I woke up early this morning, around 4am, and felt like I needed to write.  Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been doing plenty of writing lately, only most of it is in the form of APA style papers on “Gastrointestinal Tract: Disorders of Motility” or “Antimicrobials and Their Use” or other such compelling topics.  For the gal who only wants to prescribe psych meds and lead group therapy, writing papers on these topics is akin to water boarding—only I’m being graded on it.

So I knew that I wanted to write, that I needed to write (creatively), only I had no idea on a topic.  Usually when I write it’s because something has hit me between the eyes and insists on being attended to.  Today, the desire came before the topic so when I hopped on Facebook and saw (yet another) post about #metoo, I knew I’d found my next blog.

While the #metoo movement has opened up some very important dialogue on a long swept-under-the-rug topic, it was bound to have its share of false accusations and outliers.  There was a recent article written about Aziz Ansari and what essentially sounded like a really crappy date-gone-wrong.  Then I read a blog piece by a woman who likened her “date-gone-wrong” to the Aziz situation.  Only, they weren’t the same.  This woman talked about being forced—physically forced—into giving her date oral sex.

<insert record skipping sound here>

And yet.  And yet.  And yet …. She still didn’t view it as rape.  She viewed it as a “bad date” and talked about the objectification of persons.  I commented on the blog: “I guess I’m confused as to how ‘he physically forced me’ is anything but rape. I’ve had bad experiences where I was objectified. Hell, I’ve done the objectifying, myself. But those moments were still consensual, not forced.”  It made me sad that she was taking responsibility for something awful that was forced upon her, and it also made me stop and reflect on my own past, my own actions.

I’ve been date-raped (I hate that term—people think of “date rape” as okay-rape, polite-rape, you-asked-for-it-rape; it’s just rape, folks), I’ve been raped while in relationships by the significant other, and I’ve also had some “bad date” experiences.  These are not equivocal experiences and to equivocate them does grave injustice to the #metoo movement.  My rapes (all these years later I still feel sick just typing that) weren’t about two people using one another as objects, or one person using another as an object as sometimes happens on a “bad date”.  They were about something incredibly personal being taken, stolen without consent, sometimes forcibly, sometimes via coercion and intimidation.

Interestingly, after the first rape (the date rape), I went on a bender of objectifying men.  I’d been a virgin until that point (strike that—I was still a virgin because I NEVER CONSENTED, but society told me that my virginity was now gone—poof!), and I was angry.  Deeply, vengefully angry.  But I was also a “good girl” who wasn’t supposed to get angry (and, after all, why had I put myself into such a stupid situation to begin with?!), so I stuffed it.  I stuffed all the anger, and I skipped classes, and I drank.  I drank A LOT.  And I hooked up a lot.  After the rape, I wanted some power back, and I took that power back by CHOOSING whom I would have sex with.  It was a fucked up thought process, to be sure, but I was damn young and very wounded.

I most definitely objectified men during this period of time.  I didn’t care about them; I didn’t see them as equal human beings; I didn’t give a damn about any feelings they may or may not have.  I was pretty ugly.  But the sex was always consensual.  So those may have been” bad dates,” but nothing was ever forced (I’m certain that in some encounters I was just as objectified as the man I was with).  I am accountable for treating other human beings as objects: I make no bones about that.  I was wrong.  But engaging in encounters of that nature is not equal to rape. It’s a terrible thing to do, a terrible way to live, a terrible mindset to adopt …. But it still isn’t rape. And we can’t call it that because when we do, we diminish what victims of sexual assault have endured.

Certainly, I’ve had some “bad dates,” too, where I was the one objectified and I didn’t realize it until later.  And then I felt stupid.  And ashamed.  And pissed as hell at myself for allowing it to happen—but there’s the rub: I ALLOWED it to happen.  The best we can hope for in those cases is to learn from it and make different choices the next time around.  Me being foolish, stupid, naïve, impulsive, and regretful is not me being forced into anything.  I think many of us have been there.  It’s embarrassing as hell, but it ain’t rape.

I’m glad the dialogue is happening, even when the waters get murky like this.  So often we want things to be nice and clean and black and white and cut and dried.  But life rarely works that way.  So we should explore and discuss and listen and challenge and reflect.  Maybe we’ve been objectified, maybe we’ve objectified others. Either way, not much of a way to treat our fellow human beings.  But let’s be careful that we don’t begin to equivocate bad dates with rape.  Because they are not the same.  Sometimes we have to admit that we made a mistake. A bad date is a bad choice. A bad date is a lesson.

A rape isn’t a bad choice.

A rape isn’t a lesson.

A rape is a violation of someone’s core, and it is criminal.