I was asked to write an article about the impact on a young boy being raped by a woman. We frequently view a boy who is raped by a woman as "hitting the lotto". This blog is intended to bring a little reality to that perspective and show how a boy is changed and his values distorted. Maybe it is time we considered this rape as a REAL crime and not a rite of passage. My first thought was to discuss it in practical, almost clinical, terms. The following approach for me seemed to capture the life changing effect in a more real way. Would love to have comments back.
A Boy experiences the Emotions of a Man:
I was 12 when I got my first
car. I didn’t even know the beautiful
girl that gave it to me. She was a
older, maybe 8-10 years, maybe more. Her
gift surprised me because it was a bright yellow and spanking new Maserati. I had never seen anything like it before and
told her I wasn’t old enough to drive and didn’t have a license- she said not
to worry. I told her my parents would be
furious, and she said we just wouldn’t tell them. I got behind the wheel and felt grown up and
like a king! Her warm touch reinforced
that I was man enough for this adventure. I drove it, and drove it fast, but
only in secret. I started to lie to
friends and family, so they wouldn’t know, but I would have done anything to
continue driving my Maserati. It was a thrill and an exhilaration I had never
felt before.
Right after I turned 16, I
went to meet her and drive again, but there was only a note at our meeting
place “Dear John, I have met another and am giving my Maserati to him. “ She didn’t even sign it or say she cared.
I lived in emotional turmoil
for days and weeks after that. I
couldn’t tell anyone, because that would expose my secret and all the
lies. The memories of the supercharged
emotions I felt while driving the Maserati sustained me for a while, but I
needed a REAL replacement. I looked
everywhere for that replacement.
Since I had no money, I
couldn’t rent a replacement and so I started buying Maserati magazines and
reading about them all the time. Pretty
quickly, I became addicted to the magazines and had to look at them every
day. I kept them hidden, for fear of my
secret life being exposed. The more I
read the more I fantasized about having a Maserati again. I test-drove every
car I could get my hands on, even if I had to bribe and cajole the owner, but
nothing compared to that Maserati. Cars were
objects to me and the only thing I cared about was whether they could measure
up to that first experience. The first Maserati felt like a “love affair”, but
after that there was no emotion only an overpowering need to be filled.
I finally made a commitment
to a car just for me. It was a Honda
Accord, which was a really nice car, but definitely not a Maserati. Every time I drove it, I thought of the
Maserati. I gave my Honda the care it
required, but never the attention it deserved. My mind was forever tied to that
first drive and the powerful emotions it created. It established a standard for
emotional experiences that I could never repeat and, throughout my life, gave
me a sense of inadequacy and loss. Even
20, 30, and 40 years later, I was still dreaming and fanaticizing about that
Maserati. That first ride had made my
entire life seem downhill and a sad failure.
The Story between the lines:
I didn’t win the lotto and it
definitely did not make me a man or a better man. I didn’t realize I was being
seduced and used from the very first moment.
Promiscuity didn’t help and pornography didn’t help either. I didn’t
realize until too late that I was simply an object to her, a conquest to make. She
left me comparing every intimate moment in my life to that of a naïve
12-year-old boy. She left me feeling
stupid and embarrassed, untrusting and fearful of intimate relationships,
because nothing could match the standard of that first moment or the despair of subsequently being discarded. Love,
intimacy and affection were all measured against the same standard, since I had
no understanding of how different they really were. They required trust and I couldn’t. They require commitment and I couldn’t. They were
not meant to be sex, they were meant to be joyful experiences in themselves
shared with another person-I simply missed all of that in life.
Oh Tom. I am so sorry for your loss, but so deeply impressed with your post. I have often wondered about boys abused by females and how it impacts them. Thank you so much for this superb description. I don't even know if I'm expressing myself well or not, but thank you again.
ReplyDeleteThis post is very touching and the emotions are so well explained, i could see myself as that little boy and feel the pain even though it can never really compare. It is a real shame how some people can cause so much misery in a someone else's life and in this case, i could say that woman was the devil herself. Sorry for all the joys you missed out in life because of that. It's great you have used this experience to reach out to others and let them know their innocence can be protected.
ReplyDeleteGreat post and great analogy. To some degree I can relate, although my abusers were mostly older girls and not grown women. What those experiences took from me and the ways in which they damaged me can not be measured. No discernible value can be put on them.
ReplyDeleteAs an adult, I don't and won't even have relationships. That part of me is broken completely. It's like the "Maserati" I was given had the break lines cut, and it went careening out of control and smashed into a concrete wall, leaving me smashed and sexually disfigured.
This is an issue I've gone on about ad nauseum on the boards at malesurvivor.org. Especially the double standard aspect of the issue. I don't believe that female on male sexual abuse is any less innately damaging than male on female or male on male abuse is. At the end of the day, the difference in the trauma suffered is negligible, if there is any difference at all. Still, our society largely does not see it that way and probably never will.
Ask a lot of people and they will tell you that male offenders should be publicly drawn and quartered. Present a lot of those same people with the same exact situation, only switch the genders around, and they will ask you "who was the lucky boy?" As for the offender... "Damn, she sounds kinda cool! Was she hot?" This attitude isn't only prevalent with your average Joe but can be seen in the way female offenders are treated differently by the media and by pop culture at large. Even our own justice system tends to treat female offenders less harshly than it would male offenders for the exact same crime. Can anyone honestly tell me I'm wrong about that? Nope.
Anyway, thanks for posting this on your blog. I'm glad I found it. It was a good read. Peace,
Ken
Hi Ken,
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for your comment. I guess I have learned from experience not too expect much change from "society" and definitely to take a cautious view of my ability to cause change. For that reason, your first two paragraphs are much more important to me that the rest.
For decades, I believed it was impossible for me to have healthy relationships. Then I walked into a support group for adult survivors of child sexual abuse at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, GA. It was a mixed group with both men and women. In that group, I learned some life-changing lessons.
I learned to voice what had happened to me-talking out loud about the 8 men and the woman who violated me and change the trajectory of my life in so many ways.
I learned and accepted both intellectually AND emotionally, that I did nothing wrong and held no responsibility for those events.
I learned that the sexual violation of my youth had distorted my personal boundaries (I didn't have many) in ways that were shocking to me, when I finally came to understand them.
Most importantly, I learned that, in spite of the childhood violence, I could have true friends, joy and inner peace. I could choose to be a new and different person. To be honest, not everyone in my life has appreciated these changes and, as a result, they have a minor role, at best, in my life today.
In the support group I learned to trust people again and watched as many of them learned to trust me. It seems many of us "rebuilt" ourselves along the way. We embraced the principle that "our past does not have to define our future", and in doing so, empowered ourselves to make serious change in the values, attitudes behaviors we accept from others and from ourselves.
For me the discussions about "boundaries" were eye-opening. Once I was on the path of recreating appropriate boundaries for myself, that weren't so porous that everything was allowed or so rigid that I screened out the whole world of emotions, feelings and contact, it became clearer to me where I started and stopped (physically, sexually, emotionally and spiritually). This clarity helped me build healthy boundaries and to use those boundaries to manage my own behavior and my relationship with others. The boundaries gave me some standards to use in determining if a relationship was healthy for me. If it wasn't healthy, I eliminated it from my life. I don't think I could have done this without the group as a contributor to my learning and a sounding board for my struggles.
My encouragement to you is to not give up on having healthy and safe relationships, and striving for a future with love, joy, affection and happiness. Having traveled the empty years without any, I understand and appreciate how valuable and important they are to having a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in my life. Today I am 70 years old and entered that support group about 6 years ago. I think it is never too late to change.
tom