I wrote the first draft of this on Saturday morning, when I was heavily in the midst of a post-traumatic stress disorder crisis. Sorry to say you don’t get any hot stories from the weekend as there pretty much weren’t any. This post is a bit meandering as it’s more about expressing my feelings than writing a well-written blog post.
Mental illness is something that you can’t just wish away. I’m as able to wish away bouts of post traumatic stress as much as I’m able to wish away a bout of diarrhea from ingesting dairy without lactaid. It’s frustrating. My rational brain can grasp the fact that I’m not in danger like I was during the trauma that gave me PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). It can grasp the fact that MasterDoc takes care of me now, and the same scenario wouldn’t happen again as he would never let it. But the primal brain, the part that was traumatized, can’t be reasoned with and so I go into a bout of panic, anxiety and helplessness as if I’m re-living the the trauma all over again. And again. And again.
Various things can trigger a bout of PTSD and it’s not always (or even often) possible to determine ahead of time what might set me off. I read stories about sexual violence regularly in feminist blogs; I think it’s vital to discuss it and that silence will only perpetuate the problem. But sometimes something hits me just the wrong way, or just on the wrong day, and I find myself struggling with the same feelings I had right after the assault.
What set me off this time was a combination of things: reading comments on a post about outing sexual predators was the big thing. People were telling the survivors that they should always go to the police and that if they didn’t report the incident then they were somehow responsible for the sexual predator attacking the next person (and yet they shouldn’t publicly name and shame the person). This of course is utter bullshit as the only person responsible for the inappropriate behavior of the attacker is the attacker. But it struck me deeply as I agonized for a long time over pursuing legal repercussions after I was sexually assaulted 5 years ago. I worried about the women who could be affected in future by this asshole who was incapable of empathy or taking responsibility for his actions. I ultimately decided not to file a report because in talking to the NYPD I found out that unless they were sure they could convict they wouldn’t even prosecute. At the time people who were there that night were making all sorts of excuses for the guy who traumatized me. (He hosted fun sex parties, no one wanted to be uninvited. From what I hear he still hosts parties. Yes, New York sluts, you may in fact attend the parties of someone who committed sexual assault without remorse.) I felt like I would be completely alone in my accusations, and considering I was barely keeping my head together at that point I knew that pursuing legal action would only serve to damage me more. I also worried about harassment from his friends if I spoke up. (I did receive a little harassment just from speaking up within the circle.) Now, it’s past the statute of limitations (I can’t tell you the agony I went through that year the statute was going to be up. Do I report? Do I not?) but in the past two years a few people have come forward from that night to tell me that, indeed, what that guy did was wrong and they have felt terrible about what I went through. It’s comforting, but I wish they could have spoken up when I could have gone to the police.
As for the guy who did it, well he’s still a part of the sex blogger community. He’s on twitter. He’s on Fetlife. Part of my trigger was thinking about how many of my blogger friends believe his facade of “nice guy” and don’t realize what he did to me. I feel like the world should know, but in this society we protect the perpetrators of sex crimes. Had he hit me, or mugged me, I wouldn’t hesitate to name him. But since it was sexual and I know that being at a sex party when it happened would be enough for the slut shaming to begin, I don’t feel safe hollering his name from the rooftops. Oh privately I have told many, but publicly I’ve been mostly circumspect. I’m sure if anyone questioned him about the incident, he would deftly turn things around and make me look like the bad one. (Just as he did after the assault. Nice guy, huh?)
I’ve heard from someone else that they heard the story of that incident from him and his telling is completely different. In his mind, I was a woman who decided to try to “destroy him online.” I find this rich considering I didn’t name who did it or hint at who did it in the aftermath (for at least 2 years). I merely blogged about the hell I was going through and from this dickhead I got things like emails telling me to stop using him as “blog fodder.” Most readers of the blog I had at that time didn’t know who had done it, so I don’t see how he was persecuted by my trying to process my feelings. (He sure didn’t like the comments people left about what an asshole he was. But these people didn’t know he, specifically, was the asshole.) He refused to take any sort of responsibility for his behavior, and one or two people close to him made excuses (“He was drunk.”) or one even went so far as to call me crazy. I’m not crazy. And this man who did this to me is clearly incapable of empathy. I’m not the only person to observe him and come to the conclusion that he likely has some sort of personality disorder. So while a part of me wants to hear an apology (5 years later and one still hasn’t appeared) I don’t really expect to ever get one, because he is so focused on how this incident affected him. (Isn’t that simply amazing? He traumatized and assaulted me and he feels that he’s the wronged party.) I’ve seen him concoct huge, involved, false stories about people I know because he imagines that they are persecuting him in some way. I’ve heard about others who have spoken out about him who have been incessantly harassed by his minions. Intellectually I know this man will never feel remorse for what he did to me. And this is supremely frustrating because his actions can still affect me deeply 5 years later. When will it stop? I don’t know that the flashbacks will ever stop. I don’t know that the self-blaming will ever stop. I don’t know that my fears of him hurting other women will ever stop. A few years back a woman I was dating turned out to go to his parties. I felt panicked for her because I was afraid if he knew I knew her then he’d do something to her too. That incident was a total trigger for me. I went home and cried.
