Chapter 3

There was an uncomfortable silence in the booth, as they waited for the waitress to come and take their drink order. Once she was gone, Lacey looked at him, obviously waiting for him to speak.

"It's like this," said Bob, starting in on a speech he'd given countless times, to countless women like this one. Well ... not quite like this one. This one was a lady. She had class. He rarely dealt with women of her class. But all he had was the speech, and some facts and figures, and that usually helped them understand what had happened to them and why it wasn't their fault.

"Rape isn't about sex." He waited for her to disagree, but she just stared at him, one eyebrow raised. "It's about domination ... control ... it's about making the victim helpless and degrading her."

"And that makes him feel..." her voice quavered.

"Powerful," said Bob. "It makes him feel like he's the most powerful person present—that's what gets him off. He wants to feel like he owns you ... can make you do anything he wants you to, and that you are completely helpless to stop him."

"So I should have fought harder," she said.

"Not necessarily," he said, caution in his voice. "Some rapists are so weak and insecure that resistance unhinges them. The typical tactics taught to women like you, in the classes you've probably been going to, are to make noise, draw attention, use your keys on his face, or your knee in his groin. With that kind of rapist, that works. The problem is that with some of them, it doesn't work. That just makes them mean, because you didn't enslave yourself instantly. They punish you for your uppity behavior. The parallels between how a rapist feels about his victim and how a slave owner felt about his slaves, in the 1860s, are startling."

"But how can you fight? How can you prepare?" she asked, clearly upset.

"Sometimes you can't," said Bob. "That's why it's so important to find these men and lock them away. Most rapes, of the kind you suffered, where the woman doesn't know her attacker, are committed by very few of the total number of rapists."

"Some women KNOW who raped them?" she asked, aghast.

"Most women know their rapist," said Bob. "Statistically, if you removed the women who get into trouble with a man they know, we wouldn't have a rape problem in the United States."

"You mean date rape," she said.

"Yes ... and drunk victim rape, and women who have a rape fantasy and it gets out of hand, and women who want to believe what happened was rape when, in fact, it probably wasn't."

Her body language suddenly screamed at him. She was so tense that she looked like she might actually jump up and run. Her hands gripped the edge of the table until there was no blood in her fingers.

"Calm down," he said immediately, soothingly.

"I'm calm." Her voice was so tight it had risen an octave.

"No you're not," he said gently. "You're screaming inside. What's wrong?"

She sat, rigid, for moments longer. He wanted to touch her again, but didn't.

"Look," he said finally. "This isn't easy to understand. Sometimes things happen that don't make sense."

Still she sat, frozen. The horror was back in her eyes again, but she wasn't looking at him. She was looking at something that wasn't even in the same building they were in.

"Is there something else?" he asked quietly. "Something else you didn't tell me?"

Her eyes cleared and then filled with tears. One ran over and trickled down her cheek.

"Tell me," he said. "You need to understand, and I can help you do that."

"You can't help me," she whispered.

"I think I can," he said. "You can't tell me anything I haven't heard before." He leaned forward. "Things happen that women are ashamed of and think is their fault. That's almost never true, but they THINK it's true. Something like that happened to you ... didn't it."

Her eyes went down to the table. "Yes," she whispered.

"Tell me," he said.

"I can't," she moaned. "It's so terrible."

"I already know you had an orgasm," he said. "You think that's terrible, but it isn't. I can explain that, too. What else happened?"

"Paul and I..." she said and then faltered. "We used to play ... games."

"Rape games," said Bob.

Her eyes snapped to his. She was horrified again, but this time it was the horror of being unmasked.

"How can you KNOW that?" she panted. "How did you know I had an orgasm!? It's like you can see into my brain!"

"Calm down," he said. "I told you, I've heard it all before. You're not as strange as you think you are, and you did NOT let yourself be raped."

"If only I could believe that," she moaned. "Paul is sure I did it on purpose ... that I let a man in, while he was gone ... that it got out of hand, like you said." More tears were coursing down her cheeks.

