Author’s note: The piece below is likely to be highly triggering for some people. I recount my experiences in such frank and graphic detail because I need to get every piece of this story out of me. I don’t expect it will be easy to read. It wasn’t easy to write. This is essentially a story of how my orgasm was stolen from me, and how I got it back.
My name isn’t really Ashley. Ashley was the name of a cat I had once. I’m a married woman in her forties who lives somewhere in the western United States. I have two young children and a career I enjoy. But getting to this point was a long, hard road.
In the summer of 1994, a few months after graduating from college, I was raped.
The attack was what some deeply misguided pundits and politicians have referred to as “real rape,” “forcible rape,” or “legitimate rape.” I did not know my attacker, I had not been drinking, and I had done nothing that could have reasonably been construed as inviting the attack. He broke into my apartment one night when my roommate was away and assaulted me in my bed. I did not want it to happen, I did not enjoy it, and I was terrified the entire time that I would be murdered when it was over.
Yet despite all that, I had an orgasm during the ordeal. Not just one but several.
“if you had an orgasm, honey, it wasn’t rape”
There may be no more loaded, visceral topic in sexual politics than the subject of orgasm and sexual arousal during rape. Most people insist it’s impossible. Orgasm is a consensual, pleasurable experience that women have to work at even when they want one. How could you have one against your will? Even trained therapists and rape counselors can have difficulty with it (trust me on that one), and rape survivors who experienced nothing of the sort during their rapes can have violently negative reactions to the idea.
Yet I can’t begrudge these women their negativity because it doesn’t arise from a vacuum. For most of human history, it has been men who controlled the discourse around sex and orgasm. Female orgasm was for the validation of men, and any existence outside that sphere was threatening. Witness the laws—still on the books in some states—that make the sale and possession of sex toys a criminal offense. Think about that for a moment: The idea of a woman pleasuring herself was so threatening that these men felt the need to make it a crime.
For centuries, female orgasm was thought to serve a specific purpose. Just as it was known that male orgasm produced semen, it was thought that female orgasm produced the egg, and it was thus necessary for pregnancy. We might be inclined to dismiss this as a quaint superstition, but it had real and severe consequences. If a woman became pregnant as a result of rape, it was presumed she must have had an orgasm and thus must have been a willing participant. Not infrequently, she might then have been prosecuted for adultery.
I have been speaking thus far of women, but men are of course raped as well, by other men, and by women. Not surprisingly, the idea of experiencing erection and orgasm under such circumstances is just as threatening to men, perhaps more so because in same-sex rapes, it carries with it the specter of unwilling homosexuality.
The “rape fantasy,” in which women imagine being forced into sexual activity but enjoying it, is an outgrowth of this tradition. When women are not allowed to control their orgasms, many find release in thoughts of surrender.
Modern humanity has demystified rape to a real—if deeply incomplete—extent. We understand now that it is primarily a crime of violence and power. Some like to say it’s not about sex, but this is inaccurate. It’s about sex in the sense that it uses sex against its victims, forces them to experience the most intimate of human interactions in a venue utterly devoid of intimacy.
How can orgasm arise in such a situation? For most people, the two are mutually exclusive. “If you had an orgasm, honey, it wasn’t rape,” is a sentiment I have come across too many times. One reason rape survivors can have such negative reactions to this subject is that police officers and prosecutors investigating rapes have been known to ask victims if they had orgasms or became aroused, in the pursuit of determining if she’s making the story up or falsely accusing the man. Did she get off? Then it wasn’t rape, just a lover’s tiff.
Of course, only a complete slut could have an orgasm from stranger rape, right? In my case, my body betrayed me because it just wanted to be fucked, or at least that’s how I saw it for a long time.
meet me in the men’s room
I internalized all this misogyny and more after my rape. It was months before I could even acknowledge to myself that I had an orgasm, and years before I could even make myself call the attack rape. For a long while, the rape was just It in my mind. Before It. After It. When It happened. And so on. I had orgasmed; therefore it wasn’t rape. I was a sick pervert who wanted strange men to attack her.
I self-medicated with alcohol and promiscuous sex. I was a pretty girl with a killer rack, so getting sex was easy. Yet the fulfillment I was chasing never came. For years, I could only reach orgasm by masturbating to memories of my rape. Even when I began having orgasms during sex again, it was only by imagining that I was being assaulted.
I don’t know how many partners I had during this period, but the number surely reaches into triple digits. I subconsciously sought out older men who reminded me of my rapist, and not just in bars. Sometimes a little eye contact was all it took.
