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Rape culture is a nasty bit of work. It exceeds all expectations in finding new ways to conjure harm. In truth, my experiences in it shake my foundations and faith in humanity. Sometimes, I don’t recognize how I make it through the day trusting anyone. Although I do hold fast that the inherent nature of humankind is not rooted in evil and corruption, I cannot ignore the fact that we do create harm in pursuing what we want.
Over the last seven months, since the tail end of 2020, I embroiled myself in what should’ve been a proper friendship that ended not only tumultuously, but in a struggle for definition. All of April, I’ve wrestled with if I can call what happened assault if I consented, and sadly remember how many times I’ve consented to sex with someone who knew I had no choice but to say yes because they were older than me and knew I’d value a little bit of attention and validation: as children are known to do. However, it is June now and I’ve fallen so low to the ground in order to build my perspective back up: what happened was sexual exploitation and it should feel worse than it sounds.
Sexual exploitation is an act or acts committed through non-consensual abuse or exploitation of another person’s sexuality for the purpose of sexual gratification, financial gain, personal benefit or advantage, or any other non-legitimate purpose. Ironically, my first introduction to this was my father. He was a man who never paid rent but always had a bed to sleep in because of the women he strung along for months at a time and, inevitably, impregnated. However, my curse is that I’m also attracted to men and many men have learned sexual exploitation, but never felt it was as bad as it seems.
The definition isn’t as innocent as it seems. In fact, it seems so inaccurate and lopsided that I had trouble wrapping my mind around it in context to how bad I felt by April against how awfully it is defined. What is a personal benefit? Isn’t the nature of sex to receive and bestow benefit? And financial gain feels inaccurate: sex workers are not exploiting themselves. But in the end, both of those situations involve informed consent. Not only in intention, but in actions as well.
In 2014, I was introduced to a slam poem/lyrical film by Cecile Emeke called “fake deep”. It has since been taken down and nearly all video evidence has been wiped out from the world. In it, Emeke, through a cast of Black British women, investigates the damage that is done by men when chasing the rush of a dispensable affair. How these men are wonderful sons, brothers, cousins and nephews but have left behind them people in a mess. A friend of mine after the relationship with this boy made a joke that everyone needs therapy after meeting a man who should’ve gone instead. I laughed to cover up the pain of truth that this is where trauma comes from.
You don’t leave people with a mess after you have walked the exchange of needs with them. You conduct yourself not in the way of maximizing your gains, but in a way of minimizing all harm no matter what you lose in the relationship. But my mother used to say men never talk themselves out of ass intentionally, which I always took to mean that men will never end something that they know they can gain from. That’s just bad game and game is just an “innocent” name for sexual exploitation and Rape Culture.
I struggle with calling this boy innocent despite not wanting to call this sexual assault now because I know what a predator is. I call the man a predator because he used veneers of innocence and alliance to present himself to me. He conjured only so much vulnerability as to fashion a drill through my emotional defenses to cultivate proximity and availability all with the goal of frivolous relationship and sex. It’s not often said, but I will say it: sex with the intent of future exploitation and sustained with emotional abuse is sexual assault. It’s just not a crime.
In a world where media like I May Destroy You exists, it becomes harder to decontextualize the image of sexual assault. As a Black Man, I have trouble ruffling years of lessons about upholding other Black men and the complex discussions around Black Men and sexual assault. I wrestle with images of Emmett Till, but I also recognize the images of R. Kelly. But as Bisexual Black Man surviving digital spaces, it becomes difficult not to see the culture of sexual exploitation we survive. We exist in a community that has taught Black men how to cultivate sexuality and charisma for our own gain. Many of us learn how to smile at a white man to conjure the image of demure friendliness before we learn to fight. If Black women and femmes are known for their magic, Black men are known for our joy and how desperate we can make people glow in its warmth.
And knowing all of this: I didn’t have the words for what happened between me and this boy. I just know I started with my guard up and unwilling to blur the lines between social media creatives and the vulnerabilities of my real life and eventually invited a boy over from Philadelphia to New Jersey and had an amazing four hours before it went sour. We talked about social engagement and many things about how Black Digital Media can grow; he asked me about how to get screeners and access to PR and Media Heavy Hitters: things that took me years to cultivate that I can make easier for him. We also had sex. When he left, I was okay not to speak for a few days since we were due to hang out the following week. When that day came: he didn’t text me back. That week turned to two weeks and then a month.
We reconnected when he needed something. It took another month for us to come to terms with the end of our romantic aspects: he blamed me, because he saw me discussing our relationship online while coming to terms with the murder of my younger cousins and his ghosting. We stayed friends after, but not really. There was always a one-sided nature to the friendship and periodically, I felt a thread that was also one-sided. A thread, if pulled, could make me act in certain ways that felt …insufficient to my needs. It’s because fundamentally, he’d found a way into me after sex and after months of speaking that could make me react with my compassion first and not my perfectly fine demand for reciprocity. He could give nothing and it was okay, but I could give more and that was how it should work: for him.
For the first time, I learned to regret sex. More closely, I learned to regret men whose quotes can range from James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates to the Critical Race Theory and Educational Praxis of Abolition. I learned that words and intentions are meaningless in the face of how your actions to people conduct themselves. Because this boy was a very “good guy”, but what he did was sexual exploitation.
