On Wednesday, August 1, 1990, just after noon, I caught a train at Amsterdam Central Station that was due to arrive in Paris, at the Gare du Nord, around 5:30 p.m. I was 22. Stream, my ex-boyfriend at the time, met me at the station as planned, and we took the Metro to an apartment in a high-rise in the 13th arrondissement that was being rented by Stream’s mentor at Bard College, a poet and translator. The poet wasn’t home when we arrived, but there was another houseguest who was. We all chatted a bit, and the other guest seemed pleasant enough. Stream was on his way out, and the other guest, who was preparing himself dinner, invited me to join him, an offer that I happily accepted.
Our conversation during dinner was unremarkable, but afterward he stood up to put a pot of coffee on the stove and then turned to me and abruptly asked about Stream: Was he my boyfriend? Had I come to Paris to sleep with him? I deflected the questions with a growing sense of unease, but then he asked me directly if I would sleep with him. I became scared. I didn’t bother waiting for my coffee. I said “no,” muttered a thank you for the dinner, and quickly left the kitchen. I hurried to the bathroom to think, worried about how I was going to leave the apartment without appearing rude, but then I realized that it didn’t matter how it looked—I had to get out of there. Not 10 seconds later, I left the bathroom, but I was too late. What happened next took one hour and would be the single most transformative event of my life.
In the first few months following my rape, I experienced a near-constant stream of flashbacks. Nights were particularly bad—once the lights were off, there were no distractions. Whatever challenges I was facing in my personal life, however, my academic life was going well enough. I was in the second year of an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and school was turning out to be the one place where I was able to find some diversion from the rape and its aftermath.
I had been drawn to philosophy because I was fascinated by questions about the nature of knowledge and reality, questions about what exists and about what we can know about what exists. Philosophy is the study of those kinds of fundamental problems, but it does not demand self-awareness, and so I found myself in a discipline that suited me perfectly. Although my commitment was at times perfunctory, I had been seduced by philosophy’s analytic method, and I was relieved to be able to retreat into the safety of a world of logic, reason, and abstract ideas. I could pretend there was nothing wrong with me.
But I was unable to keep up this pretense outside of school. I was struggling in most aspects of my personal life. As the weeks and months wore on, it became clear that there would be no “bouncing back” for me, and I became ashamed about my inability to recover quickly.
Shame is a corrosive and insidious emotion, and the shame that engulfed me after my rape was exacerbated by one particularly bad decision that I made the night I returned home from Paris. My summer in Europe had been cut short by two weeks, and I would have to tell people why, but I was in no position to go public. Just thinking about telling the story to others made me feel unbearably exposed. I talked it over with my parents, and together we fabricated a lie: I had been robbed and pushed around a bit at knifepoint. Following the “mugging,” left with minor bruises and no money, I had decided to come home early.
At some point during our discussion, I wondered aloud whether in some way I had been responsible for what had happened to me. My parents quickly dismissed that possibility, and, with only a bit of a false note, I concurred. On some level I knew that they were right, and so I ignored the suspicion I had to the contrary.
I also remember launching into a monologue about the vulnerability of women in male-dominated societies. I was fresh out of my first women’s-studies course, and while I lacked any understanding of the neurobiological and psychological damage of rape on a survivor, I had some sense of the politics of sexual violence; in an instant I intellectualized what had happened to me. Less than 48 hours after I was raped, I was engaging in a theoretical discussion with my parents about the structural causes of rape in a patriarchal society.
I even remember hearing myself (again with only a bit of a false note) telling them that rape wasn’t about sex, but about power, which might be an accurate way to characterize certain unconscious motivations of a rapist, but is a thoroughly inaccurate characterization of what rape is for a rape survivor, whose relationship with sex and her own body may be changed forever.
Whether to go public with her story is one of the toughest decisions a rape survivor faces, as she confronts her crushing vulnerability and the inescapable feeling that she should have been able to prevent the attack. What’s more, it is simply not socially acceptable for women to speak out about their experience with sexual violence. This taboo is more deeply ingrained in south-central and eastern Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where the consequences for women who publicly identify as rape survivors can be disastrous, even fatal. But even in the West, outside of therapists’ offices and professional contexts, talking about one’s personal experience with sexual violence is off-limits.
Still, as I learned, coming out as a rape survivor can go a long way toward erasing the humiliation that comes with having your body used sexually, violently, against your will. It is a way of asserting that you have nothing to be ashamed of. But there are also decisive political reasons for being outspoken. Keeping our rape stories secret perpetuates the idea that rape happens somewhere else, to someone else.
Karyn L. Freedman is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, in Ontario. This essay is adapted from One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery, just out from the University of Chicago Press.