Har fulgt denne tråden nesten fra start og lest de fleste innleggene. Det har vært med blandede føleser; popcorntime, avsky og det meste i mellom. Samtidig som det også har vært lærerikt. Trodde aldri jeg skulle kommentere i dette vepsebolet av en tråd, men har satt pris på diskusjonen. Nuvel, en venn av meg, amerikaner, nå bosatt i London, posta dette på sin facebook-profil 22. september og tenker at flere her inne kunne ha godt av å lese det;
I may regret posting this, but for every victim of sexual assault, I have to speak up...
Ok...this is something that every victim of rape might understand. A sense of shame that prevents coming out and talking about the crime that was done to US.
And in my case, since I am a man , a male victim of rape, it is even more difficult to talk about it. It shouldn't be like this. If someone shoots you with a gun, you shouldn't be ashamed of getting shot, even if you are a man. The same with sexual assault. Even if you are a man.
So, what happened to me...
I hitch-hiked across the US, coast to coast three times, round trip. The first time I did it was when I was 15 years of age, in 1973. The culture in America in 1973 was still pretty mellow. I did it again in 1974, and even though there were always sketchy rides .for the most part it was cool and my cousin Mike and I hitch-hiked and hopped freight trains and we made it across the Big Old US ofA unscathed.
But then, when we tried to retrace our steps, my cousin Mike got killed by getting run over by an 18 Wheeler (totally unintentional on the trucker's part) when we were just starting out on another cross-country trip, and it fucked me up. It took me a couple of years to realize that I had to finish the trip that we started, so in 1980, I hopped freight trains and hitch-hiked to Massachusetts, where my Aunts and Grandparents lived, which had always been our soft landing spot.
And I stayed for a bit, but then got that itch, and so I headed back west by the power of my thumb.
Things went really well, I mean super well where one good ride dropped me off for another good ride and then I got to Omaha Nebraska and three rides in a row felt sketchy as fuck and then the fourth one just outside of town and back into cornfield country got as bad as they get.
The guy in the shotgun side hopped out when this Ford pickup pulled over (I will always remember the shittiest details of this), and he pointed a snubnose revolver at me--and if you know anything about revolvers, you can tell by looking at them from the business end if they are loaded or not and this one was loaded with copper-jacketed bullets--and he told me (he didn't ask), “Do you get in now, or do we fuck your corpse?”
I got in. I got in in the middle seat.
And I sat between these two sweating, stinking men, with the barrel of that gun digging into my ribs under my armpits, and watched while the driver tucked us back onto the side roads until he found a stretch of cornfield isolated enough for what they wanted do to to me, and then he pulled over and shut off the engine.
I can still hear the ticking of the engine cooling and the “Squee” of the passenger side door as that piece of shit grabbed me by my shirt and dragged me out of the truck with that pistol jammed up under my ear.
I will never forget what they did to me, over and over, turn by turn by turn by turn by turn and that god damned grunting and slapping and that fucking pistol at the base of my skull, and I know it wasn't sex. Rape is not sex. Rape is violation by power.
And when women came out with \#Metoo I kept quiet because this was about how WOMEN have been forced, even if not at gunpoint, but forced to be degraded, even if not in a Nebraska cornfield, and it is time to listen to women when they have been degraded by male power.
For once.
So yeah. If women are coming out and describing an assault (like Kavanaugh), don't get all full of the idea of “Why didn't they say something sooner?”
You have no fucking idea how hard this shit is to talk about.
FUCK.