I’ve spent the past three and a half days trying to distract myself from the feeling of being re-traumatized. But it’s not something that can be simply ignored. I keep going through endless cycles of panic coming on, followed by extreme frustration that I could be happy and having hot sex right about now, but instead I’m feeling violated and fearful. When I’m triggered, I live the trauma all over again. Over the weekend I was psychically in the space where I was during/after the assault: scared, helpless, panicked, angry. I find myself questioning if going to a sex party makes it somehow okay for someone to put a speculum inside you without having negotiated it (or ANY play) with you beforehand. I find myself angry that I didn’t stop him before he put it in my cunt and jabbed me with it. (I had a tender spot inside my vagina for about a year after the event.) But at the time I firmly believed that if I said stop he would stop. He didn’t. And you can’t just jump up and run out of a room with an open speculum inside you. I had to rely on this asshole taking it out of me. With enough panic coursing through me I decided to end things there and then by drawing all attention to what was going on. And while I’m proud of the strength it took for me to do that, I was already traumatized at that point.
It’s been a long trip back from there to where I am now (on most days). It’s taken a long time for me to trust my dark fantasies to MasterDoc. I often fear that someone will use these fantasies against me, like how after the assault someone commented on my blog and cited my talking about using a speculum to see my cervix as an indication that I consented to this guy, who I had never played with before, to use one with me sexually. (Keep in mind any discussion of speculums on my blog were related to viewing my cervix and not at all sexual fantasy-related.) I find myself often afraid to admit to things especially without putting in the caveat that I want to do them “with MasterDoc.” He’s the only person I feel safe enough with to indulge the dark, kinky fantasies I’ve always had.
Simply talking about something does not equal consenting to doing it.
I’d name this asshole right here, right now and link to his blog, only I fear the harassment that would ensue. I’ve dealt with enough hell from this person. Right now about the only thing I can do is hope he dies a slow, painful death. And I hope that I can move past this anger that plunges me into depression whenever I’m triggered.
I write this for me. I write this because I feel better having gotten it out. Douchebag, this ultimately has nothing to do with you. If I wanted to persecute you I’d be going about it in an entirely different way.
Ok, first part to address….the PTSD. Mine isn’t at all the same, but it acts the same. My father died in his sleep, unexpectedly. I was in the house, walking past the room where he was sleeping, calling for him. Believing him to be asleep. Prior to this night, whenever I’d been unable to reach him or anybody else, death was not the first thing on my mind. It is now. If I wake up enough in the night to be fully conscious, and my husband is deeply asleep, I panic. I think him dead, too. If my mother oversleeps, I panic until she wakes, thinking her dead. If I can’t reach her via phone (you’ve seen this happen), I think she’s dead. Today it happened to me again with husband, I couldn’t reach him and it was out of the ordinary. I nearly left work, simply because I couldn’t reach him. I don’t always freak out like that, but when I do….I can’t control it. There is no rationalization. There is no logic. Nothing anybody else can tell me will help until I hear from them and have proof of life. Nothing. It’s unavoidable, and it sucks.
Second topic – not all of your blogger friends believe him. I don’t. I see him for what he truly is….among which is someone completely narcissistic (NPD, go look it up, it fits…).
While you have never named him, and others have quit talking about him….he keeps on going. Beating his dead horses to a bloody, pathetic pulp. He is obsessed. It’s actually quite frightening when you look at his actions in the last year. Even more frightening are the sheep who still trail along in his wake, listening to his long-winded posts that go on for ten years, ultimately baa’ing their support of him. His horse-beating makes him look pathetic and laughable, sad and psychotic….yet he doesn’t, and will never, see that.
I’m sorry that not enough people will see past his forked tongue ways, and will continue to be sucked in. I’ve been sucked into similar people before….they’re very good at what they do, we’ve seen evidence of his time and again. It’s frustrating to no end, I know. His audience isn’t as big as it once was, so there’s something at least.
Thanks, Lilly. Having friends’ support is the one thing that really keeps me slogging away at coping with the PTSD. I hadn’t known about your Dad, I’m so sorry. It’s totally understandable that you would have the reactions you do.
Major hugs, lady. I understand what you’re going through, and it isn’t fun or easy. I always hope it will go away. It never does, though I’m told it gets easier.
I read this post the other day and it made me feel less alone: http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/05/badd-out-of-my-closet.html
To say ‘oh, honey that sucks’ seems very trite but I don’t have a lot else to say. You are very brave and strong and beautiful. I can’t possibly understand what you are going to but I am sending lots of good vibes your way.
xxxx
On the one hand I know how you feel. On the other, I do not and cannot.
