Dear Candise:

May 2017 was when you posted the other thread: you received a friend request on Facebook from a guy you knew but never talked with before, you gave him your number, he sent you a message saying that he liked you for a while and asked you to “give him a chance”. He “expected an answer immediately. You said no, he said “we can be friends”, and you  “knew immediately he wasn’t gonna stop trying. He persisted, you eventually gave in, met him one night after 8 pm, he started hugging and touching you, you “tried to pull away… said no  so many times”, but he kept going. The day after he sent you a text saying he’s sorry, you told him it’s best you “stop seeing each other”, but he tried to get you to see him again, you “made excuses to not see him”, he “kept asking”, he even begged, and you finally gave in to him and had sex with him.

My input: the two men you shared about sexually assaulted you, and if you said no on the night the first man had sex with you, then he raped you. Problem is that in some cultures, such as the middle east culture, sexual assaults and rapes are common. Men don’t think of themselves as rapists because they don’t hold a weapon and threaten the woman’s life. They don’t consider a woman’s “no!” as anything other than playing hard to get, or a meaningless word that all women say before they stop resisting.

There needs to be educational programs in schools teaching girls and boys about this terrible practice that hurts so many girls, and which produces rude and cruel rapists out of boys.

I am sorry that this has been your experience. I was born in a country myself where this was the culture, so I am very familiar with it, unfortunately.

anita