In our culture, sex and power are rarely as simple as 'yes' or 'no'

I thought my world had come to an end. I lay awake all night contemplating suicide. The fact that I didn’t have a single bruise on my body only made me feel worse. After all, don’t rapists spring out from behind bushes on dark nights and beat their victims senseless? Wasn’t I supposed to scream and fight and scratch and do everything in my power to prevent it from happening? I am fairly convinced that trying to fight would only have made things worse, but that’s not much consolation.

Needless to say I never reported it. I did tell the cad of an ex-boyfriend about it and he and some friends apparently tracked the guy down and beat him up. That didn’t make me feel better either. After all, the situation arose because of the way I felt after being dumped. My friends leaving me at the night club like that was also out of character.

Since then, I’ve relived the incident over and over, trying to make sense of it. I didn’t have counselling over it and “the night I was raped” has never been a topic of dinner-party conversation. In fact I’ve spoken about it to hardly anyone. This is certainly the first time I’ve written about it.

I’m confessing now because of all the rhetoric and hysteria surrounding what has become known as the “NRL Crisis”. Phrases like “pack-mentality” and “team bonding” are being uttered in the same breath. The football hierarchy has been accused of actively encouraging rampant misogyny. The main theme of discussion has been the damage to the game’s reputation – as if the phenomenon of debasing women is a sport-centric pastime. Feminists are saying “black” while boofhead male chauvinist footballers are saying “white” and I’ve been seeing red.

As far as I am concerned, none of this is straightforward – it’s so mindnumbingly complicated I can barely wrap my brain around it. Even though I was in an extremely similar position to the kind of situations discussed in the press lately, I’ve also had many years to think about it. The problem for me with a phrase like “pack mentality” is that it seems to suggest that any man would have done the exact same thing under the exact same circumstances and that men are slaves to pre-historic instincts.

I don’t buy that.

Was it misogyny? Were the two guys who took advantage of me acting out of an instinctive hatred toward women and an inherent desire to commit violent acts against them? I don’t buy that either. They saw an opportunity and they set a trap. Who really knows what movitvates that sort of behaviour?

While I’ve eliminated misogyny as a motivation for these forms of sexual abuse, the question looms large: why do men tend to steer habitually toward shared sexual exploits as a bonding exercise?

Elite sport definitely creates a rarefied atmosphere for men, the same way being a rock star might. A friend of mine used to play Rugby Union at club level - his detached and patronising stance toward the female sex was a direct result of the depths to which he’d see some team groupies stoop. (My use of language here is to reflect his attitude.) It’s clear that he felt that women who go after footballers purely for the sake of sex were “scrags” but the men who had sex with these women were just healthy blokes. There always has been a pervading mentality among certain people that if a woman is “up for a bit” then she is probably up for anything. At the base of this concept is a deep disgust that men have for themselves – not women. They are basically saying: “anyone who’d want to root me, must want to root anything”.

Before anyone accuses me of man-bashing, I have more confessions in store. Twenty-four years ago I was a naive young girl who was used time and again. Being raped didn’t put me off sex; it made me continue to define my self-worth in a sexual way. If I had low self-respect before it happened, I had even less afterward. I fell into even more self-destructive behaviour.

Before my 19th birthday I met a man with a compatible dysfunction to mine and we were together for 16 years. Neither of us knew how to express or accept love outside of the bedroom so I came out of that relationship as sexually motivated as ever – albeit with the perspective of a woman in her mid-30s. For the two years I was between husbands, I was no longer the prey, I became the predator – which is another reason why I’m in two (or six) minds about the so-called misogynist agenda of men’s lascivious behavior. I have used men purely for sex. I didn’t abuse them but at times I certainly took advantage of their weaknesses for my own sexual gratification. Ironically, some of the men I encountered weren’t overly thrilled at the prospect of commitment-free casual sex. They didn’t enjoy feeling used. Mind you, some enjoyed immensely.

Did this make me a misanthropist? No – it just made me a little pathetic. I was doing my best to avoid intimacy while feeding my bottomless pit of an ego. I was having sex “like a man” in much the same way as Samantha from Sex and the City. When that show first started I was interested in how it was being received, so I visited on-line SATC message boards. There were posts upon posts of women saying “this show is ridiculous, women simply aren’t like that”. And here’s me thinking the show played out more like a documentary than a sitcom.