Alison Menard says sexual consent conversation has to change

Warning: This is a personal essay written by Alison Menard. It does contain some graphic language that some may find disturbing.It has been edited from its original version for length.

They ran me through the woods, one on each side.It was mid-June 1985 and I was wearing my friend's underwear, which she hadhastily thrust at me after I came to and realized I was naked.

I couldn't find myown underwear as I lurched around the strange house, eyes swimming, brainconfused, body - ?

I had no idea.

By that time, I was really late getting home and I was beginning to realize I wasgoing to be in a lot of trouble.

So my friend tossed me the underwear she hadbeen wearing and I put it on and then my pants etc., and these boys grabbed me,pushed me out of the house and started running through subdivisions and the woodsin between them in the direction of my house.

My arms hung heavy and limp over the shoulder of each of the boys, my legsrunning and stumbling, then dragging for distances as they pulled me.

That parthas always been a wild dark jumble of drunken semi-consciousness, althoughclearer in my memory than the periods that had come before when I was in and outof blackouts over what turned out to be a period of several hours.

That part, in the woods, being dragged from the house where it happened back tomy house, has always come to my memory in the intervening period in black nightpatches punctuated by yellowish coffee-coloured splashes of illumination.

Likescenes from a movie, they flash rapidly at me with that old movie reel sound and the look of the unsteady video camera spotlight from early versions of realityhorror movies like the Blair Witch Project.

Very shortly after my introductions todrinking and stealing, I was recruited by these same girls into what felt like akind of teenage sex club. I was 13 years old.- Alison Menard

When I went out that night, the plan had involved the kind of 14-year-oldfoolproof planning that makes my middle-aged heart hurt.

My girlfriends had founda party to go to, people I didn't know at a house I didn't know. My parents weregoing out. If I was home by midnight, no one would be the wiser.

I had gone to parties before where sometimes 13-year-old couples made out next toother kids playing clunky prehistoric video games or sifting through the vinylfor the next pick for the record player.

We slow danced and listened to Hall & Oates. Occasionally we played threeminutes in the closet, random boy connected torandom girl with spin-the-bottle precision.

This 44-year-old woman doesn't know why that 14-year-old girl didn't expect thisparty to be any different from those earlier ones.

'All of the sudden there were many secrets in my life'

I had begun my quick deep slide into progressively worse choices and experiencesabout ninemonths before this. I had been sexually molested by an adolescentrelative some years prior and it had damaged me in ways I did not yet understand.

The damage manifested itself in self-perpetuating circles around me, a kind ofself-fulfilling prophecy of harm come true.

One effect I know it had on me was to make me acutely aware of what I felt was mysexual value, which I measured against various types of attention I attracted.

Sometimes I was provocative with boys my own age and other times, many of them, Ireceived unwanted touching and attention from boys and even men, but either wayall of those experiences helped me measure my sexual worth.

As crazy as it may sound, at nine or 12years old it mattered to me thatsomeone thought I was pretty enough or sexy enough to touch me inappropriatelywithout consent.

I acted out sexually in ways that were way too advanced for my age and stage oflife even though I was still, really, a young girl. I was vulnerable.

I was alsoin many ways unsupervised, having earned independence from my parents with my obvious maturity and trustworthiness. I was smart, outgoing and already quiteaccomplished.

All of a sudden there were many secrets in my life. Bad choices. Pain. It's achicken and egg thing to figure out if I changed friends suddenly because of mysecrets or if I now had secrets because I changed friends suddenly.

All I knowis that for me, the new friends were the gateway to serious harm.

I can't pinpoint why I changed friends but do recall the friends I left behindwere calm, decent, well-behaved and made good choices. All of a sudden I thoughtthey were boring and inexperienced, not as mature as me.

'A kind of teenage sex club'

I was introduced to drinking and group pornography viewing in one after schoolvisit to the house of one of my new friends.

Some slightly older kid was there,maybe a brother, and he had a porn movie he wanted us all to watch. It was weirdand funny and titillating all at once. I think I thought it made me sophisticated.

The more I got away with, the more I realized that nobody noticed, the more Islid into incomprehensible situations.- Alison Menard

Then and after, we regularly made and drank what we called jungle juice mixedrandomly from liberal pours from every bottle in our parents' liquor racks into acommon jug, no mix.

Drink a couple of slugs of that and you're laughing. Drunkfelt good, and funny.

No one noticed when I came home giggling at supper anddropped my fork because my head was spinning and I thought it was hilarious.

