This is what I tell myself:
It was not violent, even though it hurt.
I was not drugged, even though I was drunk.
I did not get anything I hadn’t asked for.
Love was the preoccupation of my girlhood. I used to fall in love all the time. I fell in love with friends, with movie stars, with characters in books. I devoted entire diaries to it: Someday my prince will come. Some day there will be a big love, a grand love, a love to make me feel less alone.
I was raised Catholic, so I used to think – well into high school, even – that I would wait until marriage before having sex. Then I thought I would wait, at least, until I was in love. Sex was a mysterious and frightening thing, a sacred thing, a way of communicating more than just words and emotions. It was a way out of loneliness – to be naked with another human; to be bare yet safe.
In high school, my friends and I used to be the biggest bunch of virgins you’d ever meet, nerds who didn’t know how to touch, how to enjoy a kiss.
But once we got to college, virgins started dropping like flies. Except for me. So I went out one night and I drank four glasses of wine with my fiction class. I announced to everyone, including my professor, that I was very drunk. I informed a close friend that I was going to take one of the guys home with me. “Tonight Is The Night,” I said. She said she didn’t think it was a good idea. I did it anyway.
I don’t think there is a woman among my friends who hasn’t been assaulted in some way, by either friend or stranger, by someone they trusted or someone whose face they’d never seen before. We have all been hurt. And part of me thinks, cynically, bitterly, that that’s just the way it is. Suck it up, buttercup. You get hurt. You hold ice to the bruise, numb the sensation, rub the site of impact until the pain disperses. You move on. You try to stay out of harm’s way.
Or sometimes you hurt yourself before anyone else has the chance to. Then it’s nobody’s fault but your own.
And isn’t there power in that?
This is what I tell myself:
I liked it.
At least it’s over with.
I got exactly what I asked for.
This is what is harder to say:
I changed my mind the moment before. My body changed my mind for me; after the four glasses of wine, and the groping in the cab, and the finally, finally pounding with my heart, my body hesitated.
But still, I did not say no. Or stop. Or wait. Or maybe we’d better not.
He said, “You’re such a tease,” which, all things considered, seemed like a fair assessment.
I said (aloud?) okay.
My mother tells me that when I was a kid I had a mantra for dealing with doctors’ appointments. She says it fairly often, like it’s a favorite memory of hers. Me as a little girl, shaking in the cold of the office, and small, small, small.
Repeating, a litany: “Not so bad, not so bad.” Over and over.
I texted my friends the next morning, proud and in pain. They were, none of them, impressed.
I made him coffee.
I walked him downstairs.
He kissed me goodbye in front of the dormitory security guards, a gesture both unnecessary and strange, incongruent with the way he had touched me the night before.
He called me a few hours later. I was sitting in my poetry class, surprised to see his name light up on my phone, simultaneously pleased and ashamed.
He asked if I was okay.
I kept asking for it.
I learned to move properly, to make the right sounds.
Each time, I learned a little more how to go away.
One time, tired, he said we could just cuddle instead. He was gentle. (Unnecessary and strange.) He kissed me, slow and thorough. I kissed him back hard. I bit his lip until it bled. I made him fuck me.
This is what I tell myself:
Nobody ever has a good first time.
I said (aloud?) okay.
I said, come over. Come.
Not so bad, not so bad, not so bad.
Somewhere in the middle, I travel to Spain. I have sex with a boy who is younger than me. His mother says to him on the first day, no toques la Americana, and it is a rule that I know immediately I’ll break. He calls me diosa and introduces me to his friends. He treats me like he can’t believe his luck, and he cries when I leave.
I come back to what I know.
I write in my diary, sex is a thing you can do with your body sometimes, if you choose to. An activity divorced from the quality of the act. It doesn’t matter.
Another time, afterward, resentful and sad and sore, I asked him if he had a girlfriend. He said yes. I asked him if he fucked his girlfriend that way. He said no.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing about love.
My mother taught my brother and me how to say no. Over and over when we were children, she would ask us: “What do you say when someone touches you where you don’t want to be touched?” And we would shout, giggling, no! no! no!
Adrienne Rich writes about a spider:
“…I recognize in her
impatience – my own –
the passion to make and make again
where such unmaking reigns
the refusal to be a victim
we have lived with violence for so long
am I to go on saying
for myself, for her
This is my body,
take and destroy it?”
