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

It was a Saturday night in the summer of 1979-80. I was with friends at our favourite pub. My boyfriend at the time was a 27-year-old barman who worked there. I was barely 18. The plan was that we’d hang at the pub till closing and then hit the nightclub. Eventually my boyfriend told me he’d been harboring a huge crush on a female co-worker and he felt very sure she was beginning to succumb to his charms. I can’t remember the exact words he used but it was along the lines of: “I need to break up with you, but if I can’t get her into bed this time, then I’ll probably take you back.”

I wasn’t in love with this man, we had only been going out (read: sleeping together after he knocked off work) for a few weeks, but the blow to my ego was devastating. Seeing as I was already at a pub with friends, the natural course of action was to throw a pity party and get drunk.

It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out from these two opening paragraphs that I didn’t have a lot of self-respect back in those days, so what happened next won’t come as too much of a shock.

We went to the nightclub; I was fuelled with bourbon and (what I thought was) bravado to have a great night in spite of my humiliation. If blurred memory serves, fairly soon after we arrived, I struck up a conversation with a fellow who was vaguely familiar to me. Naturally, my freshly-jilted status made a great icebreaker. Pretty soon we were on the dance floor and he was all over me like a cheap suit. I can’t remember much about what I was feeling at this point, I just knew I wanted to wipe my humiliation away with the attentions of this guy. He thought I was super-hot and of course, I was back then, as most burgeoningly nubile 18-year-olds are – but I was also clueless. I thought I’d done well to hook-up, not the other way around.

When my friends signalled that they were leaving I wanted to go too, but they waved to me in a “you go girl” kind of way and didn’t wait for me to respond. After the dance I went to get a taxi but the guy talked me into letting him give me lift home. Before we left, he went to grab a mate of his. They kept me waiting for several minutes while they indulged in some animated discussion. It was like my guy was trying to talk his friend into something. The situation struck me as odd, but I didn’t read anything into it.

I don’t remember much about the drive because the alcohol was really catching up with me. Not far from where I lived, there was a secluded spot where couples often went ‘parking’. He turned down that street “just for a little while, then I promise to take you home straight after.”

Although I was very drunk the feeling of alarm broke through. I was definitely no longer feeling any attraction to this guy; I just wanted to go home. He pulled over and started kissing me. He wasn’t taking no for an answer and my instincts were that it would be safer to go along with him than try to do a runner. At that age and in those days I also thought I had no right to say no at that point. I told him I felt uncomfortable with his friend watching so he kicked his friend outside to go for a walk.

In no time we were having sex on the front seat. I was hoping it would be over quickly so he’d take me home, so I pretended to enjoy it. Then suddenly, he withdrew and straddled my chest, forcing me to give him oral sex. I was completely stunned, but he had me by the back of the head and I was too scared to say no.

Then, literally in a matter of seconds his mate had opened the car door, climbed in and started having sex with me. I was pinned, I couldn’t move. There was nothing I could do.

I was too scared to bite. I just cried and prayed it would be over quickly.

Ironically, true to his word, he drove me home afterwards. I kept my face averted from both of them and bawled my eyes out. When I got out of the car he said “I hope we can do this again some time”. I slammed the car door amid their raucous laughter and ran inside.

It might be pertinent to add at this point, that neither of these guys were professional football players.

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.

As predatory as Samantha is, the subtext is always plain to see. She fears intimacy. Her promiscuity is about retaining control and not being vulnerable to rejection. As feisty and horny as she is – she’s still human – and all humans deep down crave acceptance and unconditional love. While we may admire Sam for flashing her boobies at anyone with a hard-on, at the same time we feel a little bit sorry for her – especially those of us who have (finally) outgrown their fear of intimacy. Never, at any stage, are Samantha’s motives for anonymous sex blamed on her hatred of men.

And there it is – the ultimate irony. Sex is supposed to be an act of intimacy, yet I’m prepared to admit that I have had more sex in my life trying to avoid intimacy I than to actively engage in it. In wearing my sexuality on my sleeve, I was also hiding behind it – until recently. I have no end of sympathy for the female victim of the incident involving the Bulldogs, but sexual abuse of women is not a new thing and nor is not exclusive to sportsmen. It’s simply something that has been tolerated for far too long while we wait for certain sections of the human race to evolve. There are victims on both sides. Do all the bozos who have played stupid sex games on tour feel good about themselves afterwards? I’d certainly like some of them to come forward and tell us (like that would happen).

The sexually-oriented culture among elite sportsmen is a symptom of our society’s dependence on sexual attractiveness as a means of acquiring self-esteem, and an over-abundance of hero-worship. For every famous sportsman who uses women gratuitously, there are women lining up to have sex with him.

While a few footballers also happen to be male chauvinist pigs, the problem is not exclusive to sport. It’s endemic in society as a whole. I was raped – no question about it – but there was also something terribly tragic in the fact that I was heedlessly throwing myself at that guy in the first place.

Apparently some educational strategy is going to be put in place to “clean up the game of Rugby League” but why stop there? It’s a problem that needs attention on both sides of the equation. Start the program in high schools so we can stop the rot before it starts.