You Are Not Entitled To Us

Some of you may remember one of our posts a while ago which was later deleted. 

We’re happy to announce the scum, Daniel Dril-Mellum was charged with two rapes and other similar charges. All are considered felonies. 

I feel safe enough to share that I was presented a case-and-desist on his behalf by a Miss Kelly Dohm: 

So fuck you, Danny-boy -- your name’s out there now and it clearly had nothing to do with this blog or your survivor’s blog post. I have a strong case for you and your rich-kids’ lawyer (yes, I see her name attached to NFL cases) to fuck off and not come after me as I am merely a member of the press publishing stories given to me. I have a strong network of friends and family, and well-regarded and powerful lawyers that are each, that will ruin you worse than you have done to yourself if you choose to keep this shit up. 

And worse, that cute decision to send that cease-and-desist is now tied to your name online. So everyone will know you tried to hide it for a year. 

ibelieveyouitsnotyourfault

A lot of submissions here tend to start with something along the lines of, “This may not be as bad as other stories on here, but.....” 

There’s no “hierarchy” of maltreatment. If you are treated badly, that’s that, and you have a right to speak. 

You have a right to to share the trouble it has caused you. Don’t feel ashamed or underwhelmed by anything else you read here, because the point of this blog is, we all suffer from entitlement over women and the feminine body together. Your anger and discomfort are valid. 

And don’t feel bad even if you have said that, either, or use that to deal with a situation. Because unlike what people will try to persuade you: 

The case of Brandon Austion shows that people and universities value sports over the safety of women. How someone can be found responsibly for a gang-rape, and only be banned from a university for 10 years a picked up by another university and get a scholarship is despicable. 

You value winning sports over the safety of all the women on your campus. 

He was my boyfriend for almost 3 months.  We met online and in person he was attractive, charming and charismatic.  Things started well enough and I couldn’t believe what a catch this man was.  There were subtle things that raised flags in the back of my mind (very secretive about certain things, very meticulous, short temper and progressively more controling).

A few weeks ago, we went for a camping trip, just the two of us.  The trip started a little rocky, he was in a poor mood because the forcast called for rain.  After we got everything set up at the site he dove into the booze.  Things seemed to be going alright in spite of a rocky morning, then everything took a turn…  

Suddenly, out of nowhere, he was angry.  He grabbed me by my hair and started slapping my face.  I was in shock and didn’t understand…  he slapped me steadily for what felt like hours.  I couldn’t feel my face anymore.  Then, he started ripping my hair out.  He twisted my hair around his hand and yanked at the strands until they pulled loose.  I have so many patchy spots on my scalp…  When he had enough of that, he was even more angry.  He liked my hair long and now it was torn up and patchy and I might have to cut it all off.  That angered him so much he started choking me.  I blacked out.  When I came to, I have no idea how much time had passed or what he did to me in that time… but he was now holding a knife to my cheek.  He kept forcing me to look him in the eyes and all I could see was just anger and hate..  He was a completely different person from who I thought I knew..   He was a monster.

I just went numb and don’t recall much after that.  The next morning I woke up beside him in our tent.  When he woke up, he told me he didn’t remember much from the night before.  I told him everything he did to me.  He laughed.  That laugh shattered me… Then, he told me he probably would have forced himself on me too if he could have gotten it up.  He used that to justify why he was so angry and violent…

I avoided him for a week after we got home before I could gather the strength to leave him.  I ended it over the phone.  

At first, he desperately wanted to at least stay friends.  I told him I never wanted to see him again, but I ended up seeing him on two occasions to get my things from his apartment back.  He texted me frequently after that point and called me almost as frequently.  The text messages were civil… the calls were not.  He would scream and berate me.  I would hang up on him and he would call again.  I finally ended up blocking his number.

After the final call, I realized I needed help.  I went to a walk in counselling clinic and told my counselor everything.  She urged me to talk to my family about it (I had kept it from them because I felt like it would just be an inconvenience and they’d just say I was being dramatic) and she urged me to report the incident to the police.  

