Ground Rules

I’m not going to disguise the fact that I hit a rough patch last week.

I made one post before on my Breeder’s Blog that had roused my protective ire when a couple of anonymous commenters began disparaging my sexual partner. Last week, though, a couple of my readers started to insult and provoke me after a simple post I made about having a panic attack during an attempted fucking—one of the lingering aftereffects of my sexual assault, twenty-five years ago. The incident made me feel violated left me angrier than I have been in ages. So angry that it took a couple of days of time away from the computer before the buzzing in my head ceased.

In my comments last week, I responded that I was dismayed I’d ever been honest about my assault at all, given that a couple of people were piping up and saying essentially that rape victims deserve what they get. I said I wished I’d never written about it, and that it seemed unlikely I’d write about it again.

I’ve changed my mind about that resolution. I’m not surprised at my about-face, frankly; when I discover myself resisting something, sometimes I find that instead of digging my heels in the sand, gritting my teeth, and resisting the tug of war, it’s more valuable to follow the direction of the pull. So this week I’m going to be doing nothing but writing about my assault.

No, it probably won’t last all week. Just for a few days. I don’t think I could do it all at once. I’m writing this post for my readers as a warning of sorts, I suppose. On one level, I’d like to warn them all that the incidents covered in the next couple of days aren’t going to be the usual masturbation fodder. I’ll provide more of that once I’m done, of course. But I intend to exorcise a few demons before mid-week.

The other warning I’d like to make is that I’m setting some ground rules for interaction for the next couple of entries. It’s a shame I have to write these down, but recent event tell me it’s necessary.

1) Please be respectful of my experience. By talking about my sexual assault, I’m exposing one of the most vulnerable spots on my underbelly. I’m doing it voluntarily to a largely anonymous group of people. That act takes no little amount of courage on my part. If you come at me in the comments with disrespect—by which I mean insinuating that I asked for it or deserved it, or putting the word rape in quotation marks to imply that its status as a genuine assault is in question, or by mocking what was a fairly traumatic occurrence in my life, your comments will not be posted. I simply won’t respond to them.

2) Please remember that the past is the past. I cannot change what happened. I can’t change my response to it. Telling me the things I should have done are not going to change anything, and I am unlikely to post such comments or respond to them.

3) Please take for granted that I know my assailant was an asshole. Please assume as a baseline that I know you are sorry for what happened to me. It’s not necessary to post to say so. Too much sympathy will embarrass me, frankly, and make me feel as if people are thinking I am writing this series because I’m a hug-seeking attention whore. That’s not my intent at all.

Why am I writing about it, then? Because I know I have a lot of readers who’ve been through similar experiences, and because after my contretemps with commenters last week, I received a lot of sympathetic emails from people who thanked me for my angry responses to those comments and for my voice. I’ve never written out this experience before in full.

So maybe it’s about time, right?

There’ll be more smut soon. Thanks for putting up with my shadow boxing for the next few days. Maybe it’ll be worth it to someone.