Amy Schumer has made a living joking about sex.
She even got VERY candid about giving her then-boyfriend a blow job last March.
But the comedian is very much aware that sexual assault is no laughing matter, and she’s here to tell her full story about an unfortunate past experience in this realm.
“I’ve been flat-out raped,” Schumer told Katie Couric this week for the reporter’s Wonder Women podcast series.
Such an admission marks the first time Schumer has used this word when describing her troubled history.
In her autobiography, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, Schumer did write about how her first sexual encounter was NOT consensual.
She also opened up about the incident to Marie Claire in 2016, telling the magazine at the time:
“My first sexual experience was not a good one.”
Schumer told Howard Stern something similar that same year, saying she fell asleep one night alongside her high school boyfriend and woke up with him inside of her.
She did not press charges.
She even stayed with the boyfriend and found herself comforting him at times over what had happened.
“People, they want you to have been raped perfectly, and they want you to be a perfect victim,” Schumer told Stern, explaining how sexual assaults vary and the types of victims very.
At the end of the day, however, non-consensual sex is non-consensual sex.
“We’re so critical and it makes victims really not wanna speak up,” Schumer added.
That was in 2016.
Fast forward nearly two years and we’re in the middle of a #MeToo movement in which women are finally starting to feel empowered and in which sexual assault is at last being treated like the very serious issue that it is.
Recalling this same incident with her high school boyfriend, Schumer told Couric:
“I didn’t think about it until I started reading my journal again.
“When it happened, I wrote about it almost like a throwaway. It was like, ‘And then I looked down and realized he was inside of me. He was saying, I’m so sorry and I can’t believe I did this."”
She continued:
“This was 17 years ago. There are just so many factors. I had another time with a boyfriend where I was saying, ‘No, stop,’ and it was just completely ignored.”
Schumer now realizes that none of this was okay.
Moreover, Schumer says flat-out rape or assault is easy to identify.
But there are plenty of other situation that also require women to speak out and men to shape up.
“If you have a doctor that makes you uncomfortable, or you get a massage, or you have a date with someone and they coerce you in a situation like the Aziz [Ansari] one, I don’t think there’s any sort of criminal charge, but I think that it’s good for everybody to learn that that behavior’s not acceptable,” she says.
“It’s not a crime, but it’s not cool. And it can still really mess with a woman.”
In this case, Schumer is referring to Aziz Ansari being accused of sexual misconduct after going on a date with a woman who claims she repeatedly made it clear to the star that she did not want to go as far physically as he wanted to go.
