The Fear of Offending
What men get wrong about sexual assault, as told by a man who has been sexually assaulted.
Before I share my experience I’d like to declare first of that sexual assault might not be what you think it is. I write this piece as someone whose perspective on sexual assault and rape has changed dramatically over the years. It has changed because of the brave words by many women speaking up but also from reflecting on my experiences. I write this piece to someone who might be a younger version of myself, who cannot recognise what sexual assault looks like. Something I encourage everyone to do is reflect on how they may have contributed to sexual assault minimisation. Hopefully these stories might help you do that..
I have been sexually assaulted three separate times in my life. Three times. I’m a confident, athletic, straight, white male. I haven’t avoided being assaulted.
You might chalk up two of these incidents as misunderstandings. The clumsy anecdotes of coming of age. The lessons learned through naivety. But I don’t anymore.
The first time was as a teenager, when a eighteen year old student a year above me sent me unsolicited dick pictures and offered me $1000 if he could give me oral sex. Exploring my sexuality at that age I found another boy cute and had flirted with him over instant messenger. The older student found out and started texting me. Over time this texting became more unreserved, asking me what I liked about the other boy. What I’d like to do with him. I was not interested but the older student was unrelenting. He would catch my bus just to see me. I had to hide myself online. He would text message me constantly. Eventually he sent me pictures of his dick. He begun to leverage my secret over me and not knowing how to deal with it I felt deeply afraid and shameful. Once he graduated, I changed my phone number and escaped him.
The second time when I moved to Sydney to start a graduate job where the company put me up in a serviced apartment. The apartment building even had a pool and sauna which I was keen to enjoy. One night I went down, did a few laps and relaxed in the spa. A short while later an older man, around 35–40 joined me. We chatted for a while. He told me he was a model at my age. About things to do Sydney. It was all very normal until he reminded me the pool closed at 9pm and that we should change. This event occurred fifteen years ago but what I remember distinctly is how I obliging I felt I needed to be. I didn’t want to shower in the facilities. Why did I say okay? I wanted to go up and shower in my apartment but some how this guy convinced me not to with nothing other than extremely ordinary social coercion.
Many years later I came to recognise this feeling in the 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In the climax of the film Daniel Craig is lulled into a serial killers house even though he knows he’s a serial killer and it’s a mistake. He does this simply because the serial killer offers him a drink. Stellan Skarsgård terrifyingly reflects, ‘it’s hard to believe the fear of offending can be stronger than the fear of pain, but you know what? It is.’
In the shower stall, the man said ‘I’m out of soap. Can I borrow some?’
‘Yeh sure’ as if it was someone asking me for the time.
He came in, reached for the soap and touched my skin. To the mans credit I think he noticed my discomfort and left. As I became wiser I learned this experience might be common for gay men but how would you know as an naive twenty one year old?
You might be asking is this assault? Isn’t this just an awkward situation. The plot of a Seinfeld episode? Yeh, you can, but only because the man in this story sensed the moment. What if he didn’t? What if this older, larger man, naked with another person wasn’t so perceptive? It’d take me a decade to appreciate the judgement of this man who touched my skin, to stop touching it without my verbal prompting.
4 years ago I went out with a woman I met on Tinder. We shared a drink and we even shared a kiss before I ended the evening. Chivalrous you might say? Hardly, by this stage of my life this is how I liked to approach dates. I didn’t like to be overbearing. I didn’t like one night stands. I want my space and I want to give the person I am getting to know space. In the realm of modern dating with many failures to your name where intentions can be hard to gauge knowing clearly what you want is key and what I wanted was to get to know someone.
The following Friday night I was awoken by my phone buzzing.
‘Heyyyy where are you?’ We’ve all heard it, the trademark yells of a 2am drunk phone call. You might choose not to believe this but given the parameters of what I just explained the best course of action, I thought, all things considered, for a young woman, alone, unable to get home she explained, drunk, is to sleep off her intoxication in a safe space. My space. My couch. Downstairs. Or, she can use the bed and I’ll use the couch.
