Warning: This article presents topics that may be triggering for victims of sexual assault, violence, or harassment.

It’s fair fact these days to acknowledge we live in a culture deeply marred by sexual victimization. It’s part of college life. Rape is happening in the military, prisons, and other correctional facilities. You’ll find it at scout camp, in boarding schools, even at church. But if you aren’t a person of color, a woman, gay, lesbian, queer, trans, underaged, or another frequent target of sexual assault and harrassment, it may be easy to remain numb to the concern. If it hasn’t happened to you, you’re actually part of a shrinking population of Americans.

Many of us have no way of not looking at it. It’s in a lot of reality television and openly discussed in politics. It’s there whether you’re looking for anything “sexual” or not, but yes, it is in porn, too. In a post-“Me Too” world, with as much sexual assault and harassment still going on, it’s a wonder we have time to wind our watches before the next victim passes on the street.

News flash—we don’t. According to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, studies estimate every 68 seconds someone is violated in the United States. You can pretty well set your watch by that.

But a question lurks that few of us seem to ask: Why are we so much more comfortable talking about it when the victims are of color, queer, trans, or (most of all) women?

The answer: Because it allows us to look away from a deeper cycle of victimization, which starts with us having to look at and talk about the men in our lives, and what is happening to indoctrinate so many of them into thinking this is remotely natural.

Don’t mistake my avenue of attack here. This isn’t going to devolve into a rant about why men are biologically savage because I don’t believe that. I don’t think blame for sexual violence falls on porn, tv, movies, adult video games, or cultural byproducts at all. These are psychological inputs and outputs, fed by and into existing hungers, desire-dependent for their reproduction and consumption. Our tastes for them begin in more innocuous games, stories, and myths, and the power dynamics children witness, experiences we don’t even openly talk about or analyze.

Where we definitely miss part of the avenue of incision with regard to this particular social tumor, however, is in failing to look at how much and how often men are being violated, harassed, or forced into sexual acts against their will.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: men aren’t the ones beset on all sides by forces out to harm them. But it’s my job to state the unobvious, because who pays a master of the obvs?

In this case, most of us remain oblivious, because it’s a hushed secret in more ways than one. It’s something most won’t talk about or discuss, even deep in therapy. It took me 25 years, for example, to talk about what happened to me, because the shame is a soundproof vault.

Now, I know rape is a particular word with an acute currency of usage that is problematic if applied to penis owners at all. Universally, rape implies an act of unwanted penetration. While it doesn’t take a genius to understand men can be penetrated, only recently has it become recognized that men can be forced into acts thereof.

For the sake of sensitivity, I won’t use “rape” for the remainder of this article. I’ll instead use “compelled.” As in: coerced, pressured, impelled, shamed, constrained, intimidated, bullied, muscled, threatened, hectored, dragged, browbeat, badgered, twisted by the arm, menaced, terrorized, hounded, or otherwise made to do things against one’s conviction or will.

If you accept that maze of definitions, you start to see how much we all—men, women, children, the elderly, along with everyone in between—feel compelled by the prevailing culture around us to engage in all kinds of activity that is outside the realm of consent, self-dignity, or any real reciprocity of value.

I actually wish we had all taken Melania up on it when she proposed a national dialogue about bullying when—oh, the irony!—her husband first came to office back in 2016 after verbally cudgeling his opponents.

Back to my point, however…

For this purpose, I invoke the central themes of one of the greatest, and perhaps the greatest, work(s) of American literature—Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The irony of me conjuring a Russian as the genius behind this “American” bible of literature is not lost on me, nor potential groans of reader response. All the trappings of Lolita are evident. What isn’t always so clear is that it’s a book about the spirit of America (therefore an “American” book), as it captures us in ways inadmissible.

To be more precise, Lolita conjures the very veil we hold up to disguise our lurid, seedy fascination with the utter ruin and destruction of innocence, which goes well beyond public falls from grace or watching the rise of some phoenix, only the savor the day she crashes and smolders to ashes.

