Rape, Sexual Anorexia, and a Bottle Full of Rain

As promised, the post that sprung from last night's. This did NOT go as expected.

There are three kinds of rape survivors:

• Those whose sexuality inexplicably remains unchanged.
• Those whose sexuality fizzles out like a snail in salt.
• Those who become “hypersexual.”

I fit somewhere between two and three. I was terrified that I’d slip into sexual anorexia, so I immediately reengaged my sex life after I was assaulted. Sometimes sex was noneventful, and everyone clapped hands like Tom Waits said. Most of the time, though, it was all roaring thunder and a hundred bad dreams. Having sex after rape felt like dipping a wound in a vat of whiskey. Sometimes it felt almost exactly like assault.

In Tom Waits’ song, he talks about a sad luck dame hanging out the window with a bottle full of rain. That was me. I carried that rain everywhere. I had no choice. Eventually, I managed to empty the bottle in therapy and return to trigger-free sex.

I became part of the scene in November 2014.

By 2015, I’d already developed a new kind of sexual inhibition.

I’m completely committed to The Penis (hallowed be its name). It’s my favourite body part after bicep veins, crow’s feet, and hip bone veins. If there was no such thing as STIs and I could tolerate casual sex, I would set up a glory hole right outside my front gate. I’d have a flashing “open for business” sign and everything. It’s raining cocks (hallelujah!)

I was a sexual adventurer in my youth. I threw myself into consensual kink with gusto, but a toxic relationship led to five years of voluntary celibacy. I got back to carrying bottles of rain with me everywhere I went. Now that I’m putting this down on paper, I’m starting to feel that rain boiling in my chest. I’m angry that rape culture took my sexuality before I found kink, and I’m angry that it took it all over again just two years after I recovered from PTSD.

I’m angry that there are people in this world who are willing to steal someone’s sexuality and mental health for the rest of their lives just to get an hour of furious “pleasure.” I’m angry that rape culture is so inherent to our lives that it would be easier to count my uninhibited years than my inhibited ones. The number is four. Four years.

And I’m 47.

This post was going to be a fun exploration of my sexual inhibitions, but when I Googled studies on this issue, all I got was a long list of ugly causes: Fear of a partner… domestic violence… a lack of body confidence…

I also found a few odd entries:

Examples of sexual inhibition include

Inhibition of anal sex
Inhibition of oral sex
Inhibition of touching

Do you suppose that if we didn’t put anal sex on a list of sexual inhibitions, rape culture might be a tiny bit less pronounced?

Oxford calls inhibition a kind of hindrance or obstruction. It defines it as “A feeling that makes one self-conscious and unable to act in a relaxed and natural way.”

An unwillingness to engage in oral or anal sex is not an inhibition. It’s a disinterest. These are not the same things. I don’t like kale. I don’t refuse to eat it because I’m incapable of enoying it in a relaxed and natural way. I refuse to eat it because it sucks.

Limits are the same. They're not an absence of yum. They’re a preponderance of yuck. Maybe if society understood that, people like me would have more than four years of sexual inhibition to look back on.