The next day I filed my report.  I was so terrified.  The interviewing officer was very empathic and told me to call him if I need him.  Even if I’m just scared.

This weekend the another officer went to arrest him, but he was out of town and won’t be back until next week.  And now he knows I reported him…  I have a safety escape plan in place…  and I’m so scared…  

With the recent spike in stories about sexual harassment, misogyny, and rape, this is a reminder that this is a place for anyone to share their stories about their experiences with entitlement over feminine and female bodies. 

Don’t feel intimidated if you feel your story “isn’t enough” -- it is. Every experience that attempts to make you invalid is valid. 

Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up? 

But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. 

There is strength in speaking, in sharing experience, in a collective confessional. 

The first thing is just this very hazy memory I have. It’s a very early one, one of the first I have. See, my grandmother had a boyfriend who lived with her. This memory is of my mum telling me to make sure I’m never alone with him because some men like to “put their hands down little girl’s pants." I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with this man, and from all that I’ve heard about him, he actually seems nice and normal. But thinking about that memory caused my chest to feel heavy. I feel uncomfortable around all old men who aren’t related me and I have no idea if it’s related. I’m not even sure if this memory is real because I don’t remember much else from that age but I have no idea where I would have gotten it from otherwise.

The next two are boyfriend stuff. The first guy was manipulative and kind of a creep. He was the good little boy and I always felt as if I was the wild seductress corrupting him. But he was the one to convince me that it was okay to let him come in through my bedroom window at night. I knew my mother would have killed me, but I was so "in love”. It was like a booty call just, thankfully, without the sex. He was a year older and treated me as if I was both naïve and the smartest girl in the world. I was sick one time and fell asleep, my mum came home to find him just staring at me. Reading the other submissions, I’m glad that’s all it was. We broke up because he didn’t like my thoughts on religion. I still let him into my room that night and held him whilst he cried. I let him touch me because I thought one last time couldn’t hurt. That a slow break was easier. He spent a week after texting me and telling me that he still loved me, that I was the best thing that ever happened to him. I told my mum, she had me threaten to tell his parents and if that didn’t stop it to tell the police. I still relied on him months later to validate me. I don’t remember anything from the seven months I dated him and the months after that don’t revolve around him.

The other guy seemed great, except he was depressed and refused to admit it. I spent our relationship trying to get him to get him to care about anything. We fought constantly, I didn’t want the mistakes of my last relationship to happen so I stood up for myself. Then I apologised because I was worried that he’d hurt himself if I was mean to him. I became the bad guy because I always started the arguments over what saw as “trivial” matters. He started getting angry when I didn’t want to do anything sexual with him, still not sex. One of his friends told me later that she thought he would have stayed with me if I put out. I was outraged. He’s still one of my best friends, I have a very let bygones be bygones attitude. He ended up dating my best friend. When she broke up with him she asked me to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. We’d all just started drinking and she was worried he’d drink too much. It took her weeks to break up with him. And he ended up drinking several cans of bourbon and cola.

The last, and certainly more minor incident, I was at the train station. My brother had run back home to grab something and I was sitting on the seats. The guy next to me starts talking about smoking and drinking, asking if I do either then talking about he had just been drinking. I internally freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. It was plain day and there were people around but I was scared. The security guard was on the opposite platform watching this guy but doing nothing else. I tried non-committal answers, not sure what to do. The moment my brother turned up I jumped up saying “That’s my boyfriend. Gotta go.” I literally had to tell my brother to put his arm around me and pretend because I was scared. This guy got on the same carriage, non-intentionally I think, so we carried this whole charade on. This guy hadn’t made comments at me but I was just getting the vibe. I was so worried about what other people would think. If he had done something, anything, would people have assumed it was okay because I talked to him?

I’d like to thank all of you for not just following this blog, per se, but for helping to create the safe space that everyone who has accessed this blog has needed -- for all of your stories, and especially the bravery to accept these experiences and bring them into the light. 

Although the conversation has shifted in the past year in a more positive manner overall, there is still a continued need for spaces like this, if even in a virtual/online manner. 

