Was I "Sexually Assaulted"?

The damage of trauma culture

When I was a teenager, among my social circle there was a practice called “tea-bagging” where a guy would place his testicles on the head of a friend who was sitting or lying down. This happened to me at least a few times, and I never thought about it again. It wasn’t one of the top one thousand unpleasant things that has happened in my life.

But years later, via exposure to the mass media, I realized that I had the right to call myself a sex abuse survivor. In 2017, the website of the US military conducted an interview in which an Army officer discussed how tea-bagging once used to be considered a prank, but was now taken very seriously as sexual assault. This practice needed to be stamped out, “even if everyone involved supposedly finds it funny.”

The next year, the New York Times published an op-ed by Justin Rose, a man claiming to have been sexually assaulted in the military. The author recounted how he had been “touched by another Marine, inappropriately and without consent — and I hadn’t done anything about it.” All his other Marine bros saw he was insecure regarding what happened, and would keep making fun of him. The military is criticized for not taking his claims seriously or providing him counseling. The incident still stays with him, and now he tells his story to soldiers under his command. In his byline, Rose describes himself as “a Disney expert and a fun dad.”