Her story goes like this: New Jersey, New Year’s Eve, 1999. Four teenagers. Two boys, two girls, cruising through the suburbs. Snow-stripped saplings flying by in rows on the flanks of the highway. Bottles of smuggled booze glugged merrily in the backseat. One of the girls is 15-year-old Shira Wheeler.

At a house, the girls pair off with the guys, then briefly retreat to the bathroom. Shira asks her more-experienced friend if she should lose her virginity to the boy she’s with. “Well,” says the friend. “You’re drunk, so it’ll hurt less.” Shira has sex with the boy. And then she passes out. Hours later, half conscious, she is suddenly aware that someone is on top of her. But, she realizes, through a fog, it’s not the guy from before. It’s the one who was with her friend. Beneath him, she finds it hard to speak. It feels like everything is happening outside of her body. She vaguely remembers saying “condom” over and over.

The next Monday, says Wheeler, “My entire high school knew by first period.” The boys had told everyone — except, in their version, what had happened was a wild orgy. “It’s hard to describe how ashamed I felt.”

Some of her friends stopped talking to her, she recalls. One girl pulled her aside, looked her straight in the eyes, and asked, “Is it true?” Wheeler didn’t have the words to explain, so she simply said yes.

Later, she told a friend what had actually happened.

“Shira, that’s not right,” he had insisted. “That’s rape.”

“It was the first time I had heard that word,” she says now.

For Wheeler, 16 years later, coming to terms with her ordeal has meant looking at the bigger picture. Now she’s channelling her energy into creating a business that starts a conversation about women’s health and sexuality.

“I know what happened to me was completely wrong. But I also don’t see the situation as black-and-white,” Wheeler says. “I see the whole context — the world we live in. Back then, we had never even heard the word ‘consent’. And what little we learned [about sexuality] in health class didn’t talk about women. I think about those lessons that taught me about wet dreams and male ejaculation. And the magazines I read about ‘how to give the perfect blow job.’ But I had no information on how to discover my own pleasure! All of this, combined with what I experienced, has led to me feeling so strongly that we have to change the way we behave as a culture, so that this type of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”