We kept doing it whenever we thought we could get away with it. Sometimes wepoured water into our parents' liquor to cover the missing booze. It didn't seemlike anyone noticed so we kept doing it.

My new friends introduced me to shoplifting and then I regularly stole from localconvenience stores, the thrill of the theft an instant high, the candy and booksI stole a sustained one. I ate the stuff I stole, always in one sitting, as if Ihad developed an eating disorder.

The more I got away with, the more I realized that nobody noticed, the more Islid into incomprehensible situations.

Very shortly after my introductions todrinking and stealing, I was recruited by these same girls into what felt like a
kind of teenage sex club. I was 13 years old.

I don't want to sound too dramatic; ironically, it was an exceedingly casualarrangement. It consisted of older boys, including two brothers and a core groupof invited male friends in their last years of high school.

They recruited andgroomed younger girls for casual sexual encounters, sometimes in groups, in thebasement of the brothers' house. The boys had only one rule, they told us, whichwas don't get anyone pregnant. Other than that, they could do what they wanted attheir house or wherever. And they did.

I still remember being a bit starry-eyed thinking how lucky I was that these cuteolder boys wanted anything to do with me, that I was special. It was inevitablethat I would become a girlfriend to one of them as he got to know what a greatperson I was.

I noticed the same starry-eyed reactions in other girls and felt sorry for thembecause it was clear to me at a distance that they were being used, but somehow Ipersisted in thinking things were different for me.

It strikes me now that these were average boys from our average neighbourhoodsraised by our average neighbours. The girls were too.My participation and experiences in this group is a story unto itself.

Suffice itto say here, I slid from that bad scene to other bad scenes and more bad scenesuntil one night the next June, when I was now 14, and my girlfriends had found aparty to go to. I could feel the rush of rebellion and the unknown. I was in.

'Nothing has changed since it happened to me'

On this Friday night in mid-June, I was just going to have some fun drinking a little and laughing with friends and stayingout late, but get home in time to cover.

One of the girls I was with had a connection to a man who seemed old to me at thetime but who I now think must have been in his early 20s. He had agreed to buy ussome booze to share. Someone other than me decided that since there were three ofus, we should buy more alcohol, so he bought us a 40-ouncer of Southern Comfort.

We had no mix.We didn't even have glasses to drink from.

We waited outside the liquor store at the crappy mall in our town to collect ourbottle and walked from there to the party, chattering about who might be there.

It was warm and still light out.We arrived at the house where the party was at and walked up the driveway to a
cookie cutter three bedroom bungalow that populated every street in this part oftown.

To this day, I recall the outsized unkempt hedge of trees which obstructedalmost the entire front of the house, marking it as curiously distinguishablefrom the other homes on that block.

In the intervening decades someone hasremoved these ugly overgrown bushes, returning the house to its relativeanonymity.

We walked through the front door and the dingy outside gave way to the darker,dingier inside. The place looked not just messy but dirty, with darkly scuffedfloors and walls, and ashtrays piled high throughout the house.

Weirdly, therewere clocks and clock parts in various states of repair on every surface in theparts of the house that I could see.

The bathroom was generally gross and thetoilet was grosser. I got a groggy bird's eye view when vomiting into it later.

My girlfriends and I took turns drinking directly out of the bottle we hadbrought with us. Before long, we were beyond giggling and slurring when we talkedand everything was swimming around me.

When I went upstairs my mom was really angry. It wasobvious I had been drinking. I guess it was not obvious that I had been sexuallyassaulted.- Alison Menard

I recall drinking mouthfuls ofincreasingly warm beer from random bottles which others had left behind as theymoved around the house.

The light drained to black as the sun went down. I recall the light in thebathroom when I was vomiting and later when vomiting again; and again the lightat the end of the night in a bedroom when I had come to and was naked,as if Ihad been spit out of a dark spinning tunnel.

In between, everything seemed dark to me. I thought the lights had been turnedoff, but I later came to understand that I was actually in a blackout period andthat it was my brain and senses that had been turned off, not the lights.

I have recalled ever since that night that the few periods during which I wasconscious for the rest of that evening consisted of a confusing semi-awareness.Ifound myself unexpectedly transported to a messy bed in a messier bedroom.

Evennow, in my mind's eye, I see random limbs which seem to float in the darkness, asif moved by black-light puppeteers, some belonging to me and some belonging topeople I could not count, let alone identify.

