I was in my twenties when the leader of a training session at the summer camp where I worked told us he would use she as the generic pronoun when discussing campers who might choose to tell us they'd been sexually abused. Since most abuse happened to girls, he explained, referring to both boys and girls as victims would give us a skewed picture of reality. I'd been doing some reading and I knew that, statistically speaking, he was correct. Estimates placed the number of girls who'd been sexually abused at one in three, while the number of boys was thought to be one in seven. Those numbers meant, however, that every male counselor in the camp whose group had more than six boys, which meant every male counselor in the camp, could reasonably assume that at least one of his campers had a story of abuse to tell.
Nor, according to those numbers, could I have been the only male on staff who'd had such an experience.
The session leader spoke with such authority, however, that I did not know how to challenge him, and so I said nothing.
After the session was over, furious that I had allowed myself to be so easily silenced, I went back to my room and reread a passage I'd found in Adrienne Rich's essay called "Caryatid: Two Columns," from her book On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.
[T]aught to view our bodies as our totality, our genitals as our chief source of fascination and value, many women have become dissociated from their own bodies…viewing themselves as objects to be possessed by men rather than as the subjects of an existence.
Each time I read those words, the voice of the old man in my building came back to me, telling me again about the beauty and size of my penis. This time, though, instead of the silence with which I'd answered him all those years before, I heard in my head a small tentative voice clearing its throat, gathering the courage to speak. "But what about me?" it asked. "What about what happened to me?"
Yet even as successive readings of that essay, along with the other pieces in Rich's book, offered me a way to begin to name my own experience, it also identified me as a man with the same power and privilege that the men who abused me had used to abuse me:
Rape is the ultimate outward physical act of coercion and depersonalization practiced on women by men. Most male readers…would perhaps deny having gone so far: the honest would admit to fantasies, urges of lust and hatred, or lust and fear, or to a "harmless" fascination with pornography and sadistic art.
I was fascinated by pornography; I had fantasies that combined lust and fear; and it was impossible to miss the cynical accusation in Rich's use of the word "perhaps." The message was clear. Whatever else might have been true about who I was, I was also, by definition, the enemy, and I did not know how to speak at one and the same time as both a survivor of male sexual violence and someone who participated in it, however unintentionally and/or vicariously. So I remained silent when that session leader said what he said, which is precisely what I've been trying not to do here. It's astonishing to me, though, that after all I've said so far, after having spent most of my adult life arriving at the point where I feel strong enough to say the things I've said so far, I am reluctant to tell you what comes next—not "next" in the chronological sense, since it's actually something that happened years before I started working at summer camp, but "next" in the sense that nothing I say from this point on will be truly comprehensible if I don't tell you.
What I fear is that I'll start to sound like one of those TV-talk-show guests who recites a litany of abuse so overpowering in its horror that speechlessness is the only adequate response. Indeed, when I was younger, one of those TV talk show guests was exactly what I wanted to be. I wanted a forum in which to tell my story and to make pronouncements about its meaning, and I wanted the moral authority of my suffering, hammered into an inescapable reality through the narrative piling up of injustice upon injustice, to render my pronouncements unassailable by any logic other than my own. I was enraged, and I wanted my rage to be the center of the world, or of my world at least, and so I told people about the old man in my building, and I told them about the second man who molested me—which is the story I will tell you in a moment—and I told them as well that the story I've told you about how I lost my virginity was actually the story of a date rape.
I came to this understanding of what happened between Beth and me when a female friend pointed out that if I'd been a woman and Beth a man any accusation of date rape I might have wanted to bring would not only have been taken seriously, but would also very likely have stuck. My friend, of course, was applying a standard—that only an explicitly stated yes should be taken as permission to engage in sexual activity—which did not exist when Beth and I had sex. Nonetheless, I eagerly adopted my friend's understanding of what had happened—for Beth did, after all, use the oh-so-typically-male strategy of blaming me for what she'd done—transforming myself, at least in my own imagination, into a male version of the women to whom Robin Warshaw gives voice in the title of her book I Never Called It Rape. I wanted to be, and I wanted the world to see me as, the ultimate victim, exploited by both men and women, existing outside the terms and categories of analysis employed by writers like Adrienne Rich, and therefore resembling my abusers not at all.
Over time, however, it became more and more difficult to understand the sex I had with Beth in such simplistic and even reductive terms. For to call Beth a rapist is to suggest that she was no different from the men who molested me and that the sex she and I had was in some way a violence I survived in the same way that I survived the "attentions" of those two men—and this is an analysis I can no longer accept. My abusers were predators, and if I have come to understand anything at all about what happened that night with Beth, it is that initiation, not predation, was what she had in mind. Not that this excuses the way she disregarded what I said I wanted or, rather, didn't want, but if I think in stereotypical terms, I can understand what she might have been thinking: What teenage boy would not want an older, more experienced girl to have sex with for his first time? What boy in his right mind would say no to such an opportunity, or really mean it if he said it?
I remember not long after it happened telling a good friend, a girl my age, that I'd lost my virginity. What I wanted was to talk about how badly I felt, but the first word out of my friend's mouth was Congratulations! and she did not believe me when I told her congratulations were not what I was looking for. "You've had what every guy our age wants—at least the ones I know," she said. "So don't bullshit me with false regret! You feel like a 'real man' now and you know it, so you might as well admit it." What I knew was that I felt anything but like a man, but I did not know how to respond, and so I remained silent.
Another, perhaps simpler, reason why I'm reluctant to tell the story of the second man who sexually abused me is that it raises the question of why, having been through the experience once, I let it happen again, neither resisting on my own nor telling anyone else what was happening. I don't mean, or at least I don't think I mean, that I blame myself for not saying anything. I understand very well the silencing nature of abuse, and I know that I was abused at a time when the abuse of boys was barely recognized, and that it can take years, a lifetime even, before a survivor of abuse feels strong enough to speak up. So, no, I don't think I blame myself, at least not anymore, for not saying anything at the time, but the question of why I remained silent then does raise for me now the further question of whom I've chosen to tell over the years and why.
When one of my independent study students, for example, first started to write about her own abuse, and she was struggling with how to shape that experience in language, feeling and fearing her own inadequacy, since the struggle was far more difficult than she'd ever expected it to be, it took me a full day to decide to share with her the fact that I too had been abused and that more than a decade separated the day I first started to write about it and the day I knew I'd gotten it right. And yet if she hadn't been my student, I would've told her without giving it a second thought. And I think also about who I am in my role as a husband and a father, as a friend, and even as a citizen, and about the authority and respect and vulnerability I experience in those roles, and I realize that what it means to tell someone I've been sexually abused is, or should be, the same thing as what it means to tell someone that I am opposed to injustice, and I know I have not always lived my life according to this principle, and so I have to ask: What has been at stake for me in my own silences?
