Vee
My boyfriend like to tell me that I’m quite funny for a girl. When I challenge him and call out he says that he’s just being honest and that’snot sexism
boyfriend
when nobody helps
my boyfriend loved me, or i thought he did. we were together for a year and a half. my first relationship. he raped me more times than i can count. i told myself it wasn’t rape, that it was an accident, that he loved me – so it was fine. i sat on the feeling for months. things didn’t feel quite right anymore. he made a group of friends, and told them private sexual information about me without my permission, then asked to send explicit photos of me to the group. i told him no but the more i said no, the more upset he got. he kept trying to pressure me into a foursome with two of his friends – i didn’t know what to do or say, i tried to refuse but he’d cry and argue if i did. i didn’t know what to do. he invited me out for a meal with friends, i thought it would be a normal night – once we’d finished eating, some of his friends left, leaving him and myself alongside the two friends that he wanted me to ‘fuck.’ i was freezing cold, walking around in a jumper at 9pm in september. we walked around the town for a bit, my boyfriend kept grabbing me to the point where i felt claustrophobic, trying to be sexual but actually just frightening me. i agreed to go back to one of their houses just to hang out, i assumed we’d be talking or using our phones. when we got there, my boyfriend blocked off the area with chairs and cornered me on a sofa. he assaulted me, grabbing me and putting his hands under my clothes, not pulling his arm out from my underwear even when i was tugging on it. his friends watched, they did nothing to help me. he dragged me off to his friend’s bedroom and got me down on the bed. i was on my phone, repeatedly turning away and trying to make it clear that i didn’t want to do anything sexual. he tried to take off my jeans. it felt like a year until his friends came back in. they were trying to have sex on the bed next to us. i felt shaken and physically sick. we walked home, he grabbed my arm so hard that fingerprint shaped bruises appeared the following day, and kept asking me ‘why wouldn’t you let me touch you?’ i felt sick to my stomach from that night. the feeling of nausea, losing my appetite and vomiting didn’t stop until over a month after the attack. my boyfriend went out the following day to fuck another girl behind my back – the same girl who sat next to me and watched him assault me, doing nothing. i reached out to her and asked for help, not knowing what went on with her and him – she told me to fuck off. she wasn’t interested in what i had to say. my boyfriend broke up with me the following day so he could date her. and that was it. i have lost all my friends, respect, i can no longer leave the house and had to quit my job. i have been diagnosed with ptsd and can’t function normally. i’ve attempted suicide four times since the attack. i reported the assault to the police, but because of legal issues, they won’t allow me to access therapy. i see a therapist once every fortnight but am not allowed to discuss the assault. i want nothing more than to die. if you see something suspicious, please step in. i wish more than anything that someone would have helped me.
S
My dad has a rule that my boyfriend isn’t allowed to go upstairs when he comes over. This is mainly due to the fact that both he and my mother find it disrespectful. This isn’t something I disagree with and I completely respect this decision as I know that it is their house and I should comply with the expectations that they set. However the one thing that continues to upset me beyond belief is the fact that my brother and his girlfriend are allowed upstairs freely. His girlfriend is allowed to spend time cuddling with him in his bed, they take naps together, she changes in his room, and she’s even allowed to sleep over in his bed. I’ve brought this up to my parents and told them how they never punish my brother for breaking the rules however I was told by my father that life is unfair and because I’m a girl that I can’t go upstairs with my boyfriend. This makes me feel like I’m valued less within my own home. My own mother agrees with me in the belief that no one, including my brother and his girlfriend should be allowed upstairs together however my dad has stated in response that he is the king of this house and life is unfair. I’ve tried telling him calmly, we’ve even broken out into huge arguments about this however nothing changes. It saddens me as I feel like my own care for my father is changing however I just don’t feel that he respects me as a person because of this. It feels like I am less valued than my brother and that I can’t be free to the same standards and respect that my brother gets within my family. I guess at this point all I have to look forward to is when I finish school and can move out, but at this point it seems like that will take ages.
