Doctor’s Note: Today’s letter deals with explicit descriptions of rape and sexual assault. Please read at your own discretion.
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DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I was raped, and that’s pretty much the only real sexual experience I’ve ever had in my entire life. I’ve had a first kiss, I’ve been on dates where things have gone past kissing, but nothing a real adult would regard as anything worth calling a “sex life”. Push comes to shove, the only person who’s ever wanted to suck my dick is someone I didn’t want sucking my dick, and the only things that have ever been in my ass were explicitly refused and put in there anyway.
I’m not going to downplay the existential horror of it all: the feeling that, on top of being lonely, the only person who has ever truly wanted me was a sexual predator. I go years of my life finally thinking that at long last I’m going to have a positive sexual experience and have my fantasies fulfilled, only to be traumatized by one of the worst things to ever possibly happen to someone.
The aftermath has many facets as you can imagine: legal, familial, professional, but the one I seek help from you for is how to get a sex life after being raped. How exactly do you “reclaim your sexuality” when nobody wants you? It’s not just that I feel unwanted, it’s that every time I try to find someone it only seems to confirm that I am unwanted.
It’s not that I haven’t tried to solve the problem or worked on myself. I am a well-dressed, professional man; certainly someone who’s ambitious and successful in life, and at least not ugly. I’ve lost weight, maintain a respectable style of facial hair, and carry myself professionally.
I’ve tried attending clubs and sports programs in my area, but the demographics are utterly abysmal. It is invariably people well outside my age range (i.e. like actual senior citizens, not “ew women expire at 30” nonsense) and people already coupled, to say nothing of the fact that Covid in general completely destroyed many clubs and programs and decimated the ranks of those that remained. My area in general just doesn’t have that many people my age: I get outside and “touch grass” quite frequently, only to be met by a parade of older people and families with little kids.
Further complicating things is that, as a kinky person who has tried and failed to date vanilla, I realize that my options are very slim, especially as a “submissive man”. Kink events in my area exist and I’ve attended them, but the “alternative lifestyle” of the BDSM community basically just seems to be the same old gender roles in leather clothes and latex boots. Most men are doms, most women are subs, and the smattering of female switches and dommes are variously already-partnered, looking for a transactional arrangement, are straight-up scammers or bot accounts, not heterosexual, or otherwise incompatible.
In the “real world” I have almost no social life outside of my coworkers, who are undatable for obvious reasons of professional ethics and workplace drama. Work itself is a hinderance to my social life outside of my job: the hours are long and extremely unpredictable, and the amount of work I have to do on a given day can vary by a whole order of magnitude.
I maintain online dating profiles to predictably get zero compatible matches or comments, or just bots and scammers.
I’ve went to a speed dating event, only to get unanimously rejected.
Turning to sex workers is completely out of the question. I have my own personal values and ethical beliefs that make such a proposition dubious even if we were in an environment of complete legality. As a rape victim you can certainly say I value consent, and sex work can be very exploitative. Even still, I want someone to spend their time with me. I don’t want to spend money on someone. I want to be attractive and enjoyable to the point where someone willingly stays with me for free. I want to be someone’s partner, not their “client”. And of course, we certainly don’t live in an environment of complete legality. As troubled as I am right now, life is too good for me to risk it all on the legal technicalities of escort services or pro dommes.
I just don’t know what to do, and it’s so frustrating. It seems like other people get to have good and bad experiences in their sex lives, ups and downs, toxic partners mixed in with wonderful ones. They get to have the good touch as well as the bad touch. For me, I am well on my way to 30 and my sex life is essentially just masturbating and getting raped. It’s like someone saying their business career was fantasizing about starting a business before having their investment capital stolen. It’s not exactly a career, is it?
I really wish I had someone other than my rapist for a sex partner, but I just don’t know how that can happen. Reclaiming your sexuality is supposed to be an important part of getting your power back, but I feel so disempowered because, let’s just be honest, sex is something you need other people to do. You can’t feel sexually wanted if nobody wants to have sex with you.
I read about how “hypersexuality” is a response some rape victims have and can’t help but feel a bit of jealousy: even as an unhealthy coping mechanism, it’s just a bizarre alternate world to me. A large part of why I got raped was because I got desperate to find someone and ended up in a far more dangerous situation than I anticipated, yet rape victims other than me have coped by having too much sex. Here I am starving of sexual desirability, while other people are able to cope with binge-eating. I’m dying of thirst in the desert and read stories about how people get addicted to freshwater swimming and over-hydration.
I don’t want to sound cynical and harsh as an attitude, just as a statement of the problem. We don’t need to invoke incel rhetoric about women being the “gatekeepers of sex” here to admit basic facts and observations. Sex is a social activity that, once you are willing to do, other people become the limiting factor. You do not determine whether you have a sex life. Other people do. You need someone to do it with you. You need consent and cooperation with someone else. It is, by definition, not a solo activity. There’s something to be said about “exploring what you like”, but you can’t do that when what you’d like involves someone else, and “solo sex” is honestly a euphemism in my opinion.
