Why do I feel ridiculous for feeling violated?

Hi, it’s me again .

This is the one place (other than my mother and sister anyway) that I know I can go where you’ll completely understand what I’m talking about. You’re not going to tell me I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill or that ‘boys will be boys’ or that I shouldn’t have been drinking. The majority of the crowd here on Feministing is truly awesome.

They other night I knocked back about 14 shots with my friend Shelly* and her boyfriend *. As I was still on my feet and fairly coherent, I think it’s obvious I have a high tolerance for alcohol despite the fact that I have only actually drank a handful of times.

Shelly got utterly wasted that night. Her boyfriend drank as well, but was NOT drunk. Buzzed, maybe, but definitely not drunk or not in his right mind. We ran out for food at some point (just Aidan and I, Shelly was too trashed to walk so we planned to bring some back for her) and once sitting down he tickled my leg under the table. I jerked my leg away, but didn’t pay any mind to it. I figured it was totally innocent, it’s not like tickling my knee is a terrible thing to do (we’ve known each other for two years and have hung out very often over the last 9 months or so).

When we got back it was past 4 AM and just fell into bed with Shelly. He slept on one side of her, I slept on the other. We do this often when we all crash together; it has never been a problem.

I woke up in the darkness to someone touching me. They were stroking my back slowly through my night shirt and then pushed up my shirt a bit and caressed my skin. In my foggy, tired, buzzed mind I thought maybe it was Shelly, just trashed and being silly, but then I realized the hand was too big to be hers. I froze when I realized who was touching me. I pretended to be asleep.

He moved down and started rubbing and squeezing my ass through my clothes and just fondling it in general. This freaked out and shocked me. In hindsight, I wish I had just sat up and punched him in the balls. I really do. If something like this ever happens again, I hope I do that. It’s just that at the time I was just so foggy and tired and just at a loss for what to do. I turned over to get his hand off me. He started doing it again and I did the same thing, he stopped. I fell asleep and woke up some time later to an arm or leg on my butt. Again, I wondered if it wasn’t Shelly’s, so I reached down and felt it. It was pretty hairy, so I knew it was his. I yanked hard on his hair and he pulled it away. I waited in bed until about 9:00 AM and I just had to talk to someone. I called my mother and she could tell how distressed I was. She rushed over and picked me up.

It was just such a sickening feeling. I tried to figure out why he might have done what he did. Had he thought I was Shelly in the dark and with the alcohol he had imbibed? Not really feasible, she’s a completely different shape than I am and he hadn’t had that much to drink. Also, he’s a big guy (6’4 and 300 pounds) so alcohol doesn’t effect him as much as it does other people. Not only that, but he’d have had to reach over her to touch me.

I took a day avoiding Shelly’s calls to figure out whether or not I should confront him or inform her of what happened. Eventually, I answered the phone just spilled the beans. She was upset and confused and commented that he wasn’t that intoxicated and must have known what he was doing. We got off the phone so she could speak with him; she called me back a bit later and informed me that he denied everything. I stuck to my story and she then informed me that I was on speaker phone and that he was there. I heard her yell at him, "Why would she make something like that up?" and then she told me she’d call me back.

For six hours I stewed with the knowledge that he was denying what happened. Essentially, he was calling me a vindictive liar by saying my claims weren’t true. I called Shelly at home and the person she lives with told me she was still at Aidan’s. This threw me into a spiral of worry. Why was she still there for so many hours after what I told her? Did she believe him? Had he convinced her? Was I going to lose my best friend? For a split second I even considered that I was crazy and had hallucinated the entire scenario (I didn’t really believe that, but to just lie right with me on the phone when we both knew what happened…How dare he?)

Eventually I got a call telling me he came clean about what happened. Shelly wanted to come over and bring Aidan with her so we could talk things out. I put my foot down and said, "No." flat-out. After what he did and then lied I did not want to see him. I trusted the guy enough to sleep near him and he broke that trust so, so much.

Through a series of phone calls over the next day or two Shelly told me that:

-He is so sorry and feels sick with himself and cried because of what he did.
-It wasn’t a sexual thing, he doesn’t ‘want [me] in that way’, he was just curious.
-She can’t break up with him for cheating because she cheated in the past too (she used this situation as an opportunity to come clean to him about that, by the way)
-He’s terrified I’ll call the cops on him and he’ll get in all kinds of trouble because he provided the booze (we’re 18) and touched me.
-She loves him and wouldn’t want me to leave my boyfriend of ‘a whole year’ if our roles were reversed and my boyfriend had done it to her.
-I’m wrong about how many times he touched me. I said it was three separate times originally. He touched me, I turned over to brush his hand off, and then he went for my ass again and I brushed him off again. I count that as twice. Then I woke up with one of his limbs reaching over her and rest on my butt. Third time. But no, according to her the first two times count as once and the third time didn’t exist/was accidental.

I told her to stop calling it cheating because it WASN’T just cheating, it was something else entirely. He fucking thought I was asleep and drunk and used the situation to put his hands all over my ass. That’s a sick thing to do to someone and it makes me wonder if he’s done it before the other times I’ve been wasted or asleep around him. I also informed her that I still didn’t want to see him ever again.

She apologized so many times and told me it was wrong and that she loves me and values our friendship, but I still got this sense of excuse making and justifying and white-washing from her. What he did was wrong. It doesn’t matter why he did it or what he was thinking, IT WAS WRONG.

And yet I have this sense of…ridiculousness. Part of me feels righteously enraged, but another part feels like I’m being an uptight asshole about the whole thing and making a mountain of a molehill. I told a couple people about the situation, some said he probably wasn’t thinking clearly and to just not tell her and let it go, some told me to contact the cops, some told me to tell her and never be around him again. I also feel as though when other women experience truly horrible things like rape and assault I’m being a big baby for being so upset about this. I feel like I’m trivializing their trauma by making such a big thing of this.

In my heart, I know he was wrong though. No matter how small or how big what he did was, it still wasn’t right and he needs to have consequences for it. My version of that was telling his girlfriend and breaking off our friendship. I also called up my former Math teacher (Aidan’s current) and let him know what happened, just so someone at his school knows.

If you managed to get through this entire thing, thanks for reading my rambling. I hope you’ll comment and share your thoughts.

*Fake names in case they learn how to Google.