On Being Raped

(Hardback)

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Description

When Raymond Douglas was an 18 year old living in Europe, he was brutally raped by a Catholic priest. He eventually moved to the United States and became a highly regarded historian, writing with great care about the violent expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after the Second World War, and parsing the complicated moral questions of these actions. But until now, he has been utterly silent about his own experience of trauma.

Reviews

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.
Harpers 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 dont 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 readers 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. Douglass 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

Author Bio

Raymond M. Douglas is the Russell B. Colgate Distinguished University Professor of History at Colgate University. His most recent work of history, Orderly and Humane- The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, received the 2013 George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.