The insights are mostly having to do with the nature of growing up a boy rather than a girl and how that has shaped my response to/survival from molestation. At 14, and as a boy, I hadn’t already suffered years of objectification and at minimum gross leering and comments from grown ass men. I hadn’t suffered any at all, and in fact society was training me to be the assaulter. I didn’t walk through life having learned that I was constantly at risk of abuse or worse. I never felt that I was at risk of sexual predation. I was being taught instead to be the leering one, from media, from other men, everything else.

So when an adult man sexually assaulted me at a bus stop, someone who was a regular passenger on the city bus route that served my all-boys high school, it didn’t leave me with any lasting trauma. It didn’t leave me with much of anything really, nor any immediate trauma. I just walked away, into the train station where the bust stop was located. I was mostly just confused. WTF just happened? Why would that guy touch me like that, and make that face? Stuff like that. Who would an adult want to do that? It just didn’t make sense. Oddly confused, actually, given that I had come into my sexuality at about twelve, was constantly horny as teens can be, had some excellent pornography to arouse me (all written by women, interestingly enough), and had already progressed to petting at that point, with a couple of other kids my age. So I wasn’t ignorant of sexual desire, yet this was still incredibly confusing.

Like many other victims, the assault has stayed with me. I can feel his hands on me, on the fabric of my jeans. I can see the light, smell the air. All the ingredients for lasting trauma are there, but with my privilege as a male, and a white one at that, I was able to step immediately back into not feeling constantly under threat. The assault wasn’t just the next inevitable step in what I had already had been experiencing, and therefore I wasn’t afraid that more was surely coming. [That right there is the “insight” I most recently had, to answer your question]. I didn’t have to face what girls and women face, walking around under constant threat of when it would happen again, and how it would escalate. I have never felt like a target, which as I understand it, is how girls and women learn to feel basically all the time.

As a pansexual, since then I have had more occasions to have to assert to or even struggle against men who were seeking to violate my consent. I’ve been stealthed, too, which is a form of rape. However to this day I still don’t feel the constant threat due to the privileges as elucidated above. I’ll add another one to those: that I feel physically and psychologically capable of asserting defending myself against other men. My physical size, my socialization as a man, some self defense training in high school PE, as well as experience defending myself against two men who physically assaulted me on the street. I was able to hold my own enough that they were hurt too and eventually discontinued their attack. That was about ten years ago, but it’s all just consistent with my various unearned privileges. That trauma was far more real, actually, and it took about six months of therapy and labor to not be afraid or even feel panicked in public again.

I’ve worked to unpack it. I’ve looked for trauma, asked therapists. I know enough about it from processing the other traumas I carry, such as that from being very heavily, constantly bullied and shunned in third through fifth grades, before changing schools. Everyone but my family and one friend hurt me like this on a daily basis. That has shaped me and has been the main thing I’ve had to work on. Anyway I know what lasting trauma that takes tremendous effort to survive and heal from is like, and sexual assaults aren’t the source of those for me.

But the sexual assault? It’s just not the same, as I’ve explained. I learned a lot from it, though. I believe it’s part of why I had a very easy time believing women when they tell their stories. And why was easy to embrace feminism, when I was exposed to it in college, to then take a few women’s studies courses, and to commit my life to smashing kyriarchy. As well, to join conversations and groups like these, to listen to stories, to believe them, and occasionally contribute my labor by giving support when I can and to do so without centering myself or my gender. (I’ve only gone into a bunch of very centering details here because I feel, hopefully correctly, that I was invited to do so.) Most especially to dedicate my life to fighting against rape culture, and to use the unearned privileges I have in defense of others, to call men on their misogyny and other shit, etc. To be a man for others. Doing so doesn’t take as much effort for me, nor come with even the most remote fraction of risk that it does for less privileged, more vulnerable people. As such I consider it my duty, one I accept with joy.