I lived a quiet, inwardly focused life as a teenager. I spent a lot of time in the woods, and I spent a lot of time reading. I walked to the public library at least once a week to search through the beautifully uncomplicated, small selection of books.

One day, a boy from school (we’ll call him “Mike”) asked if he could walk me to the library that afternoon.

I didn’t actually like Mike that much. Objectively he was attractive enough, but he spit a lot and it grossed me out. The smell of whatever laundry detergent he used was overpowering in a bad way, and he was boring.

But I was lonely. So I said yes.

It was a nice, warm afternoon. I remember being relieved that he didn’t try to talk about baseball or how to get 6 pack abs like he normally did, but he was being pretty engaging and making me laugh.

Regardless, by the time we got to the library, I was ready to be left alone again so I could pick out my books undisturbed. Mike wasn’t picking up on my hints, and he followed me inside.

He was wandering around being too loud. You don’t want to be too loud in the library. We were getting dirty looks. I was nervous. I didn’t want to get in trouble.

This is where it starts to get suspiciously ambivalent.

I followed him down a staircase into the empty lower level of the library. There were meeting rooms down there, and they were locked and dark. There was a bathroom. The lights were on. I followed him inside.

Oops.

It was a small space, a little single person bathroom, white and pink with some floral decorative touches. It was very clean.

There he unveiled his not-so-innocent motives for walking me to the library. Or maybe he hadn’t even planned it, maybe the teenage male brain is just always processing his surroundings for an opportunity to “get some”.

Me on the other hand? I didn’t want to “give” him any. At all. I wanted to go back upstairs, and pick out some new books like I had planned, and then I wanted to walk home alone.

But he wouldn’t let me go.

He was sitting on the vanity, and he put his leg up to the clean, white tile wall, blocking my way. When I still tried to get by he firmly pushed me back. Again, and again.

He was smiling the entire time.

After trying arguing, and begging, and pushing, and standing silently staring into space with my arms crossed for a while to see if that might change things, I gave in.

I wasn’t at all scared that he would hurt me. He never threatened to do me any harm. He didn’t use any physical force, he only physically prevented me from leaving. I (eventually) verbally consented. I said “okay”.

I didn’t want it, and I didn’t like it. I did it because it was the only way back out of the bathroom. I did it because I was scared an adult would find us and I would get in trouble and I wouldn’t be allowed to come back to the library.

When he was finished, he just said “thank you”, and let me go.

This memory came bubbling to the surface of my mind when I read the latest from the Rational Male, on the collective reaction to the Jian Ghomeshi verdict. And it’s not so much that specific case that interests me, as much as the growing rape hysteria, the pearl clutching about “rape culture”, and campus witch hunts.

As Rollo points out, clearly there is something very powerful and wicked in what feminists are doing to exponentially redefine and expand the definition of rape, to expand the scope of power of their newly-minted “rape victims”.

But the reason they’re having so much success? Because of the raw material like the story I just told.

The thing about the story is.. It’s not a rape story, but it sort-of is, because I could never tell it today without it being labeled as such.

It’s not a rape story though. It’s a personal agency story. 

The thing about memory is that we think of it like an old VHS tape, just sitting there in a box, and we can take it out and rewind it and look at back at what happened, just as it was, and put it back into the box just the same.

But memory isn’t like that at all. Memory is a video editor. Every time we take the story out and look at it, we edit it. We change it just a little the way we tell it, every time we tell it, even if we only tell it to ourselves.

What feminists are doing are changing stories that should be personal-choice, personal-agency, self-ownership stories into rape stories.

You see, feminist video editing would have me add some dramatic music to the part where he blocked the door, take a fish eye lens to Mike’s playful smile.

They’d have me cut the part where I walked with him into the bathroom.

But that’s the climax of the whole scene.

There’s this chapter in Deuteronomy, chapter 22, that talks about what God’s people should do if a man is caught in the act of raping a woman. It says that if they catch him raping her out in the open country with no one around, the man will be subject to the death penalty, but the woman will go free because she did nothing wrong.

But if they catch him raping her in the city, and she wasn’t crying for help? Then they must both be put to death, to “purge the evil” from their midst.

This is something skeptics love to use to show how supposedly barbaric the Bible is. But I think it’s beautiful; what it says to me is that our sexuality is so precious that we have both the right and the responsibility to defend it at all costs.

The important question isn’t about whether or not Mike raped me. The most important question is why I took such little ownership of my body and my fate that I thoughtlessly put myself into a bad situation, and what that says about me, and how I can edit that key part of the story so I make sure to delete it from my future.

I said that feminists are having success because of the story I just told. Because these are the endless punishments of the sexual revolution: the blazing fire of sexuality has crossed the boundaries of the fire pit, and women are being encouraged to dance around the wild flames instead of protect themselves from it.

Women, and men, are getting badly burned.

I know so many girls with these sort-of-rape stories. Like, he wouldn’t drive me home unless I had sex with him. Like, I was on his bed in his apartment with him.

In calling it not-a-rape story, I’m not trying to say it wasn’t a bad thing. I’m not trying to say that Mike isn’t such a bad guy. I’m not trying to say it’s a thing that didn’t hurt me.

I’m just trying to say it’s a story about me, and not him.

We don’t have the right to walk into bathrooms. We don’t have the right to get into cars with men we don’t know. We don’t have the right to walk in bad neighborhoods alone at night. We don’t have a right to get drunk at frat parties and bars and leave a key piece of what makes us human out on the table for the taking.

One of the most important things you can do to help an adult heal from childhood sexual abuse is help them grasp that it wasn’t their fault. They were a kid, they were vulnerable, the power dynamic was way off, there was nothing they could do.

They need to know this because taking on responsibility for childhood sexual abuse harms a person’s sense of self-agency, it makes you think there is something magically different or bad about you, something sexual, something seductive, some kind of blinking invitation you can’t see and can’t turn off – and once you realize that isn’t real, you can take back your life and identity.

But the opposite is true when it comes to so much of what is now being called rape – if you tell a woman it wasn’t her fault, there was nothing she could have done, when she got drunk and a terrible person came along and raped her – you’re damaging her far worse than anything else.

You’re making her a perpetual victim, a person without agency, a person without hope or self-efficacy, carried along by the random cruelties of the world.

There was a time that I believed helping women recover from sexual abuse was my calling. There was a time that I stood up in front of a crowd of women and I talked about what God had done for me and I said, “if anyone has ever forced themselves on you sexually, then something inside of you has warped and you need God’s healing”, and everyone was crying and afterwards women came up to me, and it was beautiful —

But I would never do that now.

Not because I don’t believe that women are really getting raped, or that it’s not a horrible problem anymore, but because the whole thing has gotten away from us, and I don’t want to be a part of something that’s hurting women – the removal of our personal agency.