Waiting For My Rape

I was disheartened to see some readers criticize Jessica Anya Blau’s story “Waiting for My Rape” [August 2018]. Speaking from experience, I know rape can occur in unexpected ways: consenting to sex but not oral sex; within a marriage; with a friend. It took me time to acknowledge I’d been raped. Rape can be confusing and is often more nuanced than most people are comfortable with.

I hope Blau’s critics will challenge their antiquated beliefs about consent. The story doesn’t perpetuate stereotypes; it helps to broaden the conversation.

Jessica Anya Blau’s short story “Waiting for My Rape” was a downright straight-shot gut punch — not because it was so well written that it slyly crept up on you, but because it frankly addressed the insanity of alcoholism. Her description of the twisted mental hell of uncontrolled drinking took me back to a time in my life when no one liked me, not even myself. It also gave me a new way to look at my nearly twenty years of sobriety.

Jessica Anya Blau is a talented writer, but “Waiting for My Rape” does not have enough redeeming qualities to distinguish it from pornography. The protagonist’s predictable decision to return to the rapist’s house at the end of the story perpetuates stereotypes about victims of sexual abuse who secretly crave the experience. At this moment in history, does The Sun want to be associated with that message?

“Nausea washed through me as I came.” This sentence in Jessica Anya Blau’s “Waiting for My Rape” [August 2018] exposed something hidden in me and left me blinking and dazed as a newborn. I am no stranger to the realities of sexual abuse and all the ways it infiltrates a life, and I’m only beginning to see that compassion is my most powerful tool. What a gift to have writers like Blau to help light the way.

Let’s be real: the narrator of Jessica Anya Blau’s short story “Waiting for My Rape” [August 2018] laid herself out on a platter for a creepy man in the Appalachian woods. The world where a woman can get naked and drunk with a strange man and not run a huge risk of getting raped does not exist.

She did get raped, but that is not the most important question the story raises. Many of us have suffered violations in situations that are less obviously self-destructive. Blau’s narrator should ask herself: Why did I put myself out there like that, and how can I better love and protect myself in the future?

As a victim of rape and sexual assault — and in light of the current #MeToo movement — I was appalled by Jessica Anya Blau’s story “Waiting for My Rape.” I consider myself liberal minded and welcome others’ views about difficult topics, but publishing this story was a mistake, mostly because it lends credence to the argument that rape victims were “asking for it.”