I have never been sexually assaulted and for that I am grateful. I do not suffer from PTSD for that. Also grateful. However, I did and have come across a man like the type you describe, in the Pagan community. He walked a fine line, never actually “raping” (in a legal sense), never actually “assaulting” a woman (in a legal sense). But he did other things, things for which he could not be prosecuted. And his victims were always insecure women, women who had suffered sexual abuse, women who would submit to him rather than fight.
But the reason I do know how you feel is bc I personally did interact with a man just like the type you describe. A man who said bc I posted a news story unrelated to him with a comment to a private email list, that I was a delusional violent woman who had threatened him and his family, and who needed to be destroyed. He cyberstalked me for years, while other people let him go on his merry way bc going up against him might mean they were excluded from the benefits offered by being his “friend.”
I am sorry you are going thru this. I am lucky bc I don’t have any frightening aftereffects from my time encountering him. But I know, somewhat, how it feels and how it can happen. Since then I have met other men like him and sometimes they hide themselves really well. Sometimes they even fool me, for a while. But when I start to have a strong negative reaction to being around those men I know what they are — a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And I run far far away.
My heart broke when I read this. Your story sounds a little like mine. Several months ago, I had been involved with a dominant man. I was a novice at the time (which he knew–I was very honest about that). I stayed with him for a weekend. Long story short, it was a nightmare physically and mentally. Mentally, he did things that were so degrading that I seem to have left my body in those moments–as in, my body was there, but my mind was anywhere but (I still don’t know exactly where my mind was then…). He had known my hard limits, but the things he forced me to do were beyond the limits of even my twisted mind–and since I had never even THOUGHT of such things before, I found myself incredibly overwhelmed…too overwhelmed to understand that perhaps I should have safeworded.
Physically, he damaged me–he appears to have permanently screwed up my shoulder, and he gave me such intense spankings that I have purple marks on me that have not gone away after 8 months. I’d had a safeword, but I was only allowed to use a “red” type of word and was not allowed to have a “yellow” type of word–so being relatively new to this, I didn’t understand what constituted “enough to use the safeword,” you know? I did let him know that he was hurting me and that I was in pain, and he ignored me each time. When I finally DID have to use the safeword, ten minutes afterward he convinced me to let him try his new cane out on me–not knowing what to expect, I stupidly did, not knowing how much it would hurt me, especially already being in pain. In retrospect, I am INSANELY pissed that he even ASKED to do that after all he’d put me through–using that safeword wasn’t an easy choice for me and I only did it because I was truly in too much pain to go on.
Like you, my “bad dom” is also in the local kinky scene and is quite popular on FetLife. Everyone seems to think he’s just wonderful. I think he’s a monster. I had never been terribly inclined to get into the local scene, but now I know–at least as long as I live in NY–that I never will, because I never want to encounter him again. And I certainly don’t want to be around a group of people who think he’s a freakin’ genius. Genius sociopath, perhaps, but that’s pretty much it.
Very few friends know about this experience–I don’t have kinky friends, and my close friends are a bunch of vanillas. But it has changed my outlook and actions considerably. I am now OVERLY cautious with dominant men, and extremely skittish around them for a while. I know they’re not all like he was–thank goodness–but I refuse to ever go through that hell again.
I hate that this has even affected me. I feel like it gives him some sort of power over me, and I don’t want that. I didn’t report him to the police for assault for that reason (and also because, technically, I consented to what was happening–I consented to being there with him, and although I said “no” and “this hurts” and “stop,” I didn’t use the safeword when I probably should have–so I doubt I’d have any legal ground to stand on, anyway). I don’t ever want him to know what he did to me. I can’t help but think he’d feel smug about it somehow, and I refuse to give him even one more iota of power that he doesn’t deserve in the least. So I try to work through it on my own. Knowing that getting away from him was a really smart choice I made. Knowing they’re not all like that. Knowing I will find someone who doesn’t take advantage of my submissive side.
From reading your blog, it seems that you have found a good, respectful dom–you deserve that. And if you ever have your PTSD-related thoughts again, know this: You are not alone, and you have kindred spirits rooting for you.
I tried replying to the email given but it’s been disabled. I’m in NY too, if you’d like to be friendly with someone kinky (and get to know a Dom who isn’t an asshole) feel free to drop me a line. (Email address is in the about section.) I’m so sorry you went through this (and being in NY I worry we’re talking about the same man, even if not, I’d sure like to know who this asshole is to avoid him). A good Dom will watch your reactions carefully to find what you can take and can’t take. They want to take you on a mutual journey that you both enjoy – not scar you for life.
Would you be willing to be reblogged in a blog carnival I’m doing? Details here: http://purrversatility.blogspot.com/2011/07/safeward-blog-carnival-trigger-warning.html