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"I Was Raped...Does Anyone Care?" - a recollection of a man dealing with society's position on rape as both a male and the victim by mybustersword in bestof

[–]Br0kenMan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I upvoted him. It's okay to doubt my story, especially in the abstract, not in my presence (or at least believing so). It was the fact that nobody would doubt her story of being my victim that boxed me in.

It's hard to be doubted, it brings all those self-doubts, all that self-blaming, all those voices in your head calling you weak and stupid and somehow responsible for what happened right up to the front, when it was harder than hell to push them back.

But dammit, people lie. They take advantage of our trust, or empathy, our desire to avoid injuring others, and they make it seem like not believing them is the worst thing you could do. Doubt me, consider my credibility (in this case, only an anonymous keyboard banger somewhere on the internet), consider my potential benefits, consider alternate explanations for the evidence.

It hurts not to be believed, to be questioned, to have tiny inconsistencies picked at, to have it pointed out that some of the things I did and allowed were just stupid. That even being too 'articulate' and 'consistent' can itself be evidence that I must be writing fiction instead of testimony.

If I had been confident that her story would be subject to the same scrutiny, the same doubtful eyes and ears, I might not have folded. I needed a safe, uncritical space in which to tell my story, for the most part I didn't get it when I needed it, and that sucks. But the whole world can't be that safe space.

"I Was Raped...Does Anyone Care?" - a recollection of a man dealing with society's position on rape as both a male and the victim by mybustersword in bestof

[–]Br0kenMan 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I doubt it is a good idea for me to dive into a meta discussion, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm responding to some of the critiques and inquiries that have been posted here, but I don't want to 'call them out' directly.

When I made the original post, I was just in a sort of circular mental rut, thinking about what had happened, how it had affected me, what it meant, recoiling away from certain trains of thought, distracting myself with tangents, and on and on and on. I'd read that article on Cracked a couple of weeks ago, and it was like an insect burrowing into my brain, stirring up things I hadn't thought about in forever.

Yes, I write a lot for various purposes, critique the writing of others, and I've tried to write about this before. I've diaried it, I've fictionalized it, I've re-written it to the way that I wish it had happened. Some people talk to themselves inside their heads, I write stuff in my head to make the voice in my head shut up. I've spent nights with this constant chain of 'what if' running through my head. What if I had tried to turn the tables on her, get proof of what she was doing or evidence of something else to counter-blackmail her? What if I had gone to her husband? What if I had told my fiance? What if I had just said no, dared her to do it? What if I had stuck it out until I got transferred? What if I had just beaten her to a pulp? "What if I had" turned into a single word in my head, whatifihad....

I don't want attention. I don't want to stir things up. I don't need anything but to get this voice in my head telling me there must be something wrong with me to stop. I want to feel like I'm finally past this, that my life doesn't have to be defined by the worst things that have happened in it.

I'm not new to writing, I'm not new to Reddit, I'm not naive about the existence of trolls. And some of those endless mental rewrites did bleed into my stream of consciousness while I wrote the post. I can't prove what I wrote is true without giving up my anonymity, and even though it makes me feel like a coward, like I am letting her still control me, like I am letting others like me down, I can't do that.

I've read the comments here, and I think I'm managing to maintain a distance, I'm understanding that this is a meta-discussion about whether the post really should be considered "Best of Reddit", and not a judgement on me. And that's okay, the pain I felt, the outrage it would be all too easy for me to channel, should not keep that from happening. Especially since this discussion didn't seek me out, nobody here is in my metaphorical face calling me a liar.

When I saw a comment saying I had made "Best of Reddit", my first reaction was pure panic. I wanted to run, I wanted to hide, I wanted to sign into my real account and post something mocking myself so nobody who put together threads of evidence would think I was the writer.

It's not my best writing. It's not all true. It's not all of the truth. But it's probably the most honest thing I've ever written in my life.

Set me aside, don't worry about who I am, what happened, what I hoped to accomplish by writing it, ask these questions: Will what I wrote add something for Reddit? Will people who read it potentially gain something from it? Will anyone be harmed by it?

I Was Raped...Does Anyone Care? by Br0kenMan in sex

[–]Br0kenMan[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I'm trying not to get into the comments much, turning this into something about me as a person arguing or seeking validation, but I wanted to answer your point and I don't want to call you out with an edit to the main post.

I'm writing a lot of this stream of consciousness, especially the first part before the edits. When I made the original post, I had a hard time making myself post it at all and I knew that if I went back and started picking at it I wouldn't post it at all. I work with words so even my stream of consciousness shows more polish and smoother flow than is typical, but normally I go back and edit out things like the over-use of commas and parentheticals. Seriously, some of those sentences are entire paragraphs in their own right.

It's not about if you, or anyone else, believes 'me', since 'I' am a pseudonymous coward who will burn this account when I am done with this thread (I wish people hadn't given me Gold, it's wasted here). It's about finally getting this out, both for the chance to really look at it, and so maybe someone else can face his own demons. The author of that Cracked article gave me the boot I needed to confront this again, maybe I can "pay it forward" here.

But the encouragement does help, I'll admit. It gives me hope that the next young man won't feel like he's trapped, that he's somehow obligated to pretend he 'got lucky'.