Is this naïveIt is clear to most reading that this sounds like a booty call and what unfurled made that obvious, but here I am trying to do the right thing by someone in a state. Here I am trying to do the right thing by me. I’m not so foolish by the way. I knew what the intention was. I knew what I needed to do. Before all this swirling debate and before I fully understood it, what I did was provide consent. Or in this case non consent.
‘You can come but please nothing can happen. I have a footy game early tomorrow andI have to sleep. You can sleep on the couch or I can and you can have the bed but nothing can happen.’
‘Su-sure, thank-you.’
She arrived, wasted, smelling of liquor and stuffy smoke. Loud, abrasive she dispelled the quiet and stammered through the door holding her shoes. ‘Heyyyyy.’ There’s that yelling again.
In a worse retelling of the incident in Sydney, I accommodated her. She grabbed me by my hand. She wanted to talk. She led me upstairs promising she just wants to lie down. She just needed me to get her some water. She just needed me to hug her. She was just going to fall asleep. ‘Kiss me.’ she said.
And you do. You kiss them because how bad can that be? She’ll stop and that’ll be the end. But it doesn’t stop. She kisses your neck. She gets on top and straddles either side. She takes her clothes off. She takes off your clothes.
‘You have to sleep’ I say. ‘Stop.’ I say. ‘No.’ I say.
I was not turned on by any of this. I was repulsed but I found myself in it. Swirling in a whirlpool desperately grasping for a handle to grab on to and get out. You do not want to be raped and weirdly you don’t want them to have raped you but isn’t that what’s happening? That’s what’s happening.
That’s the fear of offending.
When she gave me oral I was not hard.
After a few minutes of this she said ‘What are you? Gay?’
I think you get the idea. I was suffering depression at the time because of a bad job and a break up. Her question that night marked a moment in my life I dreaded ever being asked.
What I deeply dreaded was how unordinary those words made me feel. How despite being naked and vulnerable, despite not wanting to offend, I wasn’t seen. I was offended.
When reflecting on the night I thought over and over again ‘If this could happen to me…’
I told a few people about what happened but a worsening fact unfolded. People blamed me for putting myself in that situation. ‘Of course that’s what she wanted, you idiot.’ For a long time, still today, I play this story off with a laissez-faire surrender. A privilege afforded to me, resilient enough to play it off and after all I guarantee you’ve thought it. How do men get raped?
Well, men get raped the same way women do.
If you replace me in my story with a female, could you honestly say it is story of pure fiction, impossible to occur? My story is the horrifying reality for woman everywhere. Woman think surrender is better, safer than offending.
What men get wrong about rape and sexual assault is actually how ordinary it is. How it plays out in the day to day interactions we take for granted as normal. Rape does not only occur in a dirty alley. It’s not just a shady character at the bar slipping in a pill to an unguarded drink. It’s not solely reserved for clearly unhinged creeps. Sexual assault is not just being rubbed up against on train. Harassment is not just cat calls by leering older man.
Rape is utterly ordinary and therein lies the problem.
I don’t present a solution in this article for two reasons. One, I don’t have one. Even with hindsight I’m not sure how I would have acted differently at the time. I believe we’re talking about far more profound questions about society than I think we’re able to recognise while living in it. How do we deal with issues of consent? How do we deal with personal responsibility? What role does justice, education and culture play? Any solution, I believe, will take many different forms which is the second reason I don’t present one. There are hundreds of women speaking up now, sharing their stories about what rape and assault looks like and they should be heard.
This topic is distressing for me. I don’t write it seeking pity. The events that have played out in Canberra have left me dismayed purely because of how grossly inadequate peoples understanding has been. As a male I’ve felt conflicted about sharing my voice to the story. Would it amplify the voice of women subjected to the torturous debacle we’re enduring right now, or would it be just another male voice asserting their experience where it’s not needed or wanted?
I leave all that for you to decide. What I recognise now only having experienced it profoundly is that it occurs so much easier than I think most men appreciate. How quickly you are in it. How normally it plays out. That despite what I thought might be acts of chivalry or nobility in my own past might have made someone I’m interested in uncomfortable. I know that because I used to be dismissive of it, even when I had lived it. Woman are pleading for men to see their own ignorance. Things are confusing right now, but listen to Brittany Higgins considering what I’ve just shared and hear what she is actually saying in the way she means it.