Aslı
I was in a relationship with a man from US and in the beginning he was so different from the men i knew since I was from a highly conservative country. I was even shocked when he was okay with me studying abroad for 6 months and didn’t break up with me for it. Even this shows how undeveloped the society was and how much i was used to it. Then one day we had a conversation about homosexualism and he kept defending his homophobia based on me being unexperienced and how i don’t know anything. I don’t even know if that was coming from his feelings about me being from this 3rd world country or me being this little girl that can not possibly be right but appearently it was not about the topic anymore. And the same night there was a protest about not cutting the trees in my home city for a gold mine and i was supporting it to the end and writing letters to unesco all day. He just saw a post about it and said “It’s not gonna work anyways it didn’t work for Gezi Park protest they still cut down that one tree.” I explained him that eventhough people died in Gezi Park and it is seen negatively it actually worked and there is no shopping mall in the place of the park that he walks through everyday and maybe this protest can work too. He just said “No it didn’t they still cut down that tree you don’t know shit.” After that I just asked him for some empathy at least since it is my home city. “And that is why women should not be in decision making positions because you are simply thinking with your emotions.” was the answer i got. It was all like the good old sexism I’ve been reading and listening about and I never thought that it could be me in a position like that with him. It does not have to be a physical act or extreme words, sexism can be in these little arguments that can be ignored and moved on. But it is there. People said “At least he is loyal to you or he’s not a bad person” in his defense and they were right. But it made me question my opinions and the risk of believing that he was right even one time was an insult to my being.
Sara
I was used for sex by an ex boyfriend. It was a complicated codependent & toxic rship. During it my ex partner would coerce me for nude pictures, shame me, insult me, threaten me amongst other things. When I lashed out after his abuse mixed with my own mental & physical health issues, came to a head, he got me arrested. One of the male policemen watched me get dressed to get taken down to the station, & at the station another made indecent jokes about ‘not killing yourself’ whilst in my cell. I also have had another ex partner continuously stalk me on & off, sending me sexually aggressive messages & dick pics.
Katie
I had a boyfriend who asked me to promise him something and then said, never mind. When I pressed him to tell me what he was going to say he said, “I was going to say, promise me you will get a boob job someday. The rest of your looks is so perfect, it is just such a shame…” and then he trailed off.
Demelza
While crossing the road to meet a friend for lunch I continued down a small path towards the tube station. Headphones in, I jump when a man in his twenties who can’t be much older than me taps on my shoulder. Pulling out my headphones I look around to see if I’ve dropped something and he is being lovely and letting me know. No, this man proceeds to tell me I am ‘the most beautiful THING he has ever seen, that he had let me cross the road at the crossing and had HAD TO park his car, jump out and chase me down this path to tell me this.’ Thoroughly creeped out I grimace/smiled and said thank you, making to walk away. “No, no, do you have a boyfriend I want your number” he asked urgently. I replied, “I actually have a fiance, of 8 years, I’ve just come from our shared house, so yes I am with someone, and I don’t think he or I would be okay with giving you my number.” Never ready to give up our knight in rusted armour proclaimed “but he aint your husband yet is he?” He then proceeded to pull my hand/mobile which was unlocked and put his number in my phone. I did nothing, frozen in shock and confusion. He then rang his number from my phone and put himself as a contact and mine in his. He said he would text me later that day.. When horrified and seeking female support I text my friends following him sauntering back to his car. What did my friends say? “Yep, guys are getting smarter, they prank call your phones now to make sure you aren’t giving them a fake one, we just now have to have a block list as long as our arms.” This event took place, midday in the UK in London.
AnAverageGirl
I told my Bestfriend that my ex boyfriend has attempted to rape me and she is friends with my ex boyfriend. So instead of her defending me she says “because I don’t see him in a sexual way it doesn’t really matter to me” and also saying “I don’t know what you exspect me to do.
