Content warning, trigger warning ⚠️
This post is about rape, sexual assault, bullying,
I’ve given this a lot of thought. I have never spoken out before about this, but it feels like it is time. These words are almost bursting out of me.
I’m not sharing this to distress anybody, just to make a point that this happens and it’s not ok. My family members might find this distressing, and I don’t mind at all if they do not read it.
I have talked it through with my current husband Si, a psychodynamic therapist, and friends with trauma-related mental health conditions.
No, I have not had sex with Russell Brand, that’s not it 🤮 Celebrity status can enable this, but it is ordinary people too.
This is kind of a long story, because you need to understand the context first:
It is important to understand that I was a bit of an ugly duckling at school. I was verbally bullied a lot! Some of my friends and followers will remember this.
Many of the in-crowd bitches and arseholes at my high school called me ‘ugly’ and ‘square’ and ‘rubber lips’. They mocked me, and taunted me, especially about my clothes and hair. Clearly this affected my self-esteem, and made me feel ugly.
This seems crazy to me now, but I responded to this by trying to prove them wrong.
I was rebellious and daring, proving I wasn’t ‘square’ (in my mind, ‘square’ equated to ‘goody two-shoes’ and ‘teacher’s pet’, although I now understand it to mean ‘unfashionable’).
I also tried to prove them wrong by demonstrating that I could be sexy and desired.
I have often made a play for older men; a difficult pattern for me to break. That is what I mean in other blogs, when I say I was ‘seeking validation in all the wrong places’.
You also need to understand that I was autistic, and I did not know I was autistic. I often misread people, misjudge people, and sometimes take things too literally.
You also need to understand that I had ADHD, and did not know I had ADHD. I was impulsive, a risk taker, and a sensory seeker.
I was a vulnerable teenage girl and young woman. I’d need to write a whole book to tell you about all the sexual abuse, so I’m going to tell you about two instances of sex without consent. Rape, as I now understand them to be. Now I understand that’s what it was. I suspect the perpetrators still do not get it.
1) Baggy. I do not know his real name.
I had a house party when I was 17, not long before I meet my first boyfriend. Some school friends were there, we had booze, but the party limped along. Sometime after 10pm, my friend Charlie phoned the pub she and I used to frequent for their karaoke nights. I fancied a couple of men there, both with long hair and leather trousers, they used to play pool and look cool in a Slash kind of way. Charlie invited them to come to the party. I ended up getting off with Baggy, and taking him up to my room, where we had a drunken fumble that led to sex. I regretted it immediately, and tried to tell him I’d changed my mind and wanted to go back to the party. He got aggressive, and every time I tried to leave the room, he turned the music up full blast. We lived in a quiet cul-de-sac with thin walls, and the neighbours could hear what was going on. He forced me to have sex with him, again, and again. Neighbours eventually phoned the police, who broke up the party.
2) Ben. I do not remember his surname.
This guy, another long-haired rocker, hung around with me and other rock chicks in our year at Lancaster University. He was usually a nice guy. He wanted a girlfriend, but was friend-zoned really quickly. You could call him an incel, I suppose. One evening after the rock night at the Alex nightclub, there was a party afterwards at the house of one of the bouncers (whose name I DO remember). It was out in the countryside, miles from anywhere. I got in a taxi, with Ben, my friend Kath, and others. We all used to take speed (I guess many of us were self-medicating undiagnosed ADHD), but this speed was cut with cocaine. Kath and I, already drunk, went to lie down. Ben waited a while, then attempted to have sex with us. We were both virtually comatose. I rolled onto my tummy, and clamped my legs together. I was wearing tight jeans, which were hard to remove. Ben gave up after a while, and had sex with Kath instead, while I lay there powerless to help her, playing dead. I knew he was having sex with her and she was paralytic, but I did not understand it was rape. I do now.
I did nothing about this. I locked it away in a box, that I didn’t reopen until a couple of months later. I’d heard nothing from Kath at all, but bumped into her in town. She had dropped out of university, and her parents were about to pick her up and take her home. She told me that had been her first time. It really fucked her up.
I put this out of my mind.. right up until the #MeToo movement. This demon raised its ugly head then, and after the recent allegations I am ready to fight it.
Please never assume rape victims must be lying, just because they did not come forward at the time. I get it!
Please teach your kids about consent, whatever gender they are. This is so important! Especially if they are autistic!
And if they are autistic, please make sure they know about it. Autism is not a label; it is vital information that we need to be able to look after ourselves! It is baffling to me that my autism went unnoticed.
When looking through my old photos to illustrate this blog, I found my old school reports. They show a plethora of evidence of my ADHD. I feel so let down by the system, that I struggled without understanding and medication all my life. How different could my university days have been? Why was I left to fall off the rails so hard?
#ActuallyAutistic #ASD #Autism #ADHD #AuDHD
Ausome Charlie 