Acknowledgement is the first step of resolving an issue. Even if is only a step, many find it to be the start of the healing process. And unfortunately, survivors are often denied this process - and very often its catalyst through acknowledgement - by many around them, from police and hospital officials to those close to them. 

So by working together to piece together all of our experiences, and by showing that we are allowed to acknowledge them, we are starting a healing process. We are collectively denying their denial. 

[anonymous submission] 

I’d like to preface this by saying that I have read six and a half pages of stories and articles from this blog after finding it featured on another blog and that I stand with all of you and hope that you all may find peace if you have not already.

I’d also like to note that my experiences are not particularly bad and while I can generally laugh at them during the day, it is 4 in the morning and I am shaking at the mere thought of writing this out. I have three stories that stick out, out of numerous–most of which happened after I was eighteen.

The first one took place one summer when I was in high school. My dad was managing a camp at the time, my sister and I worked at the same restaurant, and my mom worked long 12 hour days at the hospital. And my cousin was visiting, working at my dad’s camp. For the whole summer.

Now, we all helped my dad out with his camp, whether that was doing dishes or helping out with campers or cooking, what have you. The camp had been very poor since my dad had taken over and he needed us to aid because he didn’t have the money for a lot of employees. It was an extremely stressful job, made even more so by my cousin who often would not do jobs correctly. He was eager-to-please because he was and is largely neglected by his parents but his over-the-top enthusiasm often led him to do shit like accidentally dump buckets of paint on plants when trying to paint a deck or something. We were all home one night, and it was about three in the morning so he and I were the only ones up. Both of us were on desktops, with mine being behind his so I could see everything he was doing. I happened to look over at some point and see that he was looking at Legend of Zelda porn. Weirded out, I hastily looked back at my own computer and tried to ignore him until he spoke up a few minutes later.

“Hey, Anne,” he said tentatively. “Would you mind doing me a favor?” I got shivers and a red flag, so I suspiciously asked what it was he wanted. He quickly snatched his inquiry back, saying that I’d say no anyway, but I insisted he tell me in case it was something harmless like get him a glass of water or something.

He ended up asking me to take my clothes off. Taken aback, somewhat angry, I replied that no I would not and that that was incest. He replied that it wasn’t incest if we didn’t do anything, to which I said it still was and that he should be ashamed of himself. He went back to scrolling through his google search of video game porn and, disgusted, I messaged a friend on Facebook about what happened. She replied with, and I quote, “Maybe you should take it as a compliment.”

I only recently told my brother, who told my sister, and we all agreed not to tell my parents lest the rest of the extended family never be allowed near me again. Which is no huge loss, but certainly my parents would tell my mom’s parents, who would in turn grill my uncle, whose fault it was not, and I don’t want him taking the heat for something that was his son’s fault.

Flash forward to fall 2014, my first semester at college. I had high hopes that everything would be good and I would escape from long-standing depression and recently-developed anxiety and get a fresh start. As you can probably guess, that is not the case.

At the time of this first story I was only two weeks into the semester and had signed up for a chemistry tutoring class, which was basically just “do more things related to what you’re doing in class and not actual homework but it should help with the class.” This is the class in which I met my best friend and most recent qpp (J). Before this I had already dealt with two cases of harassment–one of which was mild, merely jokes made by a friend that usually fell along the lines of “you’re going to fall in love with me someday” that often I brushed off as harmless. The other was a ‘date’ gone horribly wrong, after which the guy called me over and over nearly every night for weeks despite my constant reaffirmation that I have phone anxiety, which didn’t end until one of my coworkers showed me how to block his number. However, neither of these prepared me for something like this, as I was very much a lone minnow at the time and had not foreseen any circumstance in which there would be a kingfisher.