One day I was browsing in Barnes & Noble when I noticed a tall man in his forties checking me out. He smiled at me. I thought, “Okay, you’ll do.” Without a single word, I passed him a note saying Meet me in the men’s room. He did. I sucked his cock until he was hard, then we fucked standing up in the handicapped stall. There was a wedding ring on his left hand. I wondered if his wife was out in the store while we were in here. I had an orgasm, but it was only because I was bent over away from him, masturbating to the thought that my rapist had tracked me down and attacked me again.
All I got from this phase of my life was herpes and two accidental pregnancies that I immediately aborted.
I half-heartedly attempted suicide in 2003. I say “half-heartedly” because most suicide attempts are cries for help, and I wasn’t sure there was anyone who would really care. My promiscuity had driven away nearly all of my friends, and I was by then deeply estranged from my family, who didn’t understand what had happened to the pleasant, outgoing girl they once loved.
not uncommon
It was the morning after my suicide attempt that I finally decided I needed help. Not because I had been raped, mind you, but because I was a stupid slut who could not control her sex drive.
My first therapist eventually got me to come to terms with my rape, but when we got to the subject of the orgasms, things took a turn for the worse. She clearly did not know how to process the information, and she gently suggested that I might be imagining it, that I had imprinted those memories on the rape as a means of coping with my later behavior.
But I knew I had not created those memories. I vividly remembered every moment of my rape, as I do even now two decades later. I knew I had an orgasm. I wanted to know why.
I ended treatment with that therapist, but I soon found another, a woman I’ll call Sally, who basically changed my life. When, months into therapy with her, I finally told her about the orgasms, I waited for the reaction I got the first time.
But instead, she said, “You need to realize that’s not uncommon. Many women experience some arousal or even orgasm during rape. It doesn’t mean you wanted the experience or enjoyed it. It just means your body reacted to what it was feeling.”
I sat there in a daze with those two words ringing through my head: Not uncommon. I wasn’t alone. Other women had experienced the same thing.
Of course, I wasn’t healed in that instant. I fought against the idea. I threw all my internalized misogyny at her. But she calmly deflected all of it.
“Consent is a legal concept, not a biological one,” she said. “Orgasm, by contrast, is a physiological reaction the human body has to certain stimuli. It evolved as a means of encouraging propagation of the species. Your body doesn’t know whether you’ve consented. Just as you may laugh when you’re tickled whether or not you’re happy, you can have an orgasm with the right stimuli regardless of what may be in your head.”
She told me some other things that basically blew my mind. How common is it? The data isn’t robust, but there’s good reason to believe it’s much more common than people realize. Studies have shown that around three to five percent of women report experiencing orgasm during rape. But that surely isn’t the entire story, given how embarrassing the information is (after all, in my case, it took almost 10 years for me to tell anyone). If we extrapolate—not unreasonably in my mind—from the usual consensus that only around ten to thirty percent of rapes are reported, that would suggest that anywhere from ten to as many as fifty percent of women may experience orgasm from rape.
Fifty percent strikes me as far too high even if there are researchers who suspect it’s not far off. (But then, what do I know? I was only raped once.) Yet if we take the mean of both ranges (in other words, the four percent who report represent only one-fifth of the real total), we get a figure of around twenty percent. That I could easily believe. From what I’ve read since Sally opened my eyes, there are a lot of women out there who have had similar experiences, and are starting to talk to about this, especially in recent years as the subject is at last starting to lose its stigma.
I’ve read stories of women who are struggling with experiencing orgasm while being molested as children. Women who were awoken by orgasm from extreme intoxication to discover they were being raped. Women who even experienced orgasm in the midst of rough and violent rape, despite the sheer terror they felt.
The latter might seem incredible, but experts think the human body simply can’t differentiate between “good” adrenaline that accompanies consensual sexual excitement and “bad” adrenaline that accompanies fear and terror. They’re essentially the same thing. In fact, it’s possible that such extreme emotions may make orgasm more likely because the physiological elements are so similar. The body, again, may not know the difference.
i did not climax
In online conversations on the subject, I’ve sometimes been asked if the orgasms I had with my rapist were different somehow, some kind of painful burst of sensations only vaguely analogous to orgasm. The answer is both yes and no.
In a purely physical sense, they were little different from the orgasms I’ve had from consensual sex or masturbation. And—again in a purely physical sense—they were “pleasurable” in the same way my other orgasms are.
But they were also vastly different. This can be difficult to understand if you haven’t been through it, but what I’ve tried to explain to people is that what they understand as “orgasm”—let’s call this construct climax to illustrate the distinction—has both a physical and emotional component. There is the physical and biological sensation—the orgasmic reaction to stimulus—and there is also the emotional connection with another human being (or the pleasant self-absorption during masturbation).
These two parts of climax can be separated. Just as you can experience an emotional connection during sex without an orgasmic reaction, you can experience a physical orgasm without any of those emotions, or with very different ones.