Masturbating is “solo sex” the way that a pitching machine is “solo baseball”, or kicking field goals all afternoon is “solo American football”. You are at best practicing a relevant skill or body mechanic. You are, at best, training. You are not actually playing what is by definition a team sport.
Even that aside, I’m just not sure there’s that much to explore left on my own. I have masturbated thousands of times in my life and haven’t had a truly original fantasy or bodily sensation in ages. I’ve tried anal masturbation, but the legendary “male g-spot” can just never be found, and having a finger up my butt just doesn’t seem to be it for me. At a certain point I feel like I’ve reached the hard limit of what I can do or figure out by myself, and at the end of the day, you can only swing your bat at the machine so many times before it just begins to weight on you that you might never actually get to play baseball for real. That loneliness is before we take into account the physical and mental sexual difficulties that have come post-rape.
I’ve been through a lot, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Raped and Redshirted
DEAR RAPED AND REDSHIRTED: I am so, so sorry this happened to you. That’s a horrible thing to have gone through and I know it’s left its marks on you. I hope you have friends and family – by blood or by choice – who’ve been supporting you, caring for you and helping you heal.
But I want to tell you from the start: I’m not going to answer most of your letter. It feels a little crass to say it under the circumstances – like I’m being glib in the face of what was done to you – but I honestly feel that you’re asking the wrong question here. I think this is very much a case of the question you’re asking is not the question you need answered, and I think I would be doing you a massive disservice if I didn’t address the issue that is lingering over this like a ghost.
I want to push back against something you’ve said more than a few times in this letter – something that I think is central to the question that you’re asking and to the struggles you’re experiencing. You keep talking about your rape as though it were sex what happened to you was not a sexual experience. It was violence. It was violence using sexual acts as the instrument of inflicting violence upon you, but it was an act of violence.
Rape is not a crime of sex. Rape isn’t about sexual desire or arousal. People don’t rape because they’re turned on and can’t control themselves, they don’t rape because the other person is just so alluring and they don’t rape because that’s how they express themselves sexually. People commit rape as a method of forcing control onto others. The act of a rapist isn’t to have sex, the act of a rapist is to dominate another person, to force the other person to accede to the rapist’s will. Sex is the method and one that’s used because it’s a form of domination. It’s the act of overriding someone else’s autonomy – bodily and otherwise – because the rapist chose to do so.
I think seeing your rape through the lens of sex is part of what’s causing you so many problems and why you’re having a hard time. Your rapist didn’t choose you out of romantic or sexual desire. It absolutely was not and is not the case that you are so uniquely undesirable or unattractive that the only person who could ever want you was a rapist. Whether you realize it or not, this mindset is subtly implying that you’re somehow at fault for being raped. The way you seem to be framing things, whether consciously or subconsciously, is that there’s something inherently wrong about you, something that makes you repellant and the only person who could possibly find you attractive or desirable was a rapist.
This is 100% bulls--t. What happened was not your fault. They were a predator. They preyed upon you. This what rapists do: they look for people to prey upon, to isolate, to exploit and to assault. You are not to blame for what was done to you – and I want to make it perfectly clear that this was a thing that was done to you. You were raped. This wasn’t desire. This was a violent crime.
I know that the aftermath of sexual assault and rape can be a real mindf--k. Male victims often have a very hard time in the aftermath because so many toxic ideas about “what it means to be a man” will throw the victims into the woodchipper. It “means” that you’re weak and deserved to be violated, it “means” that you “let” someone else have power over you or it “means” that you “secretly kinda wanted it”. And the goddamn mindf--k of how it hits afterwards is the sort of thing that leads people to believe that they were somehow complicit in their own assault – either by “allowing” themselves to be a victim or simply not being “strong” enough (that is: man enough) to stop it.
The violence of the rape often continues after the act because the victim of the assault may turn things inward. It becomes a cycle of self-blame, self-recrimination, the attempts to make sense of a senseless act that lands at “I must have been at fault somehow”.
You were not. This was not your fault. Tattoo that backwards onto your forehead so that you can see it first thing in the morning. Shave your head if you need the room. This was not your fault. This was not because you are so unlovable and undesirable that only a monster would want you. THIS WAS NOT YOUR FAULT.
You talk about the fallout after the assault, but what you don’t mention is whether you actually sought out counseling afterwards, what kind of counseling you found and whether it helped at all. Though if I’m being perfectly honest, I think that whatever you’ve done so far hasn’t helped. Not if you’re still putting so much of this on yourself in this way.
It sounds to me, a loudmouth with an advice column – and to be clear, Dr. NerdLove is not any sort of actual doctor – that you’re still looking to make sense of things. Whether it’s trying to find evidence that you’re past it, something that will convince you that you’re not the person who was raped any more, something that proves you didn’t “deserve” it or that there was some greater meaning or silver lining to this, and you’ve focused on sex and relationships as the ‘proof’.