But what if you unmake, and unmake, obsessed with the unraveling? I remember there would be months in between each time we fucked. I thought that meant I was better. What kind of woman, after all, chooses a sex life like this?
I deleted his number from my phone but somehow, drunk, I was always able to recall it. If he ignored my transparent come-ons, I was irate. I told him so: “I hate the way you fuck me.” Regardless, inevitably he would come. What kind of man chooses a sex life like this?
One night I stayed at my parents’ apartment, my mother asleep beside me in my childhood bedroom. I stared at the screen of my phone glowing as I waited for his response. Thinking, over and over:
Show me what this body is for.
It ended eventually but simply with a new apartment. A safe and sacred place. The apartment was warm and small. I learned to be alone there. For years I am alone, and lonely, my body a thing that eats and sleeps, that doesn’t touch itself and isn’t touched.
This is what I tell myself:
Sex is a thing you can do with your body sometimes, if you choose to.
It is a thing you can witness your body doing; a thing you can witness being done.
When it gets boring in the middle, just wait until it’s over.
This can be a good time to make grocery lists, to think of a reply to that email, to remind yourself to feed the dog.
The first woman who ever told me she loved me thought my first time was something it was not, and told me so. We talked around the word. She asked questions. “Do you think he knew he was hurting you?” “Do you think, if you had asked, he would have stopped?”
I said, I insisted, it hurt, but he didn’t hurt me.
I said, what does it matter, I never asked him to stop.
I thought of my body’s hesitation. A small but noticeable thing.
I thought of all the times my mother told me how everything shows, helplessly, on my face.
How I said (aloud?) okay.
She asked me, “What would you say if another woman told you this story?”
I try to say kind things.
I listen to her heartbeat. I say, “The statute of limitations for feeling bad about this is up” and we laugh until I’m crying.
A friend of mine, Elle, and I talked recently about sex and society. How consensual sex can still be traumatic. How the lines between consent and non-consent are frequently blurred, particularly for young women, particularly during their most formative experiences. We agreed that we don’t have enough words, the right words, the language.
There is a difference between hesitating and saying, firmly, no. What is the name for that place? I imagine it to be vast, to be full of women who said okay, who whispered it, or didn’t. I imagine it to be full of shadows, and a difficult place to leave.
Around the same time I worked with a photographer on a project about sexual violence. She told me that it is always black and white, that the edges of a violation are always firmly drawn (in ink, in stone, in anything but sand), as if we could point to our respective experiences on a map and find them in difference hemispheres. I felt wounded even as I agreed.
Sex can be both consensual and traumatic, that’s true. But you lay on me with the full weight of your body, and the weight of your words and everything behind them: “You’re such a tease.”
Don’t be such a tease.
Don’t be such a tease.
The worst thing a girl can be.
What is a woman’s body for, after all? Show me what this body is for.
And I said (aloud?) okay.
I wonder what Elle teaches her daughter. What does she tell her daughter that her young body is for? My mother taught me to say no! loudly, firmly, to protect myself from strangers who might hurt me in obvious ways.
But a woman is not a child, and the world is subtle. Nobody teaches us to say, maybe. To say, I’m not sure. Please wait. On second thought, maybe we shouldn’t. On second thought, I don’t want this. I’m not ready. To say, touch me a little longer first. Touch me at all. Be gentle. Go slow. Nobody teaches us to protect ourselves from selfish drunk boys who are not taught to recognize hesitation as anything other than another boundary to be skirted, a roadblock on the separate map from which they learned to navigate.
The older I get, the more I am certain that every woman in the world has had an experience like this. My mother, my grandmother. Girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and friends. It comes up in conversations with women I’ve only just met, thousands of miles from my home, sometimes minutes within knowing each other. The actress Loretta Young, shortly before her death, learned the words date rape and discovered a name for the place Clark Gable had taken her decades ago, an act that changed her life.