Bob handed her his napkin, and she took it and dabbed gently at the streaks.

"But I DIDN'T!" Frustration was in her voice. "I DIDN'T let him in. Not like that. I never saw him before! He was just a repairman ... except that he wasn't, and I couldn't do anything!"

"That's right," said Bob, his voice soothing. "You were helpless. He'd have killed you if you'd have struggled too much. Rapists with knives mean what they say. You had no choice."

"Then why did I have an ORGASM?!" Her voice was a hoarse, shouting whisper.

"You couldn't help that either," said Bob.

"You're just trying to make me feel better," said Lacey. "Teresa tried to insist that I didn't have an orgasm ... that it was pain that I mistook for an orgasm, but I know the difference between pain and an orgasm. I felt both that day."

"I'm sure you did," said Bob. "As I said, Teresa is young and inexperienced. She's also poorly trained, as a lot of rape advocates are."

"So explain it," she said. She was calmer already, with the hope that he could do just that.

"An orgasm, whether it's in the male or female, is a physical process. The sexual organs are stimulated during the sex act. When the stimulation reaches a certain threshold, the body does things to relieve the situation, and an orgasm takes place. It's simple biology. The man ejaculates and the semen sooths the penis, causing it to deflate. In the woman, it causes her to want to lie still and rest. All that is nature's way of making babies happen. If the body is stimulated, it reacts. There's nothing you can do about it."

"But some orgasms come with less ... stimulation ... than others," she objected.

"That's the mental aspect of things. Your mind can supply some of the stimulation required. But even if your mind is totally against what is happening, the body can be manipulated in such a way that an orgasm HAS to take place, whether you want it to or not."

"So it was a fluke. He just happened to go long enough that I couldn't help it," she said.

"I suspect not," said Bob. She gaped at him and he went on. "For some rapists, who know what I just told you, part of the domination of the victim is to MAKE her have an orgasm. He knows she will be humiliated beyond anything else he could do to her, especially if she doesn't understand what's happening, like you didn't. It is the ultimate debasement of the victim. He makes her believe she wanted the whole thing to happen. Some women, who are repeatedly attacked by the same man, actually form a bond with their attacker. They come to believe that they just didn't know they wanted this kind of treatment. They voluntarily become enslaved."

She sat back. Her wine was untouched—he pushed it toward her.

"Take a sip. Do you see what I mean when I said none of this is your fault? You were manipulated all the way. He was an expert in making you feel that way. You really do have nothing whatsoever to feel guilty about."

"But what about the rape games?" she moaned. "That's why Paul thinks I did all this on purpose. He's sure that I was cheating, and that the man I was cheating with got carried away."

"I don't know Paul," said Bob. "But I do know he's an idiot. Your fantasy—the one you played with him—didn't involve knives, or hitting ... did it?"

"Of course not," she said, flushing. "I can't even believe I HAD that fantasy now, but it wasn't anything like what happened to me. After what happened, I feel perverted for ever thinking that fantasy was hot."

"Your fantasy wasn't about rape," said Bob. "It was about playing at rape ... pretending rape ... pretending to be helpless when, in fact, you knew quite well that you were NOT helpless. You could stop it anytime you wanted to and, if you're like most other women, you did stop it on one or more occasions."

She shook her head. "How do you DO that?" she asked, her mouth open. "It's like you've been looking into my life with a secret video camera."

"You're not as different, or as odd, or as perverted as you think," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "You're just a woman, trying to understand why her world is falling apart."

She sipped her wine.

"So it really wasn't my fault." For the first time she made a statement of it, rather than a question.

"Nope," he said.

"I opened the door," she said softly.

"You should be able to open your door any time of the day or night." said Bob. "When someone chooses to victimize you, because you are trusting, THEY are victimizing you. You aren't inviting them to do anything."

She was quiet for five minutes, during which she finished her wine. Her eyes were far away again, but she wasn't tense this time.

Finally she focused on him again. "Are you going to catch that son of a bitch?"

"It probably won't be me," said Bob, truthfully. "I just make traffic stops these days."

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