Girl Gone Bad

A friend is a friend until she rapes you. Then it's just awkward.

How does a woman rape a man, and can you even call it rape? I believe the answer is yes, though I also believe that a man getting raped by a woman simply cannot be as traumatic as any variation of a woman getting raped by a man. Then again, I have only this experience to go by.

I went to the CalArts Halloween party on Friday night. My friend Jeff is a grad student there. Full of the weirdest art students in the nation, CalArts is known for their annual Halloween party, full of ornate costumes and dance floors pounding with experimental trance music. Sounds like fun, no?

My friend Sally who just moved into town had heard about these parties and invited herself along. She was a good friend, and offered to drive, so I thought nothing of it. The more the merrier.

I went with the easy, last-minute choice to dress as a pun, and concocted "Wasted Time." All that means is that I would wear a t-shirt with a large clock drawn on it and get wasted.

And wasted I got. So wasted, in fact, that I experienced my first black out and ended up in a pool of my own vomit on my friend Jeff's bed. "That can be dangerous," my sister said today when I recounted the story. Yes, yes it was, but not for reasons of asphyxiation or alcohol poisoning or any of the normal threats.

I awoke at three in the morning to my friend Jeff's new lover punching me in the chest. Maybe she was punishing me for puking on where she thought she would be sleeping, or maybe she just wanted to take advantage of a helpless, passed out dude. Either way, it wasn't fun. I groggily asked her to stop and she got one last sock in before retiring to the floor with Jeff who was himself too drunk to worry about his sullied bed.

My friend Sally had to drop her sleeping bag on the floor next to Jeff and his horrible sex buddy. Before long, through my dazed state, I heard sex sounds coming from Jeff's area. I tried to fall back asleep, turning toward the less vomitous region of the bed.

If waking up, incapacitated from my drunken, blacked out state to a girl I'd never seen before punching me wasn't enough, what happened next really stamped the night as the biggest mistake with alcohol I've ever made.

My friend Sally, who, admittedly, had been the number three in a threesome I had with one of my girlfriends in college, decided that this was an apt moment to get laid by me. Whether she was inspired by Jeff and company, or just thought it was okay since we had done it before, I don't know, but I never wanted to have sex with Sally that night, especially not in a half-conscious state.

I remember her crawling up into the bed, directly into the vomit. I remember wondering what the hell she was doing. I remember waking up again to her hand fondling my penis, making it hard. Then she started moving her leg across my body to mount me.

I was awake enough by this point to know what she was doing. I had to make a quick decision. I had two choices. Either I would say "stop," risking her embarrassment and rejection and possibly the end of our friendship, or say "put on a condom," letting her do it and hope it gets slotted under the category of silly moments in our sexual history.

I quickly told her to put on a condom just before she slipped me naked inside of her. I had one in my backpack. She complied, thankfully.

After two minutes I got soft. She stopped, crawled back onto the floor. It was weird.

The next morning, Jeff assisted me in tossing his sheets and duvet into a plastic bag for me to take to an unlucky dry cleaning service. The ride home from CalArts in Sally's car was torturous: silence sprinkled with forced chatter about the radio and the automatic windows.

I haven't spoken to Sally since Saturday morning. I don't know when I will. Knowing her, she probably won't confront me about it, so eventually it's going to be me calling her and preemptively forgiving her, without saying those words exactly. Any semblance of normalcy in our friendship will be difficult to achieve in the near future.

Should the word "rape" be reserved for something other than what happened Friday night? I don't know. But I do know that I was violated, and that what happened was not my choice.