We know it before there are words for it. We know it when there aren’t words to describe exactly what happened. The edges of a violation are not drawn in ink or stone or sand. They aren’t even written on the body, not always. The statute of limitations for feeling bad about this is up, but when my current girlfriend and I talked about sexual objectification – how everyone does it: is made an object and objectifies others, even the people they love – I was surprised into being there again, gone away from my body as it was fucked, and I had to hide in the bathroom and take deep breaths and say to myself, over and over, Not so bad, not so bad, not so bad.
oh, shit. oh man, oh shit. yeah. yes. this.
thank you for being brave enough to attempt to put into words what I’ve been struggling with for over a year now.
WOW THIS IS THE GREATEST I AM IN AWE (and sorrow)
I’m not sure there are words to express how I feel about this piece, but one of my majors was English Writing, so dammit, I’m going to try.
Thank you for writing this, but oh, it hurt, seeing myself in those words. Remembering.
I have a piece on a similar subject (one I was even thinking about submitting to the toast, as a matter of fact, before I figured it would be too depressing and no one would want to read it), but I’m not sure I could ever have nailed quite like you did, this: “I learned to move properly, to make the right sounds. Each time, I learned a little more how to go away.” I said yes. Did I say yes? I didn’t say no. I studied the porn he gave me.
And this: “[Sex] is a thing you can witness your body doing; a thing you can witness being done.” The person, me, above the neck and up, somewhere far away thinking about other things, and the body, someone’s, below the shoulders, doing things. Having things done to it. I’m sure it managed quite well on its own.
So, tl;dr, ouch but yes.
The older I get, the more I am certain that every woman in the world has had an experience like this.
Thank you for saying it.
When I read this all I could think was You’re right, you’re right, you’re right, don’t stop saying it because it has to be said. And then, Oh hell. Because if this is true, then how can things ever get any better? (And of course it is true.)
It isn’t true, though. I know I’m lucky, to be a lesbian who never tried to date or fuck or even kiss a man, and maybe that’s how I escaped this, but I’m still a woman. Womanhood is not dependent on trauma. There is no absolute universal female experience.
Holy. Shit. This is beautiful and devastating and I’m tearing up at work. Thank you.
Thank you for saying it. I’m all out of words after this.
wow. thank you for this.
This was so beautiful and brave and well-written. I had to stop halfway through to tear up a bit and then calm down, because I do think you’re right… I think every woman in the world has had an experience like this, and it’s just so hard to think about.
this is incredible. this + the teen diary piece you just wrote that was linked this morning…both incredible. thank you, and i am so glad to see this on the toast!
I think it’s really important to teach young men to recognize hesitation, reluctance, and anything other than an enthusiastic “Yes!!” as a denial of consent, and to respect it.
I think it’s equally important to teach young women the words to use when they do want to wait, when they change their minds, to describe what they want and don’t want. Normalize the idea that women aren’t obligated to submit and satiate a man’s sexual desire.
There needs to be a cultural shift in this regard, and it needs to be portrayed and endorsed by every level of adult society.
Incredibly well written. I think this will strike home with so, so many people.
I’m trying to think of a coherent response to this. This is so courageous and so, so illuminating. This names things that weren’t named, it points out so many sickening fears and expectations in me that I didn’t know were there. Thank you so much for writing this.
Thank you for writing this. I am so so glad to be working from home right now.
You wrote the essay I’ve been circling around for almost three years. And you hit it.
Hmmm. Well, I have a couple of things to say here. Please forgive me if I’m a bit disjointed, I have many thoughts at once.
I’m 41. I’ve “been around the block” (around the country mile, probably) and I hesitate to jump on board with anything that takes power away from women and blames men, which I am not entirely sure this piece is doing as I am not entirely sure it is not.
Sex between men and women is, quite often, a physically violent, jarring experience. Especially young women, who often times have no idea what it is to physically please themselves to start with. But, unfortunately, like any other act, it takes tons and tons of practice to get it right. To learn about your partner and yourself. Is it going to hurt? Yeah, probably a lot, physically and mentally. Is that always bad? That’s the real question, isn’t it?
The idea that sex isn’t supposed to hurt or make you uncomfortable or be perfect or that you are somehow supposed to know, going in, that you won’t regret it in the morning or even during…I think that’s a dangerous idea. Why is it that sex gets a pass on that front and running a marathon or taking a new job or going on a road trip or ordering the fois gras doesn’t? It’s TRYING. It’s new. Maybe you will think it’s gross after. Maybe you’ll want to throw up. Maybe you’ll want to quit halfway through. Sure. Virtually everything you try for the first time runs the risk of being something you regret.
