This rings very true, for me. If someone had asked me a few months ago if I had ever been sexually assaulted, I would have answered "No, of course not".

But thinking more about what sexual assault is, myriad examples flooded to my mind...And they kept coming and coming. It was shocking to me how much so many things had happened and I had simply normalized them and never labeled them as sexual assault.

I had never thought about those incidents in that frame before--because they didn't affect my life greatly, I wasn't traumatized by them in the long run, and I wouldn't want to think of myself as a "victim". And, of course, I never pressed charges.

So I can most certainly see how someone could be raped and say "wait, was that really rape" and not believe that they're the person who gets raped.

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Also, "people have all sorts of different reactions to life-changing trauma" misses another edge case, that not every rape *is* life-changing trauma.

I had explicitly said no to sexual activity, woke up to sexual activity happening to me, so definitely rape [though it was female-on-male so many jurisdictions might disagree], but it was not life-changing trauma. I didn't report it to anyone because it seems like not a big deal, reporting would be more trouble than it would be worth, etc.

I feel very slightly bad about that, in that maybe it would happen again to someone who *would* be traumatized in a similar situation, but given that it wasn't violent or damaging in any way, and required a specific set of circumstances that could totally reasonably be considered a misunderstanding (the lesson I took from it is "don't share a bed with anyone you don't intend to have sexual relations with"), it seems reasonably unlikely that it would be a recurring issue.

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