I think my struggles with what I think I’m allowed to call sexual assault might stem from my experiences in undergrad. In my own rhetoric as a Title IX enforcer on my campus, I’ve come across many situations where a sexual assault definitely took place, but one or both of the parties did not have vocabulary to frame it as assault. Nothing came of those events, but the persons involved were left strained by the experience, unable to put their fingers into a foggy situation that made them upset to think about but had no contextualization for it without someone verbalizing it for them.
And what a feat that is: to tell someone that they were assaulted, but have no answers for them when it comes to justice. For some victims of sexual exploitation, we can call for “Restorative Justice” but when it gets public, we deem the scenario as messy. We don’t contextualize why it’s important to stand up tall and loud and demand someone who sits in our spaces, as a Black man, and calls themselves an Abolitionist, a Leftist or a Community Organize and for them to say: “I violated my ethics and my principles I have made a platform out of. I’m sorry, I need to re-dedicate myself to these things”.
In some cases, I think of Michaela Coel’s Arabella being exposed to her sexual assault as a bystander and then realizing this seemingly innocuous act of “ghosting” is in itself exploitive and assault and having to take ownership in a way she never had to. I wonder if it would have been better for her to not know. I know that it’s not my place to say what someone should and shouldn’t know: that if it happened, it’s theirs to decide. Some problems can only be burdens in hindsight.
In hindsight, I cannot say what I did wrong even though I wanted to blame myself somehow: a feeling that I often found myself measuring against my two definitive sexual assaults I’ve experienced in my life. But in those moments is where Community can help you find your way. I thought I was needy for asking to see someone once every three weeks, but my best friend reminded me of how little time I offer to people as a writer and a person.
The fact is once every three weeks was generous. I thought I was obsessive for wanting the consistency that got this boy through my personal defenses, but my friends reminded me that consistency is the minimum: if I didn’t have that, then it was the consistency that was an illusion. I blamed myself for his distance because I just wasn’t appreciating his boundaries, but then a friend reminded me that he ghosted me for a month and only returned to keep the professional relationship.
And then, the boy and I discussed those boundaries. I compared him to Nathan on Insecure, because it was the best reference I could conjure and he didn’t deny it. Somehow, that made the image a bit more insidious in the back of my mind. I changed the comparison to Lawrence with that girl from the Bank, also on Insecure. He didn’t deny it, which made things a bit more awful. Then, I realized he was neither of those things because Insecure isn’t real life.
Real life doesn’t make an excuse for people being a “good guy” at the end of the day. Good guy is an image of a patriarchal society that considers every man as inherently redeemable. It says some men deserve the benefit of the doubt because what they did to you wasn’t the worst thing they could’ve done to you. And it blames you for not expressing more tentative measures to understand whether you should open up to them. They make your trust and vulnerability as a “you problem,” forgetting that our world is dominated by a culture of smoothing your rough edges to give the performance of a lifetime.
That’s my problem with giving a pass to good guys. Being good doesn’t get you a cookie. It lets you live knowing you left your relationships with another human being as productive and positive as possible.
In the grand scheme of things, I think about movies like Revenge of the Nerds (1984), where the penultimate good guy grows up to become a tyrant. A group of nerds, tired of harassment, take action against the mainstream masculinity that mocks them. It’s a movie that mistakes itself as a comedy, but is actually the most perfect example of where good intentions in a “good guy” becomes the monstrous habits of a bad man by the selfishness of his acts. How else can a sexual assault by deception be played for laughs?
Me and this boy talked once about a lot of things and I found quickly the image of himself he gave me to be lacking: and not just in the way I thought. The picture he presented to me, as an excuse, is of someone traumatized and dealing with his own demons. He presented, as many men do, a scenario where the him he has performed is not to be trusted and that if given a chance, he is different. Very much: “It’s not you, it’s me. I just have to be given a chance to do better and I will.”
At first, I measured my expectations of him with an assessment of the Four Trauma Responses. The version of the truth I perceived is that the “him” he performed was the truth of who he is. There’s no good guy deep down: he is who he gives you and no one can change that except him. The anxiety he felt when communicating seemingly stemmed more from a fear of being called out for his inadequacies than actually working to correct them. The only excuse that these good guy traits could offer is the excuse that while he might damage me now, tomorrow he can erase it by being a good guy to his community by talking about good things. And that reminds me of so many abusers: the ones who perform goodness in the light of day to wash down people who cannot see anything other than harm.
He constantly apologized for distance while also blaming you for even desiring availability in the relationship: as if needing to communicate was a sign of your own flaws. In so many kind ways, he gaslit. In some many worse ways, he conjured the vocabulary of progressivism and leftism and mental health to manipulate. And all with a nice smile tucked behind glasses.
It’s no wonder I liked him so much: he reminded me of my father.
You cannot be a good guy just because you intend to be better. Your actions have to match up, too. You cannot blame boundaries because if your boundaries don’t include treating people with the kindness they treat you, that’s a problem. You cannot blame casual dating culture, because casual dating still requires you to treat your lovers with reciprocity, fairness and to close the door if you cannot do that.
You have to be competent with your emotions, because incompetency with other people’s only serves you. Especially if you laid nothing down to begin with.
By June, he’d been done feeling sorry and had moved back to the timeline to hunt for his next victim. I paid close attention. In the end, I closed the door when I left with a message left on “delivered”. I left feeling exploited, he left not learning his lesson because the world hasn’t caught on to what exactly went wrong. In real life, no one holds people accountable. No one bursts the bubble of ego and self-image. You just carry the stains and the mystery of the unresolved from yet another good guy.