There is no end to our fascination, say, with the Brittanys of the world, à la Spears and Murphy (the latter of whom actually played a runaway dead girl in a movie called, you guessed it, “The Dead Girl”). But even the critical commentary on Nabokov’s book runs a gamut of playing light with and poking at the personal pains of its author—but I will get to more on that later.

To start off, let’s look at the real corollary to the novel, the case of Frank La Salle, who in 1948 posed as an FBI agent to kidnap Florence “Sally” Horner after catching her at a petty crime. He compelled her onto a bus to Atlantic City, the start to a twenty-one month journey across the U.S.—during which, he compelled her in more ways than one, all the while posing as her father to strangers they met along the way.

It is easy to see Nabokov appropriating La Salle and Horner as principal drivers in a work of supposed fiction, so clearly based upon this real account. As Katy Waldman notes in her New Yorker article, “The Salacious Non-Mystery of ‘The Real Lolita’” (in which she reviews the work of Sarah Weinman), it is altogether difficult to ignore Nabokov’s fascination with pedophilia, the author’s personal history of abuse at the hands of a fondling uncle, and the way Weinman builds a persuasive case for the "insolent loveliness of the writing” obscuring the pain and trauma of true stories like Horner-La Salle.

Art, after all, is guilty of many things—if not scavengery, then a cynical voyeurism toward the pain of others. Except, there’s a problem in that assessment. Nabokov actually knew something else he was intending with his novel.

The language is the main character of this work. Nabokov was writing about the occlusion of truth and our ability to obfuscate in the face of pain and trauma—how words serve that very purpose. It isn’t just that we gaze into the tragedy of another with deep fascination. No. We, as the reading jury, are also gazing into our own denial about the very act of being compelled to peer even further.

Unfortunately, both his book and even works like “The Real Lolita” pander to the victim gazing Nobokov is trying to get us to take a closer look at and inspect. For how can one question it, if nobody actually calls it out? To call it out, one must conjure it, to demonstrate the act. The reader must say Eureka! Realization cannot be forced, nor compelled. We have to be strangely seduced along by a deftness of artifice.

Nabokov knew how fascinated we (and he) are by the destruction of innocence. But if you have any doubt about other intentions, consider his use of names. The book is full of doubling. Even the author’s own name is used as an acronym. At numerous turns, doppelgängers abound, and even Lolita herself is referred to by a dozen names. We know pretty quick to question everything and everyone.

“Lolita,” for example, is a pet name for Dolores Haze, a figurative cloud of sorrow and pain. Child of a widow, whose mother dies early on in the story, Lolitia is his dolly girl, a lollipop, the thing Humbert Humbert is compelled to want to taste, have a lick of, plumb. Hell, even the narrator’s own name is an act of pointing to the legerdemain in all the naming. He’s doubly humble in the face of his jury, doubly sick, all twisted up by his indecent acts. Humbert also, in deep paranoia, imagines a possibly “real” doppelgänger haunting his every move, possibly dating back to the narrator’s own childhood, a man named Clare Quilty.

The read unravels like an actual inquisition. The narrator speaks as if to a jury of his peers, whom he regards as equals—Humbert never speaks down to his audience. If this isn’t tongue-in-cheek, I don't know what qualifies. We are literally gawking at the heart of a pedophile, and Nabokov lures us along, keeping us riveted enough to dive ever deeper.

Now, I’ve sat in literature classes watching people play at deciphering Quilty. Clare? Clarity? Clearly? Quilty? Clearly guilty? Or just squinty Mr. Peepy, a creeper who stalks the novel leaving clues along the way, often prior to the reader and the narrator’s own arrival in the plot, leaving breadcrumbs for self-reflection and -recrimination. There are even obscure hints that Quilty, a pornographer and playwright, can be traced to Humbert’s earliest love with an imago named Annabel Lee, a name ripped straight from the work of Edgar Allen Poe. All of this has been noted, plus more, in a vast body of literary analysis concerning this tidily untidy book, which Vladimir claimed to have written in under two months.

