Most people hear about it on the news and they think "what a shame, how sad." They think it is some creepy dark stranger on the street of a major city who captures a young girl whose parents are too naive or busy or negligent to walk her home from school. That is when she is eight. When the girl is 25 and stumbling out of a bar right into the arms of some awful man who is out to prey on her trembling hands and glassy eyes then suddenly, the same breed of creep who attacked the little girl is no creep at all but, in fact, just an ordinary man. It is her fault, after all, what did she expect after consuming enough alcohol to drown a small child or wearing a skirt that clearly gives him permission to force himself onto her unprotected and unassuming body as she lay there lifeless, either passed out or staring up at him helplessly from below? Well, what they don't tell you about ****** assault is that usually it is not a strange character at a club or on a street corner but someone who is in your life, has gained your trust and has taken it and pitched it out an open window the second he lures you into his dark, ruthless eyes. They brush it under the rug of society and leave out the details that it does not usually take place in an abandoned warehouse or on concrete but rather in a bedroom or a hallway in your workplace or school that you have walked through comfortably with him so many times before and now you can barely approach the scene of the crime without having the stench climb up your nostrils and paralyze your body until the feeling nearly sends you to the floor. They fail to admit that the victim -- who is not truly a victim at all because society smacks that label right onto her forehead, implying that the survivor is weak and the attacker won whatever sick game he was playing-- frequently wishes that she had not survived so she would not have to grapple with the pain of living with this secret and seeing his face every day, knowing that should she say a word he has an arsenal of evidence against her and she has none to back her story. They don't know that she knows in the back if her mind that she does not deserve what he did to her but in her eyes, she froze and let him use and abuse her, so how could she not owe it to this man who extracted every bit of joy from her soul and gutted every bit of life from her being? He asked me why I am so sad after he apologized to me, but did he forget the harassing texts he sent me when I would not sleep with him or the way I froze when he made me do other things?  No.  And no, the public does not hear that side of the story that so desperately needs to explode and immerse every area of society that permits **** culture rather than attempts to bring it to a screaming halt. How can society condemn assault victims and coddle assaulters after a guilty verdict is reached? As misogyny prevails, I am asked why I let this happen, told to just get over it, and questioned as to why I am so pessimistic. I am not an optimist, nor a pessimist: I am dead inside after being murdered in a culture that insists on calling it suicide.