims.   It was even more poignant when I talked to Heather about the situation, and she said she would gladly make herself available to spend time with my daughter as she processed through what had happened.  I’m glad these t-shirts are available via Scarleteen, and that $5 out of every t-shirt purchase will go to the work of Scarleteen, because if girls and women ever needed support in negotiating relationships, intimacy, sex, in dealing with sexual assault and rape and their consequences — all work Scarleteen has been doing for years now — it is today, right now.

So I support the “I Was Raped” t-shirt– the selling of it, buying of it, the wearing of it.  I am going to buy one and as and when it makes sense to wear it, I am going to wear it.  It will mark me as proud, as defiant, resisting, as so done with all of the shame and grief associated with having been raped.  It will mark me as a member of the vast sisterhood of girls and women who have survived rape, supported, taught, comforted and held one another, sought healing together.  Especially it will mark me as one of the sisterhood of women demanding that men stop raping.  It will mark me as someone who is not afraid to talk about what has happened to me because I am a woman in this world.  Until the day comes that all women and girls feel free to tell our stories as we see fit, including stories of our rapes, none of us will really be free and the rapes will never end.

To just purchase a shirt, click here.
To purchase a shirt and add an extra donation to Scarleteen, click here.

If you don’t feel it’s appropriate for $5 of every t-shirt price to go to Scarleteen (I disagree), note it on your order and the $5 will go to RAINN, Rape Abuse and Incest National Network.

Heart

*I understand that men and boys are also raped, and in no way do I discount those experiences, but this is Women’s Space and my focus here is on the lives and realities of women.