I don’t doubt it. It is precisely and diabolically inspired.

Digressions aside, Clare Quilty is a shadow archetype. Seldom mentioned, he’s a long arm. He is another cloud, extending back to the death of Lee in the narrator’s youth, a death that precludes the consummation of a love Humbert feels compelled to conjure up and re-experience throughout the novel in his sordid “worship” of Lolita. Clare’s tandem trail hints at Humbert’s own trauma, discussed in passing, almost entirely occluded from the reader’s view aside from these little haunting crumbs. It is as if it were impossible to look at, because it’s just too painful for Humbert to admit and ever acknowledge it.

In recounting this missed consummation of a childhood love, we’re swept into the memory of a seaside cave, where Humbert insinuates that one of the two men who interrupted the sexual consummation of his love for Annabel Lee may have been Clare Quilty. Quilty may also be the double of Gustav Trapp, Humbert’s own uncle. Hmm. You catching onto this? Humbert never expressly states it, but the two men, who are maybe just one, may have even compelled Humbert and Annabel in other ways, after which we know she develops typhus and dies, similar to how Sally Horner died a very short time after surviving Frank Lasalle.

Sorry, but there’s too much coincidence in all of these clues. I think Nabokov is even getting personal. He’s showing us that at the horror of a heart like Humbert is a man desperate to restore in himself a semblance of the innocence that was also stolen from him as a child. The author, readership, and Humbert himself all know he is a perverse and corrupted matrix, but it’s not so different from a consumer culture that fetishizes young girls on a routine fucking basis.

Back to the story, however…

This moment back in the cave of Humbert’s unconscious mind is the consummation of something monstrous. In it, the demon of Humbert Humbert is born. And in this book, Nabokov is working out his own dramas right alongside yours and mine and the machinations of an entire culture. Because we really can’t stop reading this, can we?

Arguably, every feminine character in the novel is also just another archetype in the author’s mind, symbolizing the loss of innocence and a wanton destruction of youth, from Dolores’ mother to Lolita herself, all part of a cycle of compulsion that leads the narrator to try and brutally recapture something he himself had lost.

Through what we almost come to believe is this genuine kind of reverence for Lolita, we see Humbert’s actually made her a religion to his own pain and suffering. Humbert Humbert is broken, gazing dimly through the horror of his own innocence lost, left hunting for scraps to vindicate what he has become and what he’s compelled to do by his unspeakable desires.

In case you still somehow missed the point, behind the portrait of a sweeping American landscape Nabokoz was writing into our own perverse love for victim gazing. We all read Lolita in the same vein as watching some artfully crafted true crime story; or any of the dead girl dramas we’re all too familiar with; or a docu-series profiling the carnage of a serial killer we would all do better to forget. Meanwhile, we’re nitpicking the bones of JonBenét Ramsey around the digital-age water cooler during breaks from our remote virtual jobs.

The victims never materialize, precisely because victims are actually immaterial. We read and never get a grasp, until perhaps the end, of who our lolitas are as people. She’s just a bunch of flowery words to disguise the violence of a world that actually stands by and watches, knowing full well what is going on, every 68 fuckin’ seconds.

What Nabokov did is ultimately grant us a picture of our own reflection, not only as a host of rubbernecking gawpers at the ongoing looped train wreck of innocence devoured, but at the fact that we, too, are crushed and broken, fallen—and we just keep on doing it to our children, over and over again.

What he is writing about is exactly this cycle of trauma. How trauma becomes high art, and art informs our sentiments and tastes. And how all that turns into this house of mirrors in terms of our longing for interrelationship.

We could blame media, as Humbert hints at blaming as his own scapegoat. Clare Quilty is a playwright-pornographer. Precisely for Hollywood, and its dark arm the porn industry, we could point to forces plowing midwestern farm girls at whatever clip they get off the bus in L.A.—an obvious trope in “The Big Lebowski.” QAnon certainly accepts this as a scapegoat. Meanwhile, we gladly send off our daughters, as evidenced by such un-humorous ploys as the Sparkle Motion dance troupe in “Donnie Darko,” where we watch a perverse rendition of an American talent competition with the full knowing that something wicked that way goes. And don’t even get me started on “Mulholland Drive.” I can give you “Thirteen Reasons Why” art mirrors life or vice versa, and what a chicken or egg conversation that devolves into.

