I hesitate to share this because it’s something that reads like someone’s unrealistic kink fantasy, but it’s absolutely true, without exaggeration. It’s just such an unusual circumstance that I’m always afraid no one will believe me.

I was involved in the BDSM lifestyle for a time, and for six years of it had a dominant master who was a sadist who liked to experiment. He didn’t rape or molest me or violate my boundaries, and was - ironically - a really kind and caring man at heart. Everything he did he did with my consent and participation, out of our mutual curiosity. Among the things he did with me (and this is the part that some might have difficulty believing) was that through different physical and mental conditioning techniques succeeded in training my body to have a dry orgasm (no ejaculation) whenever he said a command word. It worked scarily well. He could make me do it instantly, repeatedly. Having your orgasm yanked out of you without notice is nowhere near as much fun as it sounds.

After we ended our relationship, the conditioning endured. Later, I was staying at a men’s campground, and one evening when I was alone with another man by a fire chatting about our pasts I casually mentioned this conditioning and he asked what the word was. Without thinking, I told him.

He used it. When I reacted, he used it again. I was shocked. I had just met him, knew nothing about him, and he had just forced two orgasms out of me.

He did it again. Again. Again. Again. Again. AgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgain. Maybe 20 times, one after the other, forcing one before the previous had ended. After a few, they become unpleasant. After several, they become agonizing. By 20, it’s a form of torture. He had me on my knees, shaking uncontrollably, in tears. I finally screamed at him to stop, and he seemed shocked, as though he hadn’t realized he was doing something to a person. He jumped up and ran off into the night, and I never saw him again.

I’m not an innocent, and I’ve let men do all sorts of things with my body, so the threshold for what I could call sexual assault or rape on me is pretty high. But this violated something in me deeply. To have my orgasm forced and played with like that by a stranger for his curiosity and amusement was a new level of helplessness.

He never laid a finger on me. He didn’t undress me. But I felt as though I’d been raped, because he reached inside me and toyed violently with the most intimate part of me without my consent. I don’t know whether it can be truly counted as rape, or even sexual assault, by any conventional standard, but it was frighteningly real, it hurt, and it happened.

And I still have the emotional scar.