This made me sick to my stomach because I have never read anything so true of what it is like to be a woman

Was just talking with my SO yesterday and comparing lists of experiences like this.

Though ours were not identical, we certainly shared a number of similar ones, both within our experiences and with the person from the OP article.

I would not claim that gender has no bearing on one's exposure to sexual weirdness, and sexual violence in particular, but I think that much of what we're talking about here is common to both genders, and that most of the difference in our perception of those events, and in how we interpret them later, comes from societal expectations regarding what is 'acceptable' or 'traumatic' for the respective genders.

In other words, the social shit that says that women lose value through sexual encounters and men either gain or aren't affected by them, informs the way that we process what happens to us. Women feel MORE conflicted about sex stuff that is coercive and aggressive than men (in general; obvs everyone is an individual and deals differently), while men can often brush this stuff off in the same way that we might dismiss comments about our appearance, or slights which hurt our feelings.

My own experiences include "Doctor" with three older girls as the instigators (when I was around 4), Boys pulling me (ages 4-8) aside and flashing me, a girl classmate's hands down my pants when I was sleeping (age 11), a dude picking me up in a van and trying to get me to masturbate in front of him (age 16), another guy (20-something) inviting me (age 15) over to his house under the pretext of 'showing me some theatrical designs', and then trying to get me to blow him, a friend's mother inviting me (17) into a bedroom and getting naked on the bed, an ex physically grabbing my junk and trying to steer me into having sex on the porch, while I protested, verbally and physically, and TONS of incidences (from age 10 on) of being groped, or told what I look like, or should be doing to someone, sexually, by countless men and women.

During the conversation, one of the things that struck me was how LITTLE I thought about these things in my daily life, and how little they seemed to have relevance to my own current self-image, or mental state, or conception of who people are and what society is about.

I don't feel like a victim, or that I am defined in any significant way by those events.

I don't say this to discount the OP's experience, but rather to contrast with it. I feel that I am lucky, since I don't have the same societal pressure to 'remain pure', or to stay quiet and demure, or to avoid conflict, that OP has. In each of these incidents, I could always either think about it as just some weird event, or as some weirdo being weird, rather than men or women exercising some kind of gender-specific power over me.

In other words, I don't think that the greatest difference between men and women (or boys and girls) in our sexual experiences is the events themselves, but rather the way in which we end up thinking about them, in the context of gender-specific expectations around sex.

/r/TwoXChromosomes Thread Parent Link - ibelieveyouitsnotyourfault.tumblr.com