No. This cycle has another dimension. And I ask you to actually, oh my gosh, let your heart play a fiddle for the child at the heart of ol’ Humbert.

Many people have been molested, see, in one way or another. I promise, statistics on the number of children, boys in particular, is not in the realm of measuring up reality. I will get into numbers eventually, but suffice it to say that for the same reason female victims won’t come forward, the shame and compulsion to hide is doubly strong for guys. The repression of trauma is programmed in at an early age, and the emotional toll of that should really be accounted for in our national health surveys, because it leads to all kinds of health risks and quality of life outcomes, spreading exponentially outward in terms of the costs to society as a whole. One of those costs, I firmly believe, is the scope of our sexual assault problem.

Suffice it to say, we’ve long known there’s something wrong with our men, but we’re way more comfortable talking about and gazing at the victimization of women.

For me, it happened when I was around six or seven. I was living in the “alternative” family housing at a major pubic university. My mom was in law school, and we lived among older students, other divorcees and single parents, plenty of the international sort. One of my closest friends was Indian.

I remember around this time an incident, someone lurking outside our apartment. I could see fraternity row from the front steps of our building. There was a pool in the front lawn of one of the frat houses. Rumor had it, pledges had to walk a rickety plank overtop that pool full of lobster. Memory, of course, serves none of us well—I, too, am an unreliable narrator.

Which begs the question, how much will you believe of what I tell you next?

There was a young man, I believe of latino decent. I don't mention his race as if it matters, except I never knew his name and somehow he knew mine. Probably from watching me out at the swings, or listening as I played chase around the compound with friends, he learned my name and spray-painted the Spanish version of it on the block wall right outside the screen door to the apartment I lived in. I didn’t put this together at the time, I just remember every day seeing “Jaime” as I left my home. And I think of it to this day as his calling card. Aside from these details, I can’t recall his face. I know he wasn’t unhandsome—I dare say he was even beautiful, as was I. He probably was just some mixed-up teen.

One day, he caught me running through the neighboring duplex where he lived. I was in the middle of a game of chase, or maybe hide and seek. His apartment door was open. He had a large fish tank visible across the threshold, and he beckoned me to come inside, to take a closer look at all the fish.

From the front door to the hall, from the hall to a bedroom, it’s difficult to say how actual plots unfurl, how certain doors close, or what lures one deeper in, like a fish in a tank. I’d really never noticed him before. I didn’t feel compelled, if only by curiosity, and for that I suppose I’m guilty of not listening to a mother’s words. This was back in the time of the whole “Satanic Panic,” and we were schooled about “stranger danger” in every afternoon special. It was 1984, I think, heading into summer. My future wife would be born in August.

In his bedroom, he lifts up the corner of the carpet. There, I see a stack of magazines beneath. He promises to let me have one. He tells me to pick one out. I get lost, then, on my knees, my face to that corner of that room, skimming my first Playboy, or maybe it’s a Penthouse. When I turn to finally face him, I’m amazed as much by what I see in the magazine as the sight of him lying on the lower bunk of his bed, penis aroused.

He tells me I can have my choice, if I came over and put my hand around it. As for the rest, I remember my small hand around it, and him telling me what to do next. Nothing more remains to recall.

I don’t remember having to escape. I don’t remember what else happens in that room. I later make the mistake—I guess? (what a strange choice of word, but I’ll leave it)—of showing the magazine to a female cousin, who walks me to one of the many big green dumpsters on campus and compels me to throw it away.