So, to put it another way, I had an orgasmic reaction with my rapist, but I did not climax—because the emotions were entirely different.
In my case, the emotions I experienced were horror, disgust, and revulsion. But—and this is critical to understand—those emotions were taking place in my mind, while my body was reacting in its evolutionarily appropriate fashion to the stimuli of sexual intercourse.
And, to clarify here: This was just my experience. I don’t mean to suggest it’s the only one or that different experiences aren’t possible. I’ve read stories of victims who did experience an emotional connection during rape, something that I’m sure must be horrible.
i would never own another one
(Please read what follows—a detailed recounting of my rape—only if you’re still with me, and in a good place emotionally. If not, please skip down to the next section. Writing this was very difficult for me, and I hope you will take it in the spirit in which it was intended.)
Looking back with what I know now, I can see that it was far from remarkable that I reached orgasm with my rapist. The attack was not rushed or violent. My roommate and I lived in a first-floor apartment, and I think he got in by popping loose the lock on one of the windows. They were old and flimsy, and it wouldn’t have been hard. I remember being a bit concerned about them and wanting to say something to the manager. (I didn’t. Oh well.)
I’d gone to bed and was reading a book. However he got in, he made no noise doing it, and I was so shocked when he just walked into my bedroom that it didn’t even occur to me to scream for help until it was too late. He was big and I was not, and the terror was enough to silence me. After he threatened me into submission and pulled off my pajamas, he tied me to my bed and remained with me for several hours. In, I suppose, an attempt to keep me comfortable, he left the bonds slack so I could squirm around but not escape. (The sight of braided nylon rope—his was blue—gives me flashbacks to this day.) Unable to get away physically, I did the only thing I could do and disappeared into my head.
The orgasms were not accidental. He tried to arouse and stimulate me throughout the attack in various ways, including oral sex. This too, I understand now, is common. Why rapists do this varies, but it’s thought that some are trying to excuse the rape in their minds: If she comes, she must secretly want it. Others are trying to increase the sense of dominance, taking control of their victims’ bodies away from them. Still others may hope the shame and humiliation will deter the victim from reporting it. With my rapist, I suspect it was a mix of all of this.
I lay there in a numb fog, eyes closed, feeling these distant sensations over my body and between my legs. They were familiar yet alien, seemingly happening to someone else. The first orgasm jerked me back into reality as if I’d been rear-ended on the highway. The horror I felt was so intense that I cried out and began sobbing loudly. His reaction, looking up from between my thighs: To laugh at what he’d done to me.
The second orgasm came when he was on top of me. This time the horror was mixed with shock and confusion: Until that moment, I had never reached orgasm from penetration alone. How could it have happened from rape?
I think now that, far from my body betraying me, it was I who betrayed my body. I abandoned it to my rapist, and left on its own, it reacted the only way it knew how.
I cried again. He laughed again. I couldn’t disappear this time. I lay there feeling his thrusting penis inside me as he finished and ejaculated.
To my dismay, he didn’t leave. He stayed there, talking to me gently in some sick semblance of cuddling. I think he felt guilty and wanted to console me.
He told me how he had seen me at the supermarket and thought I was sexy. I was wearing a tight top, and he liked my breasts. He was caressing them as he said this, and I literally felt my skin trying to crawl off my body and hide. He followed me home, he said, and then watched me for a week or so to see when I would be alone. I suddenly realized I had seen him a few days before, but he was just a random guy in his thirties sitting in a beige sedan, and there’d seemed nothing unusual about it at the time.
He asked me a few questions, and still worried he might kill me and not wanting to make him angry, I answered as best I could. Did I have a boyfriend? No, I did but we’d broken up before graduation because he was moving home to Montana. Did I enjoy sex? Yes, usually. He complimented me on the tightness of my vagina, a sentiment that made me want to rip it out with my fingernails. Did I masturbate? Yes. How often? I mumbled something, not sure what to say.
He asked if I had a vibrator. I did, and for some reason I told him where it was in the bottom of my nightstand. He took it out and began using it on me. I begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. “Just relax. Let me make you feel good.”
I had lost the ability to go away inside my mind. I tried to fight him, but he’d broken my resistance. Those first orgasms were already dissolving my self-esteem like acid. How could they have happened unless I wanted this?
He brought me to orgasm twice more, and at the peak of both, my defenses broke down just enough that I briefly lost myself in the pleasure he was trying to give me. How could I let such a thing happen? It was a momentary escape, the only one available to me, but the shame of those two moments, mere split seconds, would haunt me for the next decade.
