Don’t Let Brock Win. End Rape Culture.

*Trigger warning: This post discusses rape and references Brock Turner, the former Stanford student and current rapist, who was sentenced to only six months in a county jail for committing a violent assault*

Don’t let Brock win.

“I was raped.” Whenever I think about it, whenever I hold that sentence in my head, I try my best to shrug it away. I make tense conversation with myself, “a lot of women get raped. It happens.” “It’s sad but it is a reality for both women and men.”

I stiffen and my throat gets tight but when I think about those words, “I was raped,” my counter argument is always, “at least I didn’t die.” “I wasn’t murdered.” The day after I went back to my life.

“You were lucky.”

When the three words, “I was raped,” weigh heavy in my skull, big black bogged down letters that obscure what I can see and how I see myself, I push back against that clogged, depressed, garbled mess and say, “It happened in college, move on. It was a long time ago.”

“I was raped.”

If I think about it too much for too long I can feel my stomach surrender to corrosive sores and acidic bile. I feel the burning in my belly and the sludge tug its way up my throat. My gut curls into a fiery fist and punches my heart into used-up pulp. I scold myself and think, “let it go already.”

But when I say the words out loud, “I was raped,” which is not all that often, I can’t shrug it away.

In part because my husband’s face grows soft with concern and his eyes get heavier out of love for me, and wishing I didn’t have to carry that weight. His fixed gaze reminds me that it wasn’t ok. It is never ok.

It becomes harder to normalize and justify the experience of rape when I say corrupt lines like, “a lot of women get raped. It happens” out loud. Even when uttered just to myself. Those words come out wrong and ugly on my tongue because I don’t believe them.

No one should accept rape as our only reality.

A price to pay for being a woman in a society that shrugs and blames in hospitals, in courtrooms, across college campuses, in our communities, and in our homes. Society is broken when the only comfort after being raped is looking in the crooked mirror attached to the door of your dorm room and simultaneously shaking and sighing with relief because you aren’t visibly wounded. You won’t have to make up any explanations.

Society coaxes us into staying silent, threatens us to write off what happened, warns us, “there is no need to talk about it. Or him. Never him.”

Instead you fight yourself to let it go.

But when you talk about that torment, even years later, and you let those words slip out of the corners of your mouth, and you have to whisper them because it still hurts so much, you know that it is real. It still hurts to hear it, it still hurts to feel it, it is still real.

“I want to let it go already,” I tell my therapist as those big black bogged down letters, carved into my body when I was in my 20s, scorch my raw skin and continue to drown me in a defeat I thought would only last until I made it safely back to my dorm room. Then I’d be over it.

“I was raped.” That’s the truth.

It was a traumatic experience, now a painful memory, and still something I carry with me that I frequently try to convince myself doesn’t matter. But when I protest in my own head that, “it could’ve been worse,” I realize that what I’m actually saying is that I didn’t matter.

I don’t matter.

He made a mistake. He made a mistake on top of me and he should be free of any pain or consequences. Because he can shrug it away.

He didn’t do anything that wrong.

It was consensual — fuck no — but he has the luxury of rewriting that experience; my character is limp and willing.

And society nods in agreement.

Enables him to “learn” at the consequence of ripping me apart. He never has to read big black bogged down letters saying “you are a rapist” because he doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t feel the rust, the soreness, the used-up pulp, the sadness, and the anger, because he has already let it go. He just needed to let me go.

One night for him, a life for me.

It is easier for him. Even when I say it out loud in a hospital, in a courtroom, on a college campus, and in my community, it is easier for him because he is believed already. His words and his life mean more than mine. With his maleness and his whiteness, with his rich parents and his reputation, which can actually be anything other than living as a woman.

Society’s chosen sons.

When I look in the mirror on my bedroom door I see a woman who still struggles to say “I was raped,” out loud because she still fights with herself to just diminish the pain and dilute the words, even at the sake of dismissing her existence. I try to trick myself into thinking that would be easier.

But I still carry those big black bogged down letters, both mine and his. Even when I know I shouldn’t.

It is so hard to hear your own voice rattle back at you, “I was raped” because the world has groomed you to think you aren’t worth it, just let it go.

To all the women and men who have been raped, assaulted, and hurt by a Brock, we can’t stay silent, we can’t let ourselves get lost.

We’re strong enough to fight. And to fix things.

Don’t be afraid to get help: RAINN Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network

1–800–656-HOPE

You are not alone.