Me and a friend go diving for it later, but it’s never recovered. And that’s my first fleeting introduction to porn. I recall hiding it for a brief time in the apartment, hoping my mom wouldn’t find it. I knew the entire episode was bad, and that my mood ring would out me by telling the black-hearted truth if I ever tried to lie to her about anything.

How’s your mood now, dear reader? Just wait, there’s more to this confessional…

That was just the first of many encounters I went on to have with friends, cousins, or girls my age, who played around too, various games all leading up to the first woman I really slept with, tinged by an unconscious fear of the fact that I’d once felt a cock in my ass, in my mouth, and I’d learned of masturbation and ejaculation by watching other boys do it—and I didn’t have a clue what any of that really meant. I just knew it was something put in me. By “Jaime.”

For others it’s their mother, an aunt, a female cousin just goofing around. Or a group of boys teasing, cajoling another into putting his pecker in some hole. I knew boys out in the county indeed fuck animals—it happens. For others, it’s older men, boys even, in locker rooms, so on and so forth. Boys, all talking of things women supposedly like, but don’t think for a second the girls don’t talk in a similar manner too! Men—really, just boys—spouting off or “circle-jerking” mindlessly over how they plan to give it to ‘em, with or without the ol’ foreplay, seduction, consent.

Boys, really, having learned to talk like predators, jokingly, by who knows what show, magazine, father, uncle, coach, whomever, whatever, leads us to act in this way. But all of them, I knew, were damaged goods like me.

You could always see it in their eyes. A sense of titivated shame in how they were talking. A sense of knowing it was wrong to act this way. And just the slightest twinge of pain, because behind it all someone had done something to compel them of it.

I remember once, a friend cajoling another with the claim that all guys taste their own semen at some point, and when the one friend finally admitted to having tried it, the other couldn’t stop laughing, teasing, about how he’d tricked and heckled the other into admitting he’d slurped his own jizz. I just listened, knowing better than to admit I’d somehow tasted it too. For years, I couldn’t receive fellatio, because the slightest sound of gagging, even in a video I was watching, made me cringe and lose all interest.

Trauma, indeed, is written in the flesh (Bessel van der Kolk, "The Body Keeps the Score”).

To be American is to go through the fires of an identity crisis, ripe with all the angst of what it is to come into knowledge of sex, money, and power, and how we all fit into this vast carbon-copy machine that gladly presses forth soft porn into our mail. As we literally, or figuratively in a psychological sense, masturbate or self-compare ourselves to the Victoria’s Secret catalogue that comes in the box every month (because a sister or mom likes to buy for her guy, or vice versa), it grows ever so easy to blame external forces for shaping us this way, ever easier to deny it’s even a problem.

Which brings me to the games we all play as children. We are taught to predate one another at an early age. There is something sexual in most of us before we know what we’re busy getting into. Before we know it, half of us have a mouth on something, or a finger in something. If not a tongue or a nip, the feel of one’s own fluids.

I dare say we are seemingly born to violate, deflower, and to be deflowered ourselves. Is it the game of tickle? Game of chase? A play at hide, go seek? Then we compel our children to school with—what? This? As a set of tools to interact with others? Don’t we incessantly teach them they have no power? How are they to learn to gain it? By competition? By overpowering and outdoing others? Are we not compelling them in every way, every single day? How much of life is just a script that we’re forced to dutifully follow?

And women, my goddess! The women I have loved, watching as they drag themselves through a routine someone else designed and prescribed for them. It took becoming a mother myself to realize the indoctrination we all go through, and the deep trauma I somehow learned to manage and simply erase from my memory just in order to make myself feel and seem normal. Ladies, you know what I mean. We’re skilled forgetters.

While I could launch onto further tangents concerning all the ways a nation exploits or extracts from others, or deflowers its own garden, etc.—I won’t go on. This isn’t an attempt to clutch pearls over what happens on social media or the pictures your son texts a girlfriend. What I’m talking about is the fact that all of us learn how to act by a series of discomforts. That doesn’t justify what we do to other people! It’s just that we have to carve out space to talk about it, and talking is deeply uncomfortable. Talking requires willingly submitting yourself to that collective gaze, with all the judgements attending it. And in that regard, I think, what Nabokov wrote required a supreme act of courage to even portray someone like Humbert.

