Cat Lady In Waiting

What I Wish I Said to My Rapist https://t.co/HJtwG7djiH pic.twitter.com/am62QVLcxS

— Marie Claire (@marieclaire) March 10, 2017

Gut-wrenching account of a woman having her honor and virtue stolen? Or click-bait? Somewhere in-between, actually.

Subtitle, Five years after his crime, I finally realize what happened. This article's URL source title reads, "raped-by-someone-i-liked." And the HTML index page reads, I Was Date Raped - I Woke Up To A Man Having Sex With Me.

Thus, the original title of the essay was "raped by someone I liked," but that wasn't salacious enough for author Charlotte Lieberman's editor. You won't get any sympathy unless you scream "RAPE."

No small matter to point out that her personal narrative has undergone as many revisions as the article.

And the article could have used even more work. For example, she writes, "When I was in my teens, my mom told me never to go to Central Park alone." In the next paragraph, she writes, "The summer after my sophomore year I traveled to Mexico for a competitive internship program." I'm guessing it was her college sophomore year, but the prior reference to "my teens" impresses upon the reader a much younger reference.

So she met a guy she liked, and "We went back to where I was staying and had standardly boring intercourse." She had consensual sex with a young man she liked. Then, oh, the horror.

"A few hours later I woke up—suddenly and disoriented. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I realized that the guy who had just fallen asleep beside me was now inside of me. We were, apparently, having sex. I knew that it wasn't consensual."

No, you have re-framed it. After five years, you came up with a rationalization for your sluttiness that made him the bad guy.

"Just because you have consensual sex with a man at 1 a.m. doesn't mean he can take whatever he wants at 4." It seems to me that he was taking the exact same thing he took before. Because you didn't object before, nor after. He wasn't taking "whatever he wanted." He wasn't raping your ass.

This is the image Charlotte Lieberman presents to the world. Her Twitter bio lists one of her interests as "mental health." Totally didn't see that coming. The only thing missing from her Twitter bio is the names of her cats. We'll give that one a little time.

Hey Charlotte, if you really think you were raped, why don't you call the police?