quote:

One time a client who I had been seeing for a few months came into my office fn1 for her
scheduled appointment and, after some brief preliminaries, she announced “I think I was raped.”
It is not easy to know how to respond to a statement like that, although there is frequently some
mystery around such events. Often alcohol is involved, as it is in most sexual assault cases.
Alcohol can cause ambiguity. That’s partly why people drink. Alcohol temporarily lifts the
terrible burden of self-consciousness from people. Drunk people know about the future, but they
don’t care about it. That’s exciting. That’s exhilarating. Drunk people can party like there’s no
tomorrow. But, because there is a tomorrow—most of the time—drunk people also get in
trouble. They black out. They go to dangerous places with careless people. They have fun. But
they also get raped. So, I immediately thought something like that might be involved. How else
to understand “I think”? But that wasn’t the end of the story. She added an extra detail: “Five
times.” The first sentence was awful enough, but the second produced something unfathomable.
Five times? What could that possibly mean?

My client told me that she would go to a bar and have a few drinks. Someone would start to
talk with her. She would end up at his place or her place with him. The evening would proceed,
inevitably, to its sexual climax. The next day she would wake up, uncertain about what
happened—uncertain about her motives, uncertain about his motives, and uncertain about the
world. Miss S, we’ll call her, was vague to the point of non-existence. She was a ghost of a
person. She dressed, however, like a professional. She knew how to present herself, for first
appearances. In consequence, she had finagled her way onto a government advisory board
considering the construction of a major piece of transportation infrastructure (even though she
knew nothing about government, advising or construction). She also hosted a local public access radio show dedicated to small business, even though she had never held a real job, and
knew nothing about being an entrepreneur. She had been receiving welfare payments for the
entirety of her adulthood.

...
When she recounted her trips to the singles bars, and their recurring aftermath, I thought a bunch of things
at once. I thought, “You’re so vague and so non-existent. You’re a denizen of chaos and the
underworld. You are going ten different places at the same time. Anyone can take you by the
hand and guide you down the road of their choosing.”
...

I thought, “Part of you wants to be taken. Part of you wants to be a child. You were abused by
your brothers and ignored by your father and so part of you wants revenge upon men. Part of
you is guilty. Another part is ashamed. Another part is thrilled and excited. Who are you? What
did you do? What happened?” What was the objective truth? There was no way of knowing the
objective truth. And there never would be.
...
I thought, “I could simplify Miss S’s life. I could say that her suspicions of rape were fully
justified, and that her doubt about the events was nothing but additional evidence of her
thorough and long-term victimization. I could insist that her sexual partners had a legal
obligation to ensure that she was not too impaired by alcohol to give consent. I could tell her
that she had indisputably been subject to violent and illicit acts, unless she had consented to
each sexual move explicitly and verbally. I could tell her that she was an innocent victim.” I
could have told her all that. And it would have been true.
...
But I also thought, “I could tell Miss S that she is a walking disaster. I could tell her that she
wanders into a bar like a courtesan in a coma, that she is a danger to herself and others, that she
needs to wake up, and that if she goes to singles bars and drinks too much and is taken home
and has rough violent sex (or even tender caring sex), then what the hell does she expect?”
...
If I had been the adherent of a left-wing, social-justice ideology, I would have told her the
first story. If I had been the adherent of a conservative ideology, I would have told her the
second. And her responses after having been told either the first or the second story would have
proved to my satisfaction and hers that the story I had told her was true—completely, irrefutably
true. And that would have been advice.
...
So, I asked her to tell me what she thought, and I listened. She talked a lot.
When we were finished, she still didn’t know if she had been raped, and neither did I. Life is
very complicated.

(editors note: she was definitely raped)