Warning: this article contains sensitive material that could be potentially triggering.

Video games are a fascinating medium, one that has been a cornerstone of the global media for their capability to bring people together and experience monumental moments unavailable to the normal person.  The accessibility of the internet and the tools to create these experiences have allowed creators and teams of all sizes to create these experiences for whomever is willing to dedicate themselves.  Video games are made with the intent to create these moments, to provide an escape from the mundane and reach out to the fantastic and unbelievable.

This article is not about the fantastic and unbelievable.  It’s raw, unsettling, but necessary. They didn’t do it for us; there’s a lot to understand, interpret, and ingest in the 40 minute tell-all of Taylor McCue’s He Fucked The Girl Out of Me.  For starters, this is not a review.  I don’t think this is something you can grade or critique based on technology and graphical fidelity then put a numeric score on.  What this is is a reaction to being the fly on the wall for a person’s traumatic experience, how America treats people that don’t fit its molded structure of an “average” person, and what “different” people will do to reach the feeling of normality most humans take for granted.

It starts with an extended hand.  A request for an ear.

Interpretation of trauma is different within all of us.  Some people can recognize the severity of the issue and become sympathetic to it.  Some can relate to the issue and empathize with their own feelings and situations.  They did not have this.  Misconstruing trauma with personal beliefs is a cocktail forever mixed terribly.  Shunning a traumatic event into silence will only fester the pain into something even more, and having the courage to even speak of such things is hard to do.  A response to the explanation of sexual trauma suffered by them: an erection from the listener, a shunned expletive from another, these would drive anyone to lock these feelings away.

The character within this 8-bit coded program proceeds from left to right, passing by the woes of opening yourself up only to cram the pieces back in.  The timeline of this trauma will peel back from right to left, back to the beginning.  We don’t know what happened, only that the support they thought they had does not approve.  How can people see the real you with their eyes willingly closed?

It starts with an empty pocket.  A request for medication.

Now a starving college student, they find themselves within a troublesome but common scenario: food or medication?  Colleges have a real prickly way of vacuuming in as much money as they possibly can, in the ways of inflated tuition, predatory housing, and fucking meal plans.  If you commit full-time to your education and do not come from a middle class and above household, you succumb to increasing your loan to them to survive.  If you combine this with medication needed to transition, you now must make a choice to eat or work towards being normal.

I cannot sympathize with the feeling of needing medication to transition into the person you know you are, but I can empathize with how the American Healthcare System will do everything in its power to ruin people who need medication to survive physically and mentally.  I’m Type 1 Diabetic, and my monthly bill to acquire my insulin with no insurance is around $2,400 a month.  Thankfully I have a job that lowers this tremendously, but the amount of freedom I have to pursue anything is now limited to having this job, or else I die.  This is common with many medications including medication for transitioning patients that a near majority of the country think are morally wrong for existing.  It costs nothing for these companies to make these medications, but those who are entrusted to help us will only support what fills their pockets and aligns with their beliefs.  How can people help the real you with their arms willingly crossed?

It starts with a proposition.  A request for funds.

So with no job, no support, and no time, where do you go to get the money to help you make it?  Wherever you can get it.  A friend of theirs provides an opportunity to make some money by being a “date.”  A gentler term for “sex worker.”  Them and their friend would go on a date with another guy and be paid for their time: provided outfits, food, entertainment, all for their time and attention.  It sounds too good to be true, and in most cases it is.  Sex work is illegal in almost every part of the country, where the act of sex is not illegal but the exchange of funds for sex is life-threatening, so sex workers must cloud identities through anonymity: different names, burner phones, low profiles, hushed tones.  But the risk is provided within a monetary reward, in their case: a $200 split for a night.  It’s enough money to eat for a few days, and work towards paying off the ~$350 medication tab.

The world is a constant struggle of give and take.  Sometimes you have take and take and take until you see how much you’re allowed to take.  How many samples can you take from the mall food court before they tell you to quit?  How much money can you take from men who are willing to pay for your attention?  Their friend implores that there’s no room for feelings where they’re going.  It’s a job.  Be on your guard.  Watch your back.  Don’t get caught.  How can people help the real you when the system is willingly broken?

It starts with a night out.  A request for your attention.

Bumping bass, strobing lights, a Pepsi.  They’re only 19, with a smeared “X” Sharpie’d onto both hands.  Touch a drink, and they’re gone.  The man provides drinks, swiftly refused by their friend knowing good and well they can’t trust what may or may not be in those.  There are rules to the game, but they don’t know them.  Everything moves so swiftly.  The man says he likes them, and wants to see them again alone.  You both feel uncomfortable with this.  It’s hard to continue to click on.

It ends with a kink.  A demand for their innocence.

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He Fucked The Girl Out of Me is not a game but a somber, therapeutic release.  An attempt to free the pressure of compressed silence from their internal black hole of guilt and shame that carries the weight no human should bear.  It’s the world promising everyone the chance to be a beautiful butterfly, and the policies that rip the wings off the ones not deemed beautiful to the world.  It’s a frustrating, debilitating realization that if the world just fucking let people be who they want to be, trauma like this would not happen.  This story shouldn’t need to exist.