Trigger Warning: Intimate Partner Violence and Oral Rape
At an age when I didn’t fully understand my gender/sexuality, I had already been conditioned to be grateful for receiving any sexual attention, being an ‘unfeminine’ woman. I continued to be in a relationship with my abuser till they left for another city.
Many years and another campus life later I understood the gravity and prevalence of intimate partner violence in college campuses, where toxic masculinity and internalized misogyny prevent those involved as well as their peers from seeing violence as violence.
Indian college campuses today are still rife with slut-shaming and fractured understanding of consent which societal structures and popular media continue to fuel. Young people today are more aware of their rights, and hopefully shall be able to unlearn whatever is harmful to their personhoods too.
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When the cool girls I was becoming friends with said the word, I pretended to understand and imitated their smirks.
Quickly making a mental note to google it later.
Of course I forgot to look it up.
Many make outs in college toilets later, the day we were alone together in a room with a bed for the first time, you said I had promised you one and started begging.
Before I’d process where I’d heard that word before, you pushed me down with those strong arms on those strong broad shoulders till I couldn’t move myself anymore and was choking on your cock as you held my head and moved it like you wanted.
It was then that I learnt the meaning of the word. Blowjob.
I gagged and almost cried, but you let me go just in time, for me to fix my expression back. While you lay there eyes shut mouth open.
I learnt this was something you liked, and something that made me feel terrible.
All that time that we were together thereon I went down on you not because I enjoyed it at all, but because I was trying to learn to bear it.
All that time that we were together thereon I didn’t let you go down on me because I didn’t want you to feel what I did, especially since so many places in my body already disgusted you so much.
I decided my dark pungent cunt didn’t have to be one of them.
I was sparing myself the pain of being not-enough yet again,
while telling myself I was sparing you the trauma of having a mouth reeking of me.
Took me years to peel off your words from my skin.
Took me years to rub the roses off my eyes and see the red flags as they were.
Took me years to learn oral sex isn’t terrible, rape is. And that is what it was.
It saddened me that I didn’t understand this back then.
It saddened me that could not tell this to anyone back then.
It saddened me that I ended up locking doors to MY pleasure.
It saddened me that you never apologized.
And it saddens me that you might not even acknowledge this if confronted.
P.S. I love giving head now.
Featured Image Credit: Amrita Sher-Gil –’Hungarian Gypsy Girl’
