Was it rape or sex gone wrong?

[fionaca]

Removing my post, as its to upsetting to re read. Hope u all understand.

[diana_holbourn]

I would say it was rape, and I'm sure you could have made a good legal case for it being so. He didn't stop when you indicated beforehand that you didn't want sex, and he refused to listen when you said no. The fact he never respected your wishes before when you said you wanted to use protection suggests he was consistently not considerate of your feelings or what you wanted. The fact he used force indicates that he knew he was doing something you didn't want. Rape is to have sex with someone knowing they don't want it. He clearly knew what he was doing was wrong, or he wouldn't have been aggressive and ignored what you were saying and doing. And he wouldn't have had the evil look on his face. You can't hold yourself responsible for what happened when just before it happened, you were only doing something you'd done lots of times before with him but nothing anywhere near that bad had happened before. You couldn't have foreseen what he would do.

You can't blame yourself for letting him climb on top of you. Try to remember how you were feeling at the time: you were probably so surprised and disbelieving that he could do something that nasty that you were too shocked to think properly and couldn't really foresee what he was going to do.

Many people don't kick and scream when they're raped because something tells them it'll be safest not to, because he might just get more violent if they do. Sometimes, they're right. And again, when people are shocked when something nasty suddenly happens, they're not in a fit state of mind to assess their options and do what seems best. The emotional part of the brain takes over and makes a quick decision about what will be the safest thing to do. And it must have taken a while to get over the surprise that he could do such a thing. If you'd gone through a scenario in your mind beforehand where he might do that kind of thing and you'd rehearsed kicking and screaming in your mind, prepared to do that if he tried to rape you, it would have come more easily. But that wouldn't have been a natural thing to have done with a boyfriend. Why would anyone do that when they trust their boyfriend? So it's no wonder you didn't. You were probably so taken aback with the shock of it that you didn't really know what to do for the best. You were probably too focused on what was going on to pay attention to deciding what to do about it.

As for why he'd want to do that to you, it would be difficult to say, but maybe he didn't think like most people. Some people are very vengeful, and if someone says something that makes them angry, they think and think about it and get more and more annoyed and get things so out of proportion that they end up wanting to hurt the person. Or sometimes, they take it out on someone who wasn't even the one who made them angry. Sometimes people can start fantasising about raping someone because they've been looking at pornography and getting pleasure from images of people being raped, because they have a sadistic mind-set. And when the images don't give them the high they want anymore because they're used to them, they have to act out their fantasies to give them the same feelings they got before from looking at pictures. It's like an addiction. Sometimes they've been sexually abused themselves and want to feel like the strong ones who're in control and doing the humiliating in the sex act for a change. There may be other factors, and maybe it was a combination of factors. Psychopaths can be charming when people first get to know them, and they can be deceived into believing they're really nice people. But cracks in their character will start to show, like his selfishness around sex that you describe him having from the beginning. I'm not saying he was necessarily a psychopath, but he might have been, and he might have had a pattern of doing the things you describe with girlfriends, that you couldn't possibly have known about.

It can be especially distressing for people to be raped by someone they thought they were close to and trusted, since they can feel betrayed, and wonder if they can trust themselves to make a good decision about future friends or boyfriends. It might take a while to get over that. But with boyfriends in the future, it could help you reassure yourself if you write down as many ways you can think of as to how they're different from your ex. And you can help protect yourself if you stay away from men with controlling tendencies who won't compromise with you about having their way in things that are important to you. That could be a danger sign that they might do worse things. People can often filter out men like that if they deliberately provoke a small conflict with them when they first meet, when the man's still fairly keen to impress them so he's unlikely to do anything that bad. If you start an argument about something that isn't really that important to you, for instance if he wants you to go out somewhere, you could insist you want to go somewhere else instead, then you'll find out what kind of attitude he has when he doesn't get his way, and how he feels about women disagreeing with him. If you don't like his attitude, you can dump him before it goes any further, before you've got close to him. It's important for people not to have sex with their boyfriend before they do that to them, no matter how insistent they are, because that will make the break-up more painful, because you'll feel closer to them.