'Consent ...cannot exist in those circumstances'

It is entirely possible that someone in my presence thought I was playing along,at least for parts of it.

It's why I feel I understand what happened to RehtaehParsons and that Jane Doe in Steubenville, Ohio and those other girls here andthere etc etc.... all of whom have had their sexual, emotional, psychological andphysical integrity violated by male friends or acquaintances after over-consumption at a party, while they or other people watched and hooted or tookpictures and captured smartphone videos.

It is painfully obvious that we still don't teach our children that a person whohas consumed drugs or alcohol to the degree that he or she is vomiting or passedout cannot legally give consent to sexual activity of any kind, no matter whattheybelieve to be the outside indicators of consent being given by that person,even if it appears the intoxicated person is offering an overt invitation totouch.

Any indicators of consent are negated by the altered state they are in.

Consent does not and cannot exist in those circumstances. Period. Nothing todiscuss or justify.

I have learned that there is a category of person for whom the ideal sexualpartner is "that really drunk girl I can take advantage of."Who, when in thepresence of a friend or acquaintance who is passing out from too much alcohol orother drugs, rather than recognizing she needs help or protection, will pounceand take what they want.

They will encourage others to take advantage and high-fiveeach other through the havoc and harm they then cause. And they will justify itby saying she looked like she wanted it. Yeah, with the vomit dribbling out ofher mouth and through periods when she is non-responsive, she wants it.

Nothing has changed since it happened to me. And that makes my middle-aged hearthurt.

'Were you one of them?'

So here I was, that night, being dragged through the woods. I had come back toconsciousness sometime earlier; could have been 10minutes, could have been anhour.

I will leave you to think about what it's like in the days after to walk throughthose same junior high halls and pass boys you don't know thinking, screaminginside your head, 'Were you one of them?' andthen, the whispered anxious panic, 'Oh, you were one of them.'

Funny, before it happened to me, I would have thought you would see it in my faceor on my body that I had been gang-raped. But if I didn't even really comprehendwhat had happened to me, how could I expect my parents to?- Alison Menard

We finished the terrible trip through the woods and backyards in a straight linefrom that place to my house.

They dropped me on my porch and rang the doorbelland took off quickly. Bright lights came on. A parent discovered me on the frontstep and brought me inside.

When I went upstairs my mom was really angry. It wasobvious I had been drinking. I guess it was not obvious that I had been sexuallyassaulted.

Funny, before it happened to me, I would have thought you would see it in my faceor on my body that I had been gang-raped. But if I didn't even really comprehendwhat had happened to me, how could I expect my parents to?

Those guys may have thought they were being gentlemen to have "helped"me home.More likely, my adult mind now understands that having had their wild fun, theyprobably actually wanted to rid themselves of the problem, the evidence; of theconnection to me or anything or anyone that had been there that night.

So I remember the shock of being home, traumatized, on my own because I was drunkand a huge disappointment. I remember getting quickly past my mother and goingto bed. Then, the excruciating recovery.

The wicked, wicked hangover first. Thesore muscles and bruising. The dawning horror that came back to me in dark dreamyimages.

'My middle aged heart hurts'

Monday and school came quick and then it was whispers and rumours and mygirlfriends filling me in on some details. Three or five or seven, the actualnumber doesn't matter when you're gang-raped and people around you eitherparticipated or they stood around and watched.

I'm pretty sure it feels the sameno matter the number of people who actually put something on or inside of yourbody without permission.

Besides, how do you count? Do you only count the guy who inserted his penis inyour vagina, or are you supposed to include the guy who put his penis in yourface too?

What about the people of both genders who watched it happen? While they didn'tactually touch anything on my body, they also didn't call for help or ever reportit to an adult. Are they responsible? Complicit?

Thankfully technology didn't exist yet that would allow someone to have takenpictures or video of me and then to have distributed it widely.

Don't get mewrong, rumours and word of mouth were bad enough. But at least I could bury myshame and try to pretend no one whispered about me until after my extremesuicidal anxiety subsided many months later.

Unlike Reteah and Steubenville Jane, I didn't have to see a horrific shamefulrepeat of what had happened to me in a complete drunken blackout but I alsodidn't have tangible proof of who had done this to me.

In the modern era, the great thing about social media is you can identify yourattackers. At least with the photos the perpetrators and their friends takenowadays you can tell who participated and make them accountable for theiractions and use it as a teachable moment for everyone else.

Except we don't even do that. And that makes my middle-aged heart hurt.