Rape interferes with how my partners and I can experience joy and connection even within incredibly loving, supportive, and nonnormative relationships. Rape culture means that even as someone who realized just how nonconsensual that high school relationship was just a few months after it ended, I still struggle with the repercussions of that experience and the many that followed it. Even though I had the strength to confront that boyfriend over AOL Instant Messenger to tell him just how I felt about our relationship (in the form of a badly written and very emo poem, of course), I kept doing
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