Amusing himself with my body had made him hard, and he wanted me again now. The second rape took much longer. He alternated between penetrating my mouth or my vagina, and giving me oral sex. He clearly wanted to make me orgasm again, but I had nothing left. I numbly wondered how long it would take him to finish, what I would do if he ejaculated in my mouth. He didn’t. He finally came inside me after what seemed like an hour. As he grunted and shook above me in release, but before pulling out, he twisted the knife one last time. “You came more than I did, you know.”
When he was done, he dressed and untied me. Then—incredibly—he apologized for raping me. He’s not going to murder me, I thought, but I wish he would. I curled into a fetal ball as he left and barely moved for the next 12 hours.
The first thing I did when I finally got up was find a hammer and smash my vibrator to pieces. I would never own another one.
six months
That’s how long it took me to write the account above. The more I wrote, the more details came back to me, many of them very difficult to put down on the screen. But I wanted it all out, to prove that it no longer controlled my life, and that took time.
When I think of my rape now, I want to go back and hug that 22-year-old me, to tell her we will one day be well, that there is a way forward. I’ve come to understand, with Sally’s help and the love I’ve since found, that my body is simply very reactive. It enjoys sex and orgasms easily. It just didn’t know any better that night, didn’t know what was really going on. I’ve come to love it for what it is, to treasure what it can do.
It didn’t betray me.
You might be surprised to know that I do still occasionally relive the rape during sex, as I did so many times during the promiscuous period of my mid-twenties. I do it only because I’ve decided to own those memories. They’re mine. I claim them. They’re part of who I am. There’s a part of me that just enjoys submission and surrender. How it got there, who knows? There was a time I tried to suppress it and drive it out of me, but I could not, so I choose to embrace it. If it gives me pleasure, who’s to say it’s wrong?
the first one I owned again
I met my husband in 2007. I had been essentially celibate for about four years (there might have been a relapse or two) while I was in therapy with Sally. I didn’t trust men, and I didn’t trust myself around them. We worked together, and he’d been trying to get me to go out with him for a while. He was the antithesis of how I’d come to view men during my bad period: predatory, sex-obsessed, and only interested in my body. But he was gentle, thoughtful, and seemed truly interested in me as a person. He was also several years younger than me (I have problems trusting older men to this day).
After discussing it a few times with Sally, I finally agreed to a date. One turned into several. On our fifth date, before we had sex for the first time, I told him about my rape and what it had done to me. I didn’t mean to tell him about the orgasms, but once I started, it all came pouring out. I wanted him to know what he was getting into.
He was silent for a while when I was done. I felt all the progress I had made with Sally starting to crumble, and I waited for him to tell me he wasn’t interested in a woman who could orgasm with a rapist, who’d had sex with a hundred-plus men after it. But instead he said finally, “You are who you are. You’re not what was done to you. None of that changes how I feel about you.”
Trite, maybe. But it touched me in a way I hadn’t been touched in a long time. The orgasm I had with him that night was the first one I felt like I owned again.
be at peace
I’m deeply in love with a wonderful man. I have two little angels I adore. And I’ve reconnected with my family. When I finally told my mother about the rape, she broke down crying for fifteen minutes. She told me she thought something like that had happened, she’d just never been brave enough to ask. I don’t resent her for not doing so. Had she asked during the bad days, I wouldn’t have told her anything anyway.
My sole regret now is not reporting the rape when it happened. I know my rapist is still out there. I am certain he raped other women before he found me. He came fully prepared, and his behavior was too practiced. Having gotten away with raping me, he surely tried to rape again. (With the same blue rope? The possibility he used it on another woman, before or after, still chills me.) I have reclaimed my soul, but I can never recapture those lost years.
After talking it over with my then-new husband, I finally reported the rape in 2009, fifteen years after the fact. But after the passage of so much time, with any physical evidence long gone, there was little the police could do but take the report in hopes it would help another investigation. (At the time, the statute of limitations for rape in my state was ten years. It was extended to twenty this year, but for a rape in 1994, it’s too late for me.) The female detective with the sex crimes unit I talked to was serious and professional, even comforting, but also resigned to the likelihood that nothing would ever come of it. So far, nothing has.
I pray desperately that he’s already in jail or perhaps even dead, killed in self-defense by another would-be victim. I wonder if another woman was raped because I was too destroyed to report what happened to me. I fear I will need to answer for this when I meet God one day.
And thus we come at last to my purpose in sharing my story: To prevent another woman from remaining silent for so long because she went through a similar experience. To urge you, if you’re reading this on some stage of the journey I traveled, to find the strength to fight back, to make it right.
Understand that you’re not alone. What you went through doesn’t make you anything other than who you are. You can heal if you let yourself. Be at peace.
If you’ve made it this far, I invite you to share your thoughts below if you choose. I’ll only delete trollish comments and abuse. I don’t know if I’ll ever make another post on this blog, but I may respond to comments.
Ashley's Orgasm 