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"I never said that,” he said softly.
I closed my eyes. He would do this sometimes, insist that he hadn't said words I was sure
I'd heard, and it always made me feel like I had gone insane. I knew he'd said it. I'd even
responded with, "You can't mean that," and then he'd repeated it. But I felt so tired. It
had been hard enough to start the conversation. Hard enough to walk around the streets
crying for hours.
Maybe I really did misunderstand him somehow; I've been over those moments in my
head a million times, and I don't know anymore. Maybe I misunderstood. Or maybe he
was falling into a classic pattern of emotional abusers. Maybe he insisted that I was
hallucinating in order to confuse me out of protesting: abusers do these things because
they work.
What I do know for sure is that when he halted the conversation with a flat denial, I
couldn't bring myself to even try to talk about it again. Couldn't bring myself to resume
the conversation. But I also couldn't bring myself to break up with someone I loved so
much. We talked about other things instead.
And, of course, nothing about our sex life changed at all.
When my best friend called me the next day to check in, I said, "Well, he says that he
didn't say what I thought he did.”
Her silence echoed with disbelief.
"Maybe I just... didn't understand what he actually meant," I said, but my words sounded
weak even to my own ears.
"Maybe," she said doubtfully, but she didn't press the issue.
Even after that fight, I continued dating that man for a long time. I look back now and I
can't imagine how I did it.
KK Ok
V. Men's Perspective
The gendered societal pressures that affect men are worth discussing, and worth
analyzing, and I often do just that. There is undeniable pressure on men to "perform"
sexually, for example. I try to have sympathy for men who feel this pressure -- but it is
difficult sometimes, because its major effect on my life has been to silence me. To make
me feel as though I couldn't ask for anything sexually. As though I couldn't express my
needs without hurting my boyfriend's feelings or making him angry.
And even now, when I talk about this stuff, I am as vague as I possibly can be about the
exact timeline. The last thing I want is for people who know me to read this and know
exactly when I started having orgasms. I don't want anyone to know exactly which
partners "couldn't perform." Because I know those men might feel it as a social
punishment, and as much as I hate the dynamics at work, I can't hate the men who were
part of them. They had their own social anxieties and their own blind spots and if I didn't
understand what was wrong, how could they?
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018503