On Being Raped

“A searing, self-reflective account…Courageous, sobering, and cathartic.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“This short and devastating memoir is at once intimate and analytical…On Being Raped is eloquent about the nonexistent resources available to male rape victims, a situation that mirrors what female victims faced a half century ago.”
—Harper’s Magazine

“On Being Raped, Douglas’ slim volume about that four-hour experience and everything that followed, is as much a political treatise as a memoir. It serves as a declaration of the rights of male rape victims within a culture that still believes such things don’t happen, not to real men.”
—Libby Copeland, Slate Book Review

“On Being Raped is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the effects of sexual violence. Told with grace, beauty, and raw human emotion, it makes the world face the too often neglected plight of adult male survivors.”
—Laura Gray-Rosendale, author of College Girl: A Memoir

“With great courage and honesty, Raymond M. Douglas recounts and interrogates the most intimate and devastating violation a human being, man or woman, can suffer. His beautifully written inquiry faces down all the questions, one by one, and in doing so challenges the reader’s assumptions about gender, violence, masculinity, and recovery. On Being Raped is a profoundly moving memoir that will press you to think hard about your gendered response to sexual violence, especially when the person victimized suffers in a body the prevailing attitude deems somehow less worthy of sympathy, support, and justice. Douglas has gone into the darkness and brought us back a great gift. May we be wise enough to receive it.”
—Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House and Love & Fury

“This is an extraordinary book and we are so lucky that Raymond M. Douglas has had the courage to write it. He tells his story of being raped with unflinching honesty and yet also great eloquence. In its fierce intelligence, On Being Raped shocks but also inspires us. Douglas’s thoughts on the ‘survivor’ movement (or ‘on not getting over it’) are fresh and analytically precise. This wise and elegantly written book deserves a wide general audience.”
—Mary Louise Roberts, author of What Soldiers Do