The Date Rape that Destroyed My.......

Date rape is incredibly humiliating. 

Date rape also destroyed my already fragile sexuality. I write this for men as well as for women, especially survivors. 

My son is short and on the autism spectrum. Like many other young men of his age, with his diagnosis and short stature, dating just doesn't happen for him. He made peace with that. He lives with me, and we have a great relationship because we both like hiking and gardening. Neither of us is lonely.

He also knows what rape did to my sexuality. He's in his third decade of life on this earth, so he can take that.

My favorite job in wildlife and fisheries is a tie. I had an internship with the Bureau of Land Management in northwestern Nevada. Among other things, I assisted with the banding of Golden Eagles, Prairie Falcons, Red-tailed Hawks, and a variety of small passerine birds. Because I am small, I have small hands. Guess who was recruited by more senior biologists to stick their hands into holes in trees where birds were nesting. I got pecked plenty. The most dangerous birds were the Prairie Falcons because they had sharp talons and would dive-bomb us. The passerine birds were more endearing than damaging. The mother wren attacked me, but her pecks were gentle compared to being divebombed by a Prairie Falcon.

But Ronald Reagan became president, and he viewed the spending on wildlife biology as wasteful. However, there was one fisheries job that non-Americans paid for, so President Reagan did not object to it-- Foreign Fisheries Observer.  America now has a commercial processor fleet, although I understand that the fisheries in Alaska are not as productive as they were forty years ago. But forty years ago, we had not yet developed that fleet of processors. So American catcher boats trawled for fish and delivered them to Soviet, Japanese, Korean, and Polish fish processing vessels. American biologists like me were hired to collect biological data on the fish caught and processed.

The first processing vessel I worked on was Soviet. The Soviet Union broke up into multiple smaller republics in 1991, but the dominant republic was always Russia, so Russian was spoken by everyone on the fishing vessels. The Soviet vessels worked with a joint venture company that hired Russian-speaking Americans to help coordinate operations between the American catcher boats and the Soviet processors.

I was assigned to a fishing vessel that still had a prior observer who had not yet been assigned a method of transit home. Usually, that transit came on an American catcher boat, but sometimes the Soviet vessels made port calls in Dutch Harbor. The observer just hung out on the vessel waiting. Coincidentally, his wife was an American-born Russian language interpreter, hired as a go-between for both the Soviet vessel and the American catcher boats. We called these interpreters Joint Venture Representatives as they represented the interests of both sides in the joint Soviet and American fishing venture.

I took over the observer work from the other observer while he waited for a ride to Dutch Harbor.  Just a few days passed before a Russian cargo vessel arrived on the fishing grounds to pick up frozen fish products and take them back to the Soviet Union. Usually, a cargo vessel had one fish-processing ship tied up on each side. This provided an opportunity for the Soviet fishing vessel captains and their chief engineers to get together and invite us American observers and Joint Venture Representatives to join them. They brought out the vodka. Anyone who has read many of my blogs will know that my mother was an alcoholic. Most of my life, I have not imbibed alcoholic drinks. I continued that habit in college. But when I turned 21, my co-workers encouraged me to celebrate the usual way. I did and got drunk. Fortunately, I was with people who took care of me. After that, I stuck to the two-drink rule. No more than two drinks. Then I was done. That meant I would get merry, but not drunk. I liked Kalua, cream, and coffee, and stuck to that drink most of the time,

But the Russians did not have Kaluaa and cream. They had coffee, but they didn't mix it with the vodka they drank. I tried just sipping the vodka, but every time I took a sip, the Russians tipped off my glass. 

At some point, my memories become fuzzy. The Soviet fishing captains went back to work, and it was just me, the other observer, and his JV rep wife in the cabin belonging to the other vessel's JV rep. My vessel's JV rep and her observer husband left.

My next memory is hearing a frantic knocking on the door of the cabin I was in. I was in the bunk naked with the JV rep on top of me...and you know what. The female JV rep from my boat was yelling at me to get out.

So I dressed and went out on deck with a line of men on both ships watching me as I transferred from one fishing vessel to the other.

I was utterly humiliated. I never really drank alcohol again, except for sips of communion wine in church.

Back at work on my vessel, while I was sorting fish in my sample baskets on deck, Soviet fishermen would walk up to me and say, "Maleenki drink vodki?" (Little drink of vodka)

I blamed myself for my stupidity. It took me a long time to process what happened and realize that I had been raped. 

In the meantime, I worked so hard on my fishing vessel that the crew stopped walking up to me to say, "Maleenki drink vodki."

I still feel anger at the American JV rep who raped me. I don't obsess over what happened. It is more than four decades in the past.

But I have never been the same. I was raped five years before, and that rape is so difficult to talk about; I can't talk about it right now. I feel as though my sexuality got knocked out in a one-two punch.

I married a man who could stimulate my mind with intellectual conversation, but I could never get past being raped. We divorced, and I don't date.