I have a confession to make. I almost didn’t submit this post. I was afraid of you, all of you. I was afraid I would be met with the same response I’ve always gotten: “Shut up, stop whining, you weren’t really sexually assaulted, anything that happened was your own fault, so stop being such a drama queen trying for attention.” Just because someone wasn’t violently forced to do something doesn’t mean they aren’t a victim, doesn’t mean they weren’t hurt. Much smaller violations can horribly warp a person’s ability to trust, to enjoy life, to have healthy, stable relationships.

What is sexual assault? It’s such an important issue, but what is it? I’ve heard the definition of “any unwanted sexual interaction” used, but what does that really mean? Where do you draw the line between what is and what isn’t sexual assault? Can you even draw such a line? At the slippery edge of things, how do you differentiate between a consensual act that one party later regretted, an act that one party was unsure of, was pressured into, but enjoyed and was happy to have gone through with, and an act that one party was not ok with, but silently went along with because they felt pressured to do so?

The answer is in the experience. If you experience it as a violation, as something you don’t want, that was done without your consent or against your will, it’s sexual assault. By these criteria, the third example above was definitely assault; the first and second are still impossible to set into one category or another. It all seems to come down to whether or not the person feels that they have been assaulted. All well and good, but what if the education isn’t in place? What if you don’t know that this bad experience you had to endure has a name? What if you don’t know that it was assault? How can you speak up and speak out if you don’t know? What if it’s one of those gray areas where most people will criticize you for speaking up, say you’re looking for attention, tell you to stop playing the victim? What if the only response you get is anger and distrust for speaking up? What then?

For me, it was years before I realized that what had happened to me might be sexual assault. Before, I had thought that it was normal, that there was something wrong with me for not enjoying the experience. I thought it was my fault that it felt like something was wrong. I thought it meant there was something wrong with me. To this day I’m not sure if what happened to me was assault. The lines are so gray, the memories faded by love for a guy who didn’t know how much he was hurting me.

The world I grew up in had never taught me that you always, always, ALWAYS have the right to say “No.” The world had told me that intimacy was a slippery slope – when you do A, you give up the right to say no to A again, and also can’t say no to B, which is very close to A but goes a bit farther. Then, once you’ve done B, you give up the right to balk at C… and so forth. Basically, once you did more than innocent kissing, you would be pressured to go farther and farther, all the way to sex. If at any time you stopped, if you said “no,” you were at best a tease, at worst a frigid bitch to be taunted for your failings publicly. Your partner might not even be the one pressuring you; the whole damn culture was pressuring you into sex.

The schools never told us we could say no, and every day our peers drummed it into our heads that you could not say no. Is it any wonder I stayed silent when my relationship with a more experienced guy went much faster than I was comfortable with? He tried to talk me into something; I was very uncomfortable with it, but after not giving him an answer for a while, after pushing his hands gently away a few times, I would give up, turn passive and let him do what he wanted. I didn’t know I had a choice. Every time we pushed past what I was ready for, I felt dirty, violated. I wanted to scrub it all away, but it wasn’t something soap could deal with. I felt terrible, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. And, of course, if I hadn’t enjoyed having my nipples sucked or being almost naked with a guy, no matter how young I was, then there was something wrong with me. Any girl, virgin or not, should want those things; besides, you’ve gone so far, what do you think gives you the right to turn back now? And later, you decided you liked the activity; therefore, it was never a problem in the first place, you were just a late bloomer.

It was a few months before my boyfriend caught me almost throwing up in the bathroom after something he did. All this time, he had never known he was hurting me. When I got very uncomfortable, I would try to move his hands away from whatever he was doing a few times, then give up and go passive. I never said anything, but my body language changed; he assumed that meant I wasn’t sure what to do, that he had to teach me. He would never have done those things if he had known; he never again pushed me beyond what I was ok with. He became fanatical after that about checking in, learning my body language and asking me a thousand times “Is everything ok? Are you ok?”

To this day, it still haunts me. It still makes me feel guilty about my sensuality. It’s given me deep, enduring trust and intimacy issues. I’m really not sure if what happened to me was assault or not. I didn’t say no out loud, but I didn’t know I could. But then again, it can be rape even if a victim isn’t struggling and screaming. I often tried to stop him gently, non-verbally. Does that count as saying no? If you go along with things because you’ve been taught that you have to, does it still count as assault?

I may never know whether what happened to me falls under the umbrella of sexual assault or not. I was never raped. I was never violently assaulted. I was just deeply hurt by sexual contact I didn’t want, and never was able to talk about it after being told “nothing’s wrong, it’s all your fault” too many times.

Whether or not what happened was sexual assault, the blame for it doesn’t fall with the boyfriend who thought he was doing what I wanted, who thought he was being gentle and considerate. It doesn’t fall with this guy who was torn to pieces when he realized how badly he’d been hurting me for so long. If blame falls anywhere, it belongs to the culture. It belongs to society. It belongs to the schools that never really taught kids that you always have the right to say “No,” or didn’t start teaching it early enough. (Here’s a clue – senior year of high school is far too late) It belongs to the parents who never taught their kids to always respect your partner’s boundaries. It belongs to the teachers and coaches and churches and guardians who brush reports off with comments like “boys will be boys,” or “well, what did you do to invite it?” It belongs to the society that perpetuates the idea of the slippery slope of permissions, and the lies of “No means yes!” and “They all secretly want it. You just have to show them and get them to admit it. They’ll thank you later.” It belongs to the society that insists on blaming the victim, so that they don’t have to face their own blame.

What is sexual assault? I’m not even really sure anymore where to draw that line. But there’s always more than enough blame to go around; it takes a village to raise the child who goes out and sexually assaults someone.