This feels to me like you’re trying to find a sense of control again, especially after your bodily autonomy was violated the way that it was. That’s a very common feeling after a violent crime like this. And I think to a certain extent, you’re making things worse for yourself by treating your rape as though it was about sex – especially since it sounds like you’re still blaming yourself for it. I mean this line right here is very telling, to me:
“A large part of why I got raped was because I got desperate to find someone and ended up in a far more dangerous situation than I anticipated”
That right there? That’s self-blame and that’s bulls--t. People get desperate to find someone all the time and often make poor choices because of it. Those poor choices don’t inevitably lead to assault, nor do those choices mean that they’re not victims of the people who hurt them. It certainly doesn’t mean they deserve to be raped, abused or harmed in other ways. It means that someone found them in a vulnerable state and took advantage of it. Neither the desire nor desperation are the problem here, nor are they the cause. The only people who are ultimately responsible are people who look for the vulnerable, the lost and the lonely. This is what happened to you: someone took advantage of your vulnerability. That doesn’t make you responsible for what happened to you. Being vulnerable isn’t something that you’re supposed to avoid. Being vulnerable doesn’t mean that you’re at fault because someone else took advantage of your vulnerability. You’re not expected – nor should you be – to be on your guard at all times, to treat everyone you encounter as a potential threat until proven otherwise. That’s not safety and security, that’s not being smart or being a “real man”, that’s just hypervigilance – you know, one of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s not something you’re supposed to f--king strive for, that’s a state that people try to recover from.
This was not your fault. You are not to blame. I’m going to keep saying this until it makes your eyes bleed and you feel the words – actual words manifesting in physical space – come out your ears because you have been so filled by this knowledge. YOU ARE NOT TO BLAME. You wound up in a place with someone who deceived you, tricked you and ultimately violated your trust and your body. Someone used your vulnerability against you as a way to hurt you. That sin is entirely and exclusively theirs.
And look, I am saying this with all the empathy and compassion I can muster and I hope you feel that when I say that I think the way you’re trying to address that is incredibly unhealthy for you. I think, at best, focusing on trying to get laid is going to continue being an exercise in frustration and self-loathing until you address this.
At worst, I think it’s going to become a form of self-harm.
Part of that “hypersexuality” you’re talking about? You’re right, that’s a profoundly unhealthy coping mechanism… but the reason for it isn’t to “get over the rape” or “reclaim their sexuality”, it’s often about one of two things: self-harm and punishment, or regaining a feeling of autonomy and agency again. The latter is often very much about proving something to themselves – that they’re not letting the rapist “win”, that their rapist doesn’t have “control” over them or gets to influence what they do, that they’re in charge of who they f--k or that what happened to them will be less bad if they just drown it in other people’s bodies until it doesn’t feel the way it does.
That’s not “you’re dying of thirst and they’re dying of water-poisoning from being having too much water”, that’s someone else trying to deal with the pain in the aftermath of a horrible event. It’s also important to note that hypersexuality doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly super sexually desirable. It means they’re going out and having a lot of sex, with a lot of people, and not necessarily being discerning about who or why. I rather suspect that if you were to ask them, many would tell you that the sex they’re having isn’t actually good or pleasurable because the point isn’t good sex, it’s taking power back. Even if that’s not what’s consciously going through their head in the moment.
Do I think reclaiming your sexuality is important? Absolutely, and I think it can be incredibly healing and life-affirming. It is a reminder that you’re stronger and more resilient than many believe – sometimes even than you, yourself believe. But I honestly don’t think that you’re doing is reclaiming your sexuality. I think you’re trying to prove something – to yourself, to people who didn’t and don’t believe you, to the universe. I think you’re hoping that if you can just prove that you’re desirable and can be “more” than someone who was raped then even if it doesn’t make the rape un-happen, it would at least be the act that finally gets you over it. And I don’t think that it’s ever going to work. Certainly not in a healthy way or a way that would help heal you.
I talk about “being in good working order” in order to date pretty damn often I know, and I have to be honest: I don’t think you’re there at all. I think you’re in a mindset that is going to make it incredibly difficult to not just find sex – especially sex worth having, but to actually accept desire or affection from someone or for that sex to have any sort of impact or meaning. I think if you were to go find someone and have sex, afterwards you’re going to feel empty and unsettled, a sense that things aren’t “right” in some nebulous way that you can’t quite put your finger on. I think that will just lead to more unhealthy attempts at coping and healing that will only make things worse before they get better.
And yes, I think you need to talk to a professional, not to a loudmouth asshole like me. If you don’t have a therapist who is experienced in dealing with sexual trauma then I think you really need to find one. At the very least, I think the best thing you can do is to call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or chat with one of their counselors via their website. You might also want to visit 1in6, which is specifically for men who’ve experienced rape and sexual assault. They offer free, confidential online support for men just like you, who’ve been raped and assaulted, lead online support groups and can help you find the resources that are available to you to help encourage your healing.
I know that this isn’t the answer you want. I know how frustrating, even emasculating all this is, and I absolutely empathize with you. But I don’t think that trying to get laid is going to help, only hurt, and you hurt enough as it is. I think you need to focus on your healing, more than anything else.
You’re carrying a lot of pain right now and it sounds to me like no small amount of self-blame. It’s time to finally put it down. There’s been enough pain. It’s time to clean the wound and let the healing begin.
Love and sex will be waiting when you’re ready. But for now, I think you need to take care of yourself and these deeper, far more pressing needs.
You’ll be ok. I promise.
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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com