Sooo 6 months after finishing my Art AS-level, I've decided I should probably share a piece of writing I created about the harsh reality of the way women can and have been treated by some men.
I began asking girls all the same question: What is the worst thing a boy has ever done or said to you? I started to receive more and more responses of real experiences girls have dealt with. I was so overwhelmed with the honesty of these girls but also the brutal and traumatising experiences they'd had to come to face with. I knew that I needed to create some sort of message with these responses, something to really let people know the dark secrets most women are too afraid to speak about. So I used every response I got from my question and turned it into a story about a very young girls sexually, physically and mentally abusive relationship. It is as if the story was that each of these girls experiences has become every girls reality. Sadly, everything is true apart from it all being experienced by one girl.
(also a very big thank you to every girl who had the courage to answer this question)
I was 13 when he began speaking to me. I was already used to the regular shouts of things like ‘slut’ or a car honking since I’d hit puberty early. I never knew his real age but I was too naïve to care. At first it was all sweet talk. He’d take me out to gigs, stroke my legs and squeeze my arse. I liked the affection. But I never realised it was just so he could get into my pants. I was too young to understand that’s all he wanted. I thought it was real. At first he’d say things like ‘‘aren’t you going to shave babe, before we...’’ and push me against the wall, pulling me, touching my face. I didn’t really understand what he was doing but I went along with it and did what he said. But what started out to be a little aggressive began to get worse.
He’d make me do stuff I didn’t even know existed. There were times where I was too afraid, he’d try and take my clothes off but when I said no he’d push my legs down on the bed and do it anyway. I would lie there lifeless as he fucked me, and fucked me as if I was as useful to him as a doll. He would threaten to kill me if I didn’t have sex with him and give me abuse saying things like ‘You’re a psycho with an eating disorder’ and call me a slut and whore. He told me to groom myself and advised me to self-orgasm to rid my headache.
There were things he did to me that make me feel sick, he used me as a blow up doll and forcefully analed me. I began to ignore him when I knew this wasn’t right. But he’d always find me and I was too scared to say no again. He would come and stroke me and tell me he was sorry but when I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore he said to me ‘If I stroked you... that’s not sexual, I stroke my dog’. He blamed me for everything. Said he only wanted it as a one-night thing and that he planned to only take me out once and dump me after without the guilt. ‘Don’t flatter yourself’ he would say.
I was going back out with him a few months after I tried to end it. I was 14 now. He’d corner me into a room and try and kiss me and stick his hands down my bra. He’d whisper in my ear ‘women are only good for one thing!’ and make me take my pants off so he could touch me.
Nothing I did was ever good enough for him, or even for myself. When I wore clothes that didn’t show my body he’d tell me to put something shorter and tighter on, yet when I wore skirts above the knee he told me I had no respect for myself.
He would perform sexual acts on me while I was fast asleep and then tell me it was my own fault because I didn’t have sex with him earlier, calling me ‘frigid.’ He would take me out to parties and show me off in front of all the older boys. One once made a remark about my boobs and someone else shouted ‘’what boobs? She’s as flat as fuck, it’s appalling mate.’’ I felt humiliated. Another time he took me to a party in the middle of nowhere drugged my drink then raped me while I was unconscious. He told me I probably got too drunk and that it was my fault, that I shouldn’t cry wolf. He emotionally manipulated me, making it impossible to leave the relationship. It began to get physically abusive too. He began stubbing cigarette butts out on me every now and then and progressively got worse. On one occasion he broke three of my ribs, my collarbone and right arm. All I’d done was to show up for a movie eight minutes late.
He also used my eating disorder as another way to abuse me. He’d scream at me ‘’You’re a fucking self-absorbed, narcissistic, attention-seeking bitch. Go ahead and cut yourself and make yourself sick, you deserve it, you deserve all the pain in the world.’’ That ‘’if anyone ever got to my size they should kill themselves to stop anyone having to see such a disgusting sight’’ I didn’t really understand why he was still wanted me. That wasn’t it though. He told me that it was good for my own sake that I got seriously ill, so then I could lose weight. He controlled my life, telling me that if I didn’t lose the weight I’d recently gained recovery, he’d hurt me ‘’because it was obvious I didn’t care much about our relationship if I made no effort with my appearance.’’
Everything seemed to be happening so fast. I lost sense of time. I never thought I’d be that girl. You hear about it from other people, other stories. You get frustrated because it seems so simple to leave or just go to the police. It isn’t. You feel as if there’s nowhere, no one to turn to. No one seemed to notice what was going on and that scared me. Most days I wished he’d just kill me. I was fuelled with self-hate. The pain would get too much that he’d be doing me a favor to just end it. And I thought that even if I ever got out of it, the memories would always be there. It seemed as if living, surviving wasn’t worth it anymore.
He took away my innocence and the womanly features I once seemed to have. I was forced to grow up in the middle of what should have been a happy childhood. I constantly felt dirty like I needed to clean myself over and over. What he did made me feel inferior to him and men as a whole. I felt like it was somehow my fault - the fact that it made me feel as if I was in the wrong. He made me feel less than human, as if he was the superior gender.
Years later I bumped into him at the pub. I began screaming at him, telling him to leave. The fucking prick looked me up and down and smiled and said, ‘’Look at you, all grown up. I don’t know why you want me to leave, nobody else complained.” And as he was leaving he whispered to me ‘’I never loved you anyway, not even for a second.’’ Those words haunt me to this day.