We need to hold space for men, too, you see. Or, as my child says, these “peckerwoods”—we need to make space for penis owners to talk about their lack of control. Which is difficult for men to admit, since control is a religion for many of them. But it’s time to talk about what’s been done to, and even by them. To feel through the pain of trauma. And to start establishing a real treatment plan for restoring collective dignity, genuine boundaries, bodily autonomy, and respect for all others. Justice requires a mindful ear.

We also need to stop compelling people to work lives of quiet desperation. We need to build a non-compulsory society. One that doesn’t strip people of their self-esteem. That doesn’t shame them for appearances. That doesn’t tell them they deserve whatever life is doing or has done to them. A society that doesn’t justify looking, on the one hand, and looking away on the other. That doesn’t rape people of their labors and loves (yes, I used it again—I told you I’m unreliable).

Which is to state it all too lightly still. When talking about cycles of victimhood, it can easily become a hall of mirrors, of who did what to whom, or what started it all, ’til the whole exercise becomes deeply unnerving and morally fraught. For at the heart of it is no explanation other than wantonness.

We are all wanton in our destruction. Both by the degree to which we commit it, degrees in which we incite it and—sometimes, yes—the degree to which we sometimes invite it in.

And that’s still not where I intended to go with all this.

I started with the intention of simply writing the names of every partner I ever slept with, then a sentence or two about whether there was any compulsion involved. Did I ever pressure someone to bed? Were they eager, and was I? Did we dare each other, or compel each other in some other way? Were we too drunk?

Then I realized I couldn’t remember names. Images started to double. I realized some of those faces are blurred into other pictures I’ve looked at, ‘til I no longer know if my sex life is real, or a reel.

I think of myself, then, how many times I could’ve ended up rotting in a dank forest. I think of the alleys where I might have been dragged. Image after image, word after word, conjures in my head a symphony of terrifying noise, the heart of which is the trauma of having once been a human child inviolate.

Then I think of how I want to commune with you here: without pride, with humility, no humiliation. I think of what it means to feel pushed by different strokes. Compelled by this effort to share. To open up my chest to hope. To write. To paint. To touch, dance, and flow. And I think of who could listen or would want to ever bother? Why listen? What function does an audience serve? “Why do we do this communication thing that we do?” asked a wise professor I once knew.

Then I think of all those boys who cannot do it. I think of the “boy” that I once was. I think of all “he” tried to be, to claim, to scavenge and claw from a world that was busy taking and compelling him. And whatever it gave me in return, I want to give it all back and say, “No thanks.”

Not with anger do I say it. Not with disgust, nor condemnation. I have chosen to be a woman, for the pain of being a man was saltwater to my sweet and tender tongue.

I spit him out, in the end. I spit him out, and shout with conviction: “No thanks!”

According to reports in the National Library of Medicine, research examining men as victims of sexual violence is deeply lacking. Understanding of adult male sexual victimization (AMSV) is dwarfed by our knowledge-base concerning women.

Until 1994, rape of male victims was not even codified in English law. Reports estimate help and support for men is 20 years behind that of women. Male victims have far fewer resources, and greater stigma, when it comes to even reporting their trauma.

Current estimates suggest over 27% of men and 32% of women are sexually victimized at some point in their lives. As there may be additional stigmas involved in reporting, statistics may be underrepresented, which vary widely over the handful of male studies, in particular, that have been conducted since the 1970s. Furthermore, physiological responses complicate impacts on men, as their body may appear to give consent, even when they feel violated.

“Rape is rape, no matter who the victim is.”

If you are, or you know, a man who has been sexually violated, you or they can go to RAINN to seek out resources to help work through the trauma of that experience.

To find out more, visit:

https://rainn.org/articles/sexual-assault-men-and-boys

Citations:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-salacious-non-mystery-of-the-real-lolita

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10135558/