Content warning: this story discusses sexual assault.
Growing up, I attended a Canadian sleepaway camp every summer. From the ages of 9 to 16, I spent two months of the year in a bubble, closed off from the world and spending all of my time with friends. I spent each school year in the city counting down the minutes until the moment I could go back to camp, and when I was there, I relished in it.
For younger kids, camp is all about gaining independence and enjoying activities like crafts and swimming. When you’re a kid, camp is what it’s supposed to be: an exciting, carefree summer away from the hustle and bustle of the city. But around age 14, camp transitions from an innocent childhood experience to a pretty naughty one. The combination of unlimited freedom and raging hormones creates a wild environment — suddenly, instead of staying up late talking or playing cards, my friends were out exploring the newfound world of hookup culture.
I was never keen on hooking up — that’s just who I am — and I never envied my friends for the sexual experiences they were having. It was common to witness my friends blatantly ignoring someone they had made out with the night before, because it was an unspoken rule among campers to never discuss anything sexual with your hookup partner. There were virtually no real relationships, and more importantly, there was no consent or respect.
Camp had trained my brain to think of any form of sexual communication as odd, and I believed silence was the appropriate answer if I wasn’t comfortable.
As soon as this shift occurred, my love for camp began to slowly diminish. Although I’m the most strong-willed and assertive person I know, I was pressured into my first kiss (which, long story short, was essentially a lame prank orchestrated behind my back). I was an insecure 14-year-old in an environment where people lived off of drama, and as a girl, saying “no” to male attention was considered preposterous. At camp, a person’s worth was defined by whether or not they spent their nights kissing someone they had no real connection with. If you weren’t, you were pretty much invisible.
My catastrophic first kiss experience was not the only time I experienced a lack of communication and respect from a guy. In my final summer at camp, I started developing feelings for a boy I’d been friends with the whole summer. Near the end of August, he asked me to hook up. I did like him, but I was not ready for more than just a kiss, and he didn’t think once to ask me what I was comfortable with. I remember how wrong it felt when he put his hand up my shirt and in my pants without asking me if it was OK. All I knew was what I’d been told by my friends: if the guy decides to move fast, it’s your job to go along for the ride.
Perhaps this contributed to the reason I left camp, or maybe it was the generally toxic social environment. Either way, for years, I’d been talking about this hookup like it was romantic and happy, a story about two people finally connecting after a summer of being friends. I so desperately wanted that to be the narrative, so I convinced myself it was. But it was only a couple of years ago when I began to shift my mindset about the whole experience.
The tears I shed the day after it happened didn’t come from nervousness; they symbolized my discomfort from the night before that I was unable to contextualize.
I hate that it took another guy for me to realize how wrong my previous romantic experiences were, but that’s just how it went. When my first-ever boyfriend asked me for consent, my first thought was, wow, that’s kind of weird and awkward, not that’s a normal, respectful thing to do. Camp had trained my brain to think of any form of sexual communication as odd, and I believed silence was the appropriate answer if I wasn’t comfortable. It was only when he continued asking for consent that alarm bells began going off in my head about the guy from three years prior.
In the five years since my camp experience, I’ve come to realize more and more that it wasn’t romantic in the slightest — instead, it represents the dark side of hookup culture, where I was essentially brainwashed into thinking SA only had one definition. But the truth is, I was assaulted. Sure, I didn’t say no, but I also definitely didn’t say yes in any way.
That pit in my stomach in the weeks after the incident wasn’t butterflies; it was guilt, and the lingering feeling of being violated. The tears I shed the day after it happened didn’t come from nervousness; they symbolized my discomfort from the night before that I was unable to contextualize. It took years of time and distance to come to terms with the fact that consent is the bare minimum, and my experience should never be the standard.
When I spoke to my sister about how what had happened to me was assault, she said something that further pointed toward the dangers of the blurry lines in hookup culture. “I guess that means I’ve been assaulted, too.” Both of us had been fooled for years into thinking that we were just “not ready,” and that communicating these sentiments in the moment wouldn’t be an acceptable response.
Nobody ever emphasized the importance of consent; instead, campers cheered each other on for any kind of sexual encounter.
Ever since I first shifted my thinking about these experiences, I’ve placed a high priority on emphasizing consent. Whenever my friends tell me about a new hookup, I always ask them if they felt comfortable and okay with how the person was treating them — a question I never received from my friends or counselors at camp, and so desperately needed to hear. It’s not easy, but I’m slowly becoming more open about the lessons I’ve learned in hopes of creating a safe space where people can have conversations about consent and SA, and raise the standards of what it means to truly be respected.
I don’t feel resentment toward the guy who sexually assaulted me. Nobody ever emphasized the importance of consent; instead, campers cheered each other on for any kind of sexual encounter. That doesn’t excuse what he did, but I somehow can’t bring myself to be angry at him. I am, however, resentful of the camp environment, which was in many ways responsible for the drastic levels of peer pressure and lack of any kind of sexual education. I have no doubt that blind eyes toward instances of SA led to many more cases. In the end, I can only hope that stories like mine will inspire others to know their worth and exit whatever toxic environment may be causing them pain — or, at the very least, accept that they deserve to be treated better.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit hotline.rainn.org.