Stephanie
My boyfriend tonight told me what he thought was a funny story about a guy he works with playing a game in a bar for fun. In this game you get 5 points for touching a girls boob with your elbow, 10 points if you touch her boob with both elbows. Failed to see the funny side of this, to which I was made feel bad for making him feel awkward telling the story…
Elise
I had a friend for many years who always took a fancy to me. He seemed nice and I trusted him and he had been dating my best friend when we were 16 years old. Eventually we ended up at some parties together and he drunkenly used me to cheat on his girlfriend, my best friend 3 times. One of these times involved me being pinned, saying “no” 4 times, and telling them that if he went any further it was molestation. He did not care. He went further. And I was molested by him inserting his fingers in to multiple times, while I was too weak to fight him off of me. I tried to forgive and move on, hoping that if I pretend it never happened, continued being his friend, and never said anything to his girlfriend the incident would go away and I would quit feeling damaged. I tried to speak up, and told 2 of our close friends, but he found out and texted me, infuriated. He later went on to tell me that I was never allowed to talk about it again, and manipulated me by playing victim, and telling me that it hurt him and made him sad when I “brought up something from the past.” Years went by and I thought this boy had changed. At the end of our first year of university we ended up dating. He told me that after college i was to put my dreams aside so that I could follow his. Also during this relationship he would pretend we weren’t together at parties. He instructed his friends to never mention anything about his girlfriend (me) or even that fact that he just wasn’t single. And no, this did not change when I was at those parties with him. He would not dance with me, he would not talk to me, he would not look at me, he wouldn’t introduce me to his friends, he wouldn’t even stand next to me. I later found out he actually enjoyed watching me being flirted with by other men. It gave him some odd and concerning validation by other men that I, as a girlfriend, was attractive and acceptable. While i was being bothered by odd men and extremely saddened by the fact that my boyfriend ignored me in public, i did notice what the goal of this distamce was. He was constantly hitting on other women in front of me at these parties. He would poor drinks for them, take down their numbers, and chat them up all night. When i confronted him about this behavior he quickly made me the villain and said that it was unfair of me to ask him to stop “making friends” and went on to tell me that, even though it made me feel awful, the behavior would continue. At one party another atendee finally noticed this odd behavior and confronted him in front of multiple people about how he should be paying attention to his own girlfriend. My boyfriend at the time proceeded to get very mad at this attendee and told the attendee to stop telling him what to do. Multiple other men approached me that night to explain they had been to multiple parties where they had seen me, and never once got the impression that i had a boyfriend, much less that he was actually at the same party. Eventually I realized I was unhappy and wanted something else, but at the time I was too close to the situation to see how incredibly manipulative he had been. However I did break up with him. Later on in the year i would go on to ask his best friend if he thought that boy had cheated on me, he said he had not cheated on me, but it did seem that he had tried multiple times to do so, only that the attempts failed to be received well by the women he attempted it with. After the breakup we remained friends. However, just to be clear, I told him, about a month after the break up, that I didn’t want to have sex with him. He seemed extremely mad at me for not wanting to sexually pleasure him anymore but also, to my belief, because he had always had an extremely difficult time with women and quickly grasped the unlikelyhood of finding another woman. About 3 or 4 weeks went by and I ended up at a small party at his appartment. He stayed sober, waiting for me to get drunk. Me, being unaware of this tactic, felt I was in a small, safe space, with only close friends and proceeded to, for the first time in my life, get black out drunk. The next morning I woke up, naked, in bed next to that friend, remembering only bits and pieces of the night before. I remember shots, making out with that friend, puking twice, and some fuzzy memory of being naked, on my back, with him on top of me. I asked him what happened and he proceeded to try to initiate sex again. I told him no and moved out from his grasp. He told me we had had sex. This friend kept a security camera in his room that could see parts of his bed so I asked to see the video from the night before as proof. I could only stomach about 5 seconds of the apparently 3 hour rape. I told him that I didn’t like what he had done while I had been in such a state of inebriation. He said, and I quote “I was honestly pretty sober last night…. Yeah, I should have stopped, especially after I realized how bad(ly drunk) you were.” I was shocked. He admitted to being sober, admitted to knowing I was blacked out, admitted to having seen and heard me puke multiple times…. And had continued to sexually assault me for 3 hours. He was my best friend for 4 years and my previous boyfriend. I was beyond hurt. I struggled for a week before I finally broke and ended up telling all of my roommates and my mom about what had happened. I accused him of rape, not because I was going to go to the police, but just because I needed to hear him say it. He went on to deny it, to blame me, and to ignore me as my mental state deteeiorated. All of these things, of course only helped it to deteriorate further. We went to different universities, so I couldn’t even contact faculty to receive a restraining order. Most days I’m fine and I just feel lucky not to remember anything but the 5 seconds of video I saw. But every once in a while I still struggle with this, with being raped, with the fact it was my best friend, with the fact that I can’t put this manipulative sexual predator some place he can’t hurt anybody else. My biggest hope is that one single woman hears this story and somehow gains strength and knowledge from it. The strength and knowledge to leave a manipulative relationship, or to help someone they care about leave one. One of the biggest tellers (and problems) I see is women (and men) making so many excuse for shady/offensive/abusive behavior for their significant other and thinking that is a normal relationship. A partner should not do something to you that you are too ashamed to tell your friends. A happy relationship is not one where you constantly have to forgive and forget things that deeply bother you, or where you are even made to feel ashamed for being bothered. A healthy relationship is not one where you have to say “yes, I know deep down that this is wrong, but he said….” no. You deserve better. The people you care about deserve better. Everyone deserves better than that.