Rachel Thompson - Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom and What We Can Do About It

Rachel Thompson is a journalist specialising in reporting on sex, relationships, and gender. Rachel is the senior culture reporter at Mashable, and has written for The Sunday Times, CNN, ELLE, The Telegraph, and HuffPost. She is also the host of History Becomes Her podcast, which explores the inspiring stories behind women currently making history.

For Annie and Elspeth, my grandmothers.

For Nancy, my mother.

Dear reader before we begin, I want to let you know this book explores sexual violence in detail and features first-hand accounts of violations, including rape and sexual assault. The book examines how systems of oppression manifest in our sexual culture and discusses racism, ableism, anti-fatness, transphobia, biphobia, homophobia and misogyny, which might be triggering for some readers. If, at any point, this book is triggering or upsetting, feel free to stop reading, take a break or skip a chapter look after yourself.

I was 19 years old when it happened. It was my first year of university and the sum total of my limited sexual experience was a few intoxicated fumbles with men who didnt reply to my texts afterwards. I could count the number of times Id had sex on one hand and I felt my inexperience keenly. I saw it as a deficit I needed to fill urgently, doing my utmost to hide that void from my peers, who all had an assured air of knowing exactly what they were doing. Or so I thought. Freshers week was my opportunity for reinvention, a chance to shake off the mantle of epithets that had defined my reputation in adolescence.

Frigid was the word that had followed me since age 12, when my school friend invited me to a sleepover at her house and proceeded to invite two much older boys over. As my friend took one of the boys upstairs to her bedroom, I stayed downstairs with the boy whod been designated as mine. I remember going into my friends parents kitchen in search of some orange squash, and the boy following me into the cupboard and grabbing my arse. Youre a pervert, I told him. Get off me. He tried it again later on, groping me as I attempted to go upstairs to see if my friend was OK.

After the boys left, my friend asked me why I hadnt done anything with the boy Id been left downstairs with. Because I didnt want to. Plus I dont fancy him, I said. Doesnt matter. You should have done it, she told me definitively. The next day my friend broke down and cried because she was worried she was pregnant after what had happened. She was the same age as me.

So here I was in my first year of uni, desperate to get rid of the reputation of inexperience that had followed me around my entire youth thus far. It was time to be a real young person, to do the things everyone else my age was doing. Because I didnt want to look back in my old age and think, Why didnt I have more sex?

Thats when I met Daniel. He was everything I was not: privately educated, obscenely wealthy, popular and cool. Daniel and I met on a night out with a bunch of friends. A nightclub in my university town was having a beach night, so I donned a bikini and a sarong. I was too drunk to stand for some of that evening, and I lost my keys after falling over into a bush and never found them again. There are huge swathes of the night that I cannot remember.

I woke up in Daniels bed. From the moment I opened my eyes I knew something wasnt quite right. I hadnt taken my epilepsy medication the night before and now I was paying the price. My arms were twitching uncontrollably. My breath kept catching with every shock-like jerk. To the untrained ear it would have sounded like a dose of the hiccups. But I knew exactly what was coming.

I tried to go back to sleep in an attempt to ward off the impending loss of consciousness. I told him I wasnt feeling well. Lets go have sex in the shower, he said to me. I didnt know how to tell him that if I stood up, Id fall to the ground within minutes. But I did it anyway.

Ill meet you in there, he said, before bounding naked into the bathroom. In that moment, I betrayed my body and followed him willingly. The next thing I remember is waking up surrounded by paramedics and concerned faces. Id had a seizure on the floor.

What stands out to me now is the distinct feeling of humiliation I felt as I sat in a bikini while the male paramedic told me, You can put some clothes on now.

I asked Daniel to walk me back to my room because I couldnt remember where I lived. My 19-year-old self interpreted his actions in that moment as vaguely heroic. Perhaps because I hadnt yet known kindness from a man not related to me by blood. I went back to my room and slept all day, and when I woke up I texted Daniel. He replied one week later, asking you still awake? at 2 a.m. Sorry, I was asleep. Hows it going? X I wrote the next morning. He texted me a week later, at around 10 p.m. this time. I was awake and, deciding I would like to see Daniel, I responded.

Is your roommate home? read his next message. I said that she was and he told me to come outside and meet him at the bottom of the drive outside my halls of residence. When I came face-to-face with him, we didnt kiss or hug or greet each other in any particular way. I recall looking at his eyes, which had a vacant look about them, but when he spoke he was lucid.

Lets go explore the woods, he said, grabbing my hand. We walked into the wooded area at the bottom of the lawn, where he told me to lie down on a mound of moss. We kissed and took off our clothes. Thats when he got on top of me and did something I hadnt been expecting. In my inexperience, I had no clue that what he was doing wasnt just a normal part of sex.

Daniel shifted his body up from his horizontal position so that he was sitting on my chest, his legs straddling me. Quickly, I realised I couldnt breathe.

I didnt say anything, I just froze.

There were multiple reasons I said nothing. Perhaps this is normal and Im being weird, I thought to myself. Youre reacting this way because you have zero experience with blowjobs and youre probably just doing it wrong, was another thing I convinced myself. Itll be over soon.

I was silent, rigid, focused on trying to breathe. I couldnt expand my lungs fully because of his weight bearing down on me. All I could manage were tiny, shallow breaths. Panic seized my whole body. Itll be over soon, I told myself.

Mercifully, it did end.

I breathed in air like someone whod been underwater for too long.

He finished himself off and ejaculated on my chest without saying another word to me. We parted ways. When I got back to my room, I grabbed my toiletries and got in the shower. Inside its safe harbour, I turned the heat right up until my skin turned a shade of pink my grandmother would have called puce. I scrubbed my scalded skin with soap until it was painful to the touch.

It was over.

What stuck with me was the visceral fear Id felt when I was lying underneath Daniel. For the first time in my existence, Id had a genuine fear that I might die. That I might be starved of oxygen if I continued not breathing. Id never felt my chest compressed in that way before. I didnt cry or scream or dig my nails into his flesh like I wished I had afterwards. I didnt even say, Hey, can we stop for a sec. I just lay there?