Kingfisher was not a tutor, but what they called a “peer mentor,” a fellow student who had taken the class and was being paid to run this extra chemistry class. He joined our session during the second week of meeting, which was already being run by a female peer mentor whom I was very comfortable with ©. This class had about seven students including myself, Kingfisher, and J. I was part of the minority, one of two girls in the class and the only female student. I walked into class that day, took one look at Kingfisher, and knew.It started off mildly flirtatious and I was kind of showing off as I had taken the class before. Within five minutes he had given me, and only me, a nickname, his explanation for which being that his grandfather dropped the ends of people’s names and added -ie to the end as a term of endearment (leading my nickname to be Annie). He complimented my knowledge and admitted to being and gave me challenge problems, which I completed without much thought. I figured we were just becoming friends and I would watch how it played out before I made any snap judgements about his character despite the red flags. It came to a point that I begrudged asking for help from him if I couldn’t remember a particular topic because he often challenged me to “races” to see who could complete a problem faster, usually me. He’d open up conversation about how I should switch to being a chemistry major and that biology was stupid and a soft science. This greatly offended me and I began to hate his challenges and generally any attention he gave me. There was a sudden dropoff point where the other mentor scolded him after class one day and he stopped competing with me, but still showed off his “power” as the leader of the class. Often he would tell all the students to get to work and stop socializing (instead of letting us work at our own pace as the class was best run), then immediately sit next to me and open up a conversation. Once he asked me what kinds of video games I played, which really struck me as strange because I had never mentioned an interest in them. He would also often loom over my left side, which made me feel trapped as that was the only exit out of my desk, and compliment me on things not meant to be complimented. Often he’d just pick up my work, look at it, and then throw it back down on my desk–same with my sketchpad, and strangely, my ID card.

At one point, in October, I had been sexually assaulted (the other story in this trio) and in class was feeling less than talkative. He asked me about my sobered mood and I told him I didn’t want to talk about it, which he took to mean that someone had broken up with me. He asked me that and also whether I had been crying and kept pressing the issue when I told him I didn’t want to talk about it until the other mentor told him to back off. Another week saw me subdued, and when he asked I told him I was merely tired and he reached out to caress my arm and murmur to me. All I could do was stare and feel violated as he breached my personal boundaries (I have a severe aversion to physical contact).

A couple of weeks before Halloween, he and J and I were having a conversation about social settings around town. To make this shorter, it ended in him storming off after I refused to take his suggestion to go to a hookah bar, my reasoning being that I am extremely petite (5'1", 80 lbs) and don’t like to go to sketchy places by myself. He made it seem like he was suggesting I go with him, when it is against the rules for the peer mentors to hang out with their students outside of class while the class was in session for the semester. Kingfisher got very hostile towards my qpp when we started becoming friends, to where he would openly grill him in front of the rest of the class as if in an attempt to a. show his power and b. humiliate my friend for having a relationship with me.

At one point I had gotten to class early and only the female peer mentor was there, so I sat down in the middle of a congregation of desks because I knew he was next to arrive. When he walked in, instead of picking a desk on the fringe like I thought, he kicked all the other desks away from me almost violently and sat down very close to me. At this point I was getting so nervous to come to class that I would nearly have anxiety attacks beforehand, and I would break out into a cold sweat while he was near me.

I reported him two weeks after that after a particularly aggressive display from Kingfisher where he told me and J to work together, then moved his desk so close to mine that J was almost blocked out from actually working with me. He then proceeded to make a sexual innuendo at me and pressed me to explain when I began giggling nervously, which C heard and proceeded to break up. I went to C after that class–it was now November–and reported him to her. She felt very angry at him, thanked me for coming to her, and we left. The day after that, Kingfisher showed up in my lab with no reason to be there, which I am told was beginning to cross over into stalking territory. So much more happened, but within this small space I’m afraid I won’t have room for it. After I reported it to C, she and J went with me on the last day of the semester to report it to someone who could actually take care of it. As far as I know, nothing has been done about him a whole semester later besides the discontinuation of his peer mentoring career and I still shake if I think about it too hard.

