The Myth of the Girl Who Gets Raped
Purity culture’s most insidious gift is damaging us every day
Every year, the health teacher at my school organizes a blood drive. If I’m present when she is doing her recruitment in the teachers’ lounge, she takes a moment to say, “Not you, Liz.” We have a long-standing deal that I won’t sign up and I won’t tell my trio of horror stories to scare off anyone else.
There’s the standard fainting story, with the dramatic addition of collapsing in the parking lot and being caught and carried back inside. There’s the rare but gross story of my blood clotting and starting to scab over while the needle was still in my vein. And then there’s the time when I was 19 years old and the staff became convinced I was HIV positive.
Running theory is I clicked the wrong answer on one or two online questions, and I also had a couple of fading mouth sores from the medication I had started for stomach ulcers. But it was a traumatizing hour as one official, and then another, shook my hand and casually turned over my forearm to (I eventually realized) check for track marks from intravenous drug use. Finding none, each new person asked again if there were any way I had had sex with a man who had sex with a man before 1986. Part of the problem may have been that my responses grew increasingly sarcastic. A girl…
