Domestic Violence Counseling Manual - Hot Peach Pages

apart. Most of my hymen has been obliterated, with a ragged circular edge of tissue left in its
place. Inside my vagina, the muscles at the entrance are damaged and I fear that this will adversely
affect any future sexual intercourse that I engage in. Polyps have developed immediately before and
at the entrance to my vagina. Also, the tissues of the lower part of my vaginal walls remain ripped.
Thus, not only do people fail to comprehend the severe pain involved in a rape, or the length of time
the victim must suffer, they also do not understand that the physical damage done on the genital
organs does not repair itself with time and that rape is a mutilating, disfiguring crime.
Haskell states that "the integratedness with which a woman experiences love and sex and herself
is what makes rape devastating," but this is not the whole truth, because there is no "sex" in rape.
There is only pain – traumatic, physical pain – and I believe that this is what makes rape devastating.
Perhaps her theory best explains the rampant fear of rape as experienced by the majority of
women who have never been raped, and who, therefore, do not anticipate having their vaginas ripped
and torn for 15 minutes, but rather some sort of sex.
I have listened to many women say that it is probably better to submit to rape than to endanger
one's life by resisting, all the while knowing in my heart that they had no idea as to the kind of hell
they would be in for. I presumed they felt that they would be submitting to sex. I, myself, could not
have imagined what rape really was like until it happened. I think that this confusion between sex
and rape is largely responsible for the male fantasies of it as being pleasurable for the victim, for its
glorification in the movies as such, and for the relatively light sentences imposed by judges on
convicted rapists, as well as for Haskell's interpretation.
-- Name Withheld
October 22, 1979
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