And in October, I was up late during the weekend playing Smash Brothers when a guy from one of the floors above plopped down next to me. I didn’t know him, but it was still early enough in the semester that people were floor-hopping when they were drunk and making friends–hell, even I had floor-hopped and I have social anxiety. It started out innocently. He was drunk but I was having fun smack-talking and kicking his ass at video games, so when his hand drifted over to barely touch my leg I wrote it off as drunken shenanigans and didn’t say much about it. He left for a walk around four am after I reluctantly gave him my number, saying he’d be back. He texted me a half an hour later saying I’d “better not be asleep.” I replied–and in retrospect I really shouldn’t have–that we’d hang out tomorrow.

The next day he texted around five pm and asked if I’d eaten and I said no but that I’d make him ramen, so I did and we ate ramen and played more smash brothers. The conversation turned to sexuality, and I told him I was asexual and comfortable with it. He seemed taken aback. After all, how could someone as cute as me never have kissed a guy, or had sexual relations with anyone? (spoilers: I’m homoromantic) I snorted and brushed it off, but as time went on he kept touching my hands and feet and commenting on how small they were, especially in comparison to his. He invited me to watch Donnie Darko, and because I was naïve and really, really wanted to believe that this wasn’t him, I agreed, and we moved up to his floor to watch Donnie Darko in the common area. The only available seat left was next to him, so I sat there, and nearly the whole time he was touching me, my outer thighs, my shins, my feet. I was curled so far in on myself in an attempt to create distance on that tiny fucking couch that I was near imploding. And I was so scared to say that I was uncomfortable, I was panicking on the inside and not at all paying attention to this (frankly pretty cool) movie that we were watching. He left halfway through to go on another walk, and didn’t return until after the movie, so I left while he was gone and went back to my room. He sent me another “you asleep?” text and I shouldn’t have replied but I said “no.” The conversation lasted a short while before he invited me to watch Netflix with him in his room. I told him I wanted to watch it in the common room, but he changed the subject and I thought he had agreed so I went up. And sat on the couch. And when he opened his door, he asked what I was doing and invited me into his room and oh boy did my heart start pounding and my sweat glands start pouring out liquid. Every warning sign, every siren, every red flag had gone off but I was afraid to be rude or seem too “safe” so I went in. He sat in his bed, and beckoned me to sit next to him, and we tried to watch Red and Blue while he put his arm around me. I was so tense that all my muscles were getting knots in them, and when he started toying with my underwear I felt absolutely paralyzed. There was nothing I could do. He asked if I was okay, and I told him I was uncomfortable with physical contact, to which he replied with a snort and stopped playing with my underwear. I told him I had tight personal boundaries, and he asked if it was because I’d never had sex before and that I’m “eighteen now” and “should have my shit together.” The conversation ended and we went back to silence and it wasn’t long before he started messing with my underwear again, lifting up the line and drawing circles on my skin and staring at me and I was so afraid that eye contact would give him “permission” to mess with me any further. I leaned forward to pull his arm out from under me and he asked if I was leaving, and in that split second I made up my mind to leave and ran out saying “Sorry, but I really need to be in a safe space right now.” My mouth was so fucking dry by the time I had sprinted down two flights of steps and I locked the door for months afterwards, reported him after a few days because my own self-blame was eating me up inside, and still does. Nothing much happened with that report either, though he wanted to talk with me, a request I denied.

I posted this last story on tumblr because I had needed a place to just get it out, and for the most part I was supported by my mutuals and friends and followers, but I received a couple of anons who told me that what I experience did not qualify as sexual assault, even though I had never labeled it as such and am still struggling to because of those messages. It made my guilt so much worse and I could barely leave my room to get something to eat from the cafeteria by the time Kingfisher’s harassment escalated. Mostly I would just sit in my room and shiver uncontrollably or browse the Internet and pretend I had closure. I thought about both of them often, and what this would mean for my future in science as both were STEM majors, and whether I would be able to stand going into my field if it meant such awful harassment. I still do wonder if I would be better off going into a different field but every time I start thinking that I remind myself that I would deal with this anyway, and it would be better to suffer it doing something I loved than suffer it doing something I hated and end up hating my life. I can’t say I don’t struggle with unlearning “I deserve this” every day, but I can say it gets easier, and can offer with confidence that time helps. So does counseling.