Because She’s “Up For It.”

When I was twenty-one years old I spent the night at the apartment of the boy I was madly in love with. He wasn’t my boyfriend and we weren’t dating, but I was certainly plotting—I wanted desperately to be in his bed and a night of drunken debauchery seemed like the best way to get myself there. I admit that I had it for him bad, afflicted with the kind of first love that makes you think of song lyrics and feel sick to your stomach, and just sitting across from him at a table at a dirty dive bar made my heart explode. That particular Saturday night we drank about a thousand tequila shots between us, clumsily and hilariously held each other up while we stumbled back to his apartment, and in realizing that sex was out of the question (neither of us could see straight, let alone fuck straight) I borrowed a pair of pyjamas and went to bed. About an hour later I woke up with him on top of me.

I relay this story not so we can have a debate about whether or not this is rape, because, despite all of my love and desire for this boy at the time, it clearly is, no shades of grey about it. I relay it instead because of the conversation I had with him the following day, fully clothed and reasonably rational, over breakfast. When I asked him why in his mind he felt it was okay to pull off my pyjama bottoms, put a condom on, and fuck me while I was sound asleep, his response was one that has stuck with me for years.

“Because you always seemed like the kind of girl who was up for it.”