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 had hastily thrust at me after I came to and realized I was naked.

I couldn't find my own underwear as I lurched around the strange house, eyes swimming, brain confused, body - ?

I had no idea.

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

So my friend tossed me the underwear she had been 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 woods in between them in the direction of my house.

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

That part has always been a wild dark jumble of drunken semi-consciousness, although clearer in my memory than the periods that had come before when I was in and out of 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 to my house, has always come to my memory in the intervening period in black night patches punctuated by yellowish coffee-coloured splashes of illumination.

Like scenes 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 reality horror movies like the Blair Witch Project.

Very shortly after my introductions to drinking and stealing, I was recruited by these same girls into what felt like a kind 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-old foolproof planning that makes my middle-aged heart hurt.

My girlfriends had found a party to go to, people I didn't know at a house I didn't know. My parents were going 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 to other kids playing clunky prehistoric video games or sifting through the vinyl for the next pick for the record player.

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

This 44-year-old woman doesn't know why that 14-year-old girl didn't expect this party 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 experiences about nine months before this. I had been sexually molested by an adolescent relative 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 of self-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 my sexual 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, I received unwanted touching and attention from boys and even men, but either way all of those experiences helped me measure my sexual worth. 

As crazy as it may sound, at nine or 12 years old it mattered to me that someone thought I was pretty enough or sexy enough to touch me inappropriately without consent.

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

I was also in many ways unsupervised, having earned independence from my parents with my obvious maturity and trustworthiness. I was smart, outgoing and already quite accomplished.

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

All I know is 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 behind were calm, decent, well-behaved and made good choices. All of a sudden I thought they 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 school visit 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 weird and 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 I slid into incomprehensible situations.- Alison Menard

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

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

No one noticed when I came home giggling at supper and dropped 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 we poured water into our parents' liquor to cover the missing booze. It didn't seem like anyone noticed so we kept doing it.

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

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

Very shortly after my introductions to drinking 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 casual arrangement. It consisted of older boys, including two brothers and a core group of invited male friends in their last years of high school.

They recruited and groomed younger girls for casual sexual encounters, sometimes in groups, in the basement of the brothers' house. The boys had only one rule, they told us, which was don't get anyone pregnant. Other than that, they could do what they wanted at their house or wherever. And they did.

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

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

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

Suffice it to say here, I slid from that bad scene to other bad scenes and more bad scenes until one night the next June, when I was now 14, and my girlfriends had found a party 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 staying out 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 the time but who I now think must have been in his early 20s. He had agreed to buy us some booze to share. Someone other than me decided that since there were three of us, 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 our bottle 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 of town.

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

In the intervening decades someone has removed these ugly overgrown bushes, returning the house to its relative anonymity.

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 scuffed floors and walls, and ashtrays piled high throughout the house.

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

The bathroom was generally gross and the toilet 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 had brought with us. Before long, we were beyond giggling and slurring when we talked and everything was swimming around me.

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

I recall drinking mouthfuls of increasingly warm beer from random bottles which others had left behind as they moved around the house.

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

In between, everything seemed dark to me. I thought the lights had been turned off, but I later came to understand that I was actually in a blackout period and that 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 was conscious for the rest of that evening consisted of a confusing semi-awareness. I found myself unexpectedly transported to a messy bed in a messier bedroom.

Even now, in my mind's eye, I see random limbs which seem to float in the darkness, as if moved by black-light puppeteers, some belonging to me and some belonging to people 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 Rehtaeh Parsons and that Jane Doe in Steubenville, Ohio and those other girls here and there etc etc.... all of whom have had their sexual, emotional, psychological and physical integrity violated by male friends or acquaintances after over-consumption at a party, while they or other people watched and hooted or took pictures and captured smart phone videos.

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

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

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

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

They will encourage others to take advantage and high-five each other through the havoc and harm they then cause. And they will justify it by saying she looked like she wanted it. Yeah, with the vomit dribbling out of her 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 heart hurt.

'Were you one of them?'

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

I will leave you to think about what it's like in the days after to walk through those same junior high halls and pass boys you don't know thinking, screaming inside your head, 'Were you one of them?' and then, 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 face or on my body that I had been gang-raped. But if I didn't even really comprehend what 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 line from that place to my house. 

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

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

Funny, before it happened to me, I would have thought you would see it in my face or on my body that I had been gang-raped. But if I didn't even really comprehend what 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, they probably actually wanted to rid themselves of the problem, the evidence; of the connection 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 drunk and a huge disappointment.  I remember getting quickly past my mother and going to bed. Then, the excruciating recovery.

The wicked, wicked hangover first. The sore muscles and bruising. The dawning horror that came back to me in dark dreamy images.

'My middle aged heart hurts'

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

I'm pretty sure it feels the same no matter the number of people who actually put something on or inside of your body without permission.

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

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

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

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

Unlike Reteah and Steubenville Jane, I didn't have to see a horrific shameful repeat of what had happened to me in a complete drunken blackout but I also didn'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 your attackers. At least with the photos the perpetrators and their friends take nowadays you can tell who participated and make them accountable for their actions 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.