Official Participant in the Youth Media Blog-a-Thon

Whenever I write about ‘sex’ I have the urge to write under an assumed name, like E. Swing because sex can be a really personal and private topic that no one really likes to share or have their name attached to.

When I turned 19, I decided to write about losing my virginity because there were too many thoughts in my head and I had to toss them onto paper to figure them all out.

During that time, I felt like I was meeting a new part of myself, someone who was a little older, a little more confused and for the first time realized she had sore muscles she never knew existed.

This may end up being more along the lines of a confession than some moment of sexual clarity, but oh well.

It took me a little over a year to come to terms with the fact that my ex-boyfriend raped me.

Saying it out loud doesn’t even seem real. He raped me.

I was walking around downtown San Francisco with a few friends and somehow the issue of relationships and sex came up. I don’t why, or how – but the memory resurfaced in such a vivid way that I blurted it out.

Needless to say – no one really knew how to respond at first, besides the initial – “What?!”

After describing what happened, I asked several of my friends if what happened could be considered rape. Some said it was in a ‘gray area’ and others stared back at me blankly and said, “Honey, that’s rape.”

I went to therapy for one year just to get an outside perspective, to make sure I wasn’t just crazy.

I’ve gone over that day so many times in my head I’m still not sure if I have an accurate account of what happened.

I remember sitting on the bed after the fact. He was standing near the mirror putting on his belt. I looked at him thinking, “Does he know what he just did?” “Did he not feel me gripping his face, yelling at him to stop?”

Every time I talk about what happened it always feels like I was telling someone else’s story. She couldn’t push him off her. She told him to stop, over and over again.

This is someone else’s memory that I have playing over and over in my head like a video on YouTube.

I confronted him about it once, online.

He didn’t believe me. Either he doesn’t remember, or he doesn’t know he did anything wrong – or maybe he just blocked it out all together. I’ll never know for sure.

The worst part of all is that I can’t bring myself to hate him the way I would normally despise him. He was my first love, my first sexual experience, and the first person to make me feel lower than dirt.

He raped me. Nope, still doesn’t sound real.
—Eming Piansay aka E. Swing