Can They Smell it on me

TW: sexual assualt, rape, and just being touched unconsensually by men.

Ok pineapples, I have contemplated whether to write my story or not, mainly because only a few people know and there is an inevitable fear of exposing myself as vulnerable and weak. Please note that this post may at times go into small detail about being sexually assualted.

Dear men….STOP FUCKING TOUCHING US WITHOUT PERMISSION. And I am shouting this becuase I am done standing in my silence making excuses for you. I am shouting this because apparantly a whole bunch of you changed your email and didn’t get the memo…because there has been a harcore bounce back that we women are no longer deleting!…..can you tell I have sent a lot of work emails lately…..I am talking about a touch subject here I know….there will be lighter moments I promise….but it has to get hard first.

I went on a date a few weeks ago and I felt immediatley unsafe, my gut is never wrong and there was a reason it had taken me 2 years to go on a date with this guy. But did I leave? No… Did I fake being sick?…Nope…Did I blame myself when he ran his hand up my thigh without consent? Yes…. Did I blame myself for hesitating before I said no very firmly to him?..Yes…Did I freeze?…Yes. Would I get anywhere if I reported him?…No… I said no to him and he then proceeded to grab my boob, in public, on a roof top bar and I said no again, he grinned and said “ok,ok since that was a clear no”…..Mother fucker, was it not clear the first time? At this point I should have launched him over the side and watched his groping hands explode as he hit the pavement below.

My amazing pineapples,this is the tone in which I will be writing the rest of this post so do feel free to leave if you are triggered or upset in any way at all.

The point I am trying to make is I did nothing. No fight, no flight, just freeze. And the hardest thing about this is that it wasn’t the first time. I had always thought that if this ever happened to me now, at the age of 32, I would be badass and grown enough to either leave or fight. But what shook me the most was that under it all, I was still in the grips of men who think my body is theirs to touch. The next day I woke up and convinced myself it wasn’t that bad and that maybe it hadn’t even happened at all. I already had the patriarchy in my head before I had eaten my cereal. It took my partners to convince me that it really had been that bad and what he did..was in fact..assault.

As I write that last word I am sat here wondering if I am allowed to call it that, we are taught that assualt is being launched at by a stranger and somehow physically injured or attacked against our will. I think about all the women who have been beaten and taken against their will. Am I really allowed to say that I was assaulted? And this question takes me back to 15 year old me, when I convinced myself of the same thing.

When I was 15 I was raped. And I have only been able to use this word in the last year when, work with myself and a therapist, made me realise this did in fact happen. The reason I questioned it is the same reason I questioned my assault on the date 5 weeks ago and the same reason it happened again when I was 26. And this reason is becuase in all these situations I had been there, at first, of my own free will and consented….at the beginning.

As women we all know that good old tale of a woman consenting to start with and changing her mind. Only to be told “this doesn’t count” or “pfffft so you were just a bit confused” or “well how was he supposed to know that, you are sending mixed signals” “you tease” NO! I changed my mind like a human, Like I have a right to do, you mis informed trash muffin!

Having said this, one thing that sticks out here is “Well how was he supposed to know” and when you are prone to the freeze response, as I and so many other women are, this unfortunate narrative pops into our heads. “Well I didn’t say anything so maybe I wanted it deep down” and when I was 15, the little girl in me just wanted to be loved and the rebellious, hormonal teen just wanted to have sex. You put all of this together and it is no wonder it took me 14 years to accept the real narrative. Which was this, I was 15 and he was 20, we got stoned and drunk and had sex,consentually, I then fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night to find him having sex with me. When I asked him what he was doing he said “don’t worry you will enjoy it” I then remember passing out again.

I left in the morning, he walked me to the station and said goodbye with a wink and I was stood on a cold Northern Line platform wanting to go anywhere but right here. At the time I thought it was because I wasn’t into him and just found him unattractive. Now I realise it was because my entire body was traumatised and my brain didn’t really think it happened. “I could have been dreaming” I Wasn’t..what I was…was sexually assualted.

On my way home, a boy my age started walking along side me near my house and asked if I was from around here, I hesitated and then said yes. As we approached my house he asked for my number and I said no…..as we got to my house he asked again and I said no. He then grabbed my ass cheek and said “You live here yea? watch, I will be back for you” I didn’t sleep for a week. I sat staring out of my bedroom window hoping he wouldn’t come back. Of course he didn’t, he was a 15 year old boy who, unfortunatley, had probably done this to 4 other girls the same day. He had no idea the devastation and sleepless nights he had left in his wake.

This story here is the reason for my title of this blog…..could he smell it on me already? That not 9 hours earlier I had been assaulted, but I had wanted it right? Could he smell the fact that I would freeze, and not fight him off or run away. I spent weeks wondering if there was some sort of network that spoke to each other “oh she is up for it…you just have to give it time”….ew….I shudder even typing that.

That day and the week that followed was then buried into my unconscious, and until this blog you are reading right now, I have never told anyone. But! the reason I didn’t was becuase my trauma response allowed me to forget, until 6 months ago when I was triggered by a t.v show and..all of a sudden…it came flooding back. I started having a panic attack and went to stand in the shower. As I felt the water run over me I clutched onto the wall to find some sort of grounding and allowed the memory to play out. And you know what’s interesting? I knew then and there that I had been assualted. There were no doubts. Stood, vulnerable, wet, trying to feel myself out of the numb flush that had coated my body. Over time my unconscious had mulled it over and almost like it was ready for a presentation…showed me the reality of what had happened.

Understanding that what I went through was in fact rape, allowed me to realise that,years later, I was sexually assaulted again by a partner. And ohhh yes..you guessed it…becuase he was a partner and I consented I didn’t think it counted. You know the sequence, I changed my mind but I froze. He was high and I was stone cold sober. A lot of awful things happened in those early hours of the morning which I will not make you read.

I buried that too. I thought maybe I deserved it for trying to end things with him, that I knew him so it wouldnt “count”. And as I left in a taxi the next morning, I wondered if the cab driver,a man, could smell it on me. Here is a girl who was up for it….and then wasn’t. she’s game.

A few weeks ago I went on a date with a man who thought he could put his hands on me without consent. Then 2 weeks later a group of men tapped me on a shoulder as they left a restaurant just because they thought they could. When I turned to see what they were doing they just laughed, like “look, we are reminding her of her experiences, what a fun game” and as the man from when I was 15, the boy on my way home, my ex, all flashed into my head, I yelled at them across a whole restaurant. They didn’t hear me but little me did, and suddenly, right there, I felt a surge of energy I have only felt a couple of times before. I had unfrozen and I am ready to fight.

And I don’t mean ready to fight men….I mean that too…but I am ready to fight for my fucking body! The right to fight for my flesh, to fight for the right to freeze and still call it assualt. To fight for the women and young girls still asking themselves “was I raped?” YES, yes you were and it is ok to doubt it happened because the trauma is almost too much to deal with and because we have been the “lesser” for so long.

Say this after me “We did not ask for it, we did not want it and we had every right to change our minds and to feel safe”

I don’t have the answer to the queston of whether they can smell it on me or not. What I do know is that whatever that smell was, it was my property, not theirs. And they still had no right to touch it.

My pineapples, if you made it this far…well….thank you. Thank you for reading probably the most personal thing I will ever write. And if you want to talk about any of this or your own experiences, please do message me. Know that what you have experienced is just as valid as other peoples. You don’t ever have to suffer in silence. You are safe here and we stand together.