Why is sex any different? It shouldn’t be. Unlike the tone of this piece (where it sounds like the author NEVER wanted sex for reasons that weren’t placed in her mind by society), sex is often desired by women. At 41, at crave it. I’ve learned how to use my body and not let it be used. I’ve learned what to ask for. I’ve learned my likes and dislikes. I would have never learned if all I had ever said was “NO.” and kept my body to myself.
Should women speak up in relationships early and often? Yes. Should women have the bad sex that sucks sometimes? Oh sure. If it’s all the time? Leave. How else do you know?
I was date raped. I said no and it happened anyway. And yes, the statute of limitations is up for feeling bad about it. And not in an “oh but I still feel bad about it way”. I don’t feel bad about it. 99% of the time, I don’t think about it. That happens with time.
I also wanted to comment because I fear young men getting blamed more and more. Not everything is rape. Regret is not rape.
Additionally, own your body, be your own agent. Speak up, learn and teach. Respect yourself. Never be a bootie call. Just don’t. It doesn’t suit women (no matter how much you try to tell yourself it does). This is where the hurt and pain is coming from. You think it’s okay to “order a man” from Tinder because all the kids are doing it. It’s not. This hurts women. We are simply not built that way and it’s OKAY. Even your friend who says she loves it. She doesn’t. The reason why this is resonating with many of you is because you are letting yourself be used because you feel like you’re “supposed to”. In my opinion, “supposed to” is the worst phrase in the English language. You are not a tease, you are testing the waters. Stay present. You don’t have to say yes, but you don’t have to say no, either. You can own the maybe. Let it go where it goes. Stay present at all times. If you find yourself disassociating from your body, check in. Bored? Terrified? Drunk? Why?
I did all of this. I made the noises. I said yes. I made the grocery lists. I bit the pillow. I rolled over and cried after. And this was all during my marriage. I. Just. Did. It. Because of “supposed to”. I blew my husband the day we brought my newborn daughter home from the hospital. Because “supposed to”. Because that type of stuff made me amazing. Oh yes.
I don’t regret any of it. Is that crazy? Perhaps. I learned though and oh, my, am I strong now. I own every inch of my flesh. I know how to give and how to take. It took all these years and all these emotions.
This piece bought a lot out of me.
Thank you for that,
Ineloquent Mommy
“It doesn’t suit women (no matter how much you try to tell yourself it does).”
“We are simply not built that way and it’s OKAY.”
“Even your friend who says she loves it. She doesn’t.”
Yes, it’s OKAY to not be built that way. But you can’t just say it like it’s universally true of the female gender. It’s not.
This is the same line of thinking that people employ to say that sex workers are not making free choices. Because anyone who would do sex work must be damaged in some way. And not acting in their own best interests.
Anyway, no. No to all of that. Age and experience don’t mean you know things about other/younger/whatever women that we do not know about ourselves.
I didn’t mean to like this comment. I don’t like it. You say you feel “supposed to” is the worst phrase in the English language. And then you spend paragraphs on how sex is supposed to be and how women are supposed to be.
Yeah, this. I clicked “like” for the “well sometimes sex just does suck, and that’s not the worst thing in the world” sentiment (because even if both parties are considerate and consenting, nobody’s perfect, and *some* metaphorical bumps and bruises are a learning experience) but then I saw the rest of it, and lady? You and your ideas about how Women Just Are For Serious can go to so much hell. And why can I not take back my “like”?
“Respect yourself. Never be a bootie call. Just don’t. It doesn’t suit women (no matter how much you try to tell yourself it does).”
holy Christmas this is so damn condescending. what else would you like to tell me about myself that you can abstract from my gender and nothing else? teach me, o seer
in addition to being condescending, she’s wrong.
never being a “bootie call” (even if you manage to achieve that or want to achieve that) is not going to stop men from raping you, just makes it more likely that you will eventually experience sexual violence from a man you know very well and are probably in some kind of committed relationship with, as opposed to a guy you meet at a party randomly and go home with that night.
nice attempt at victim blaming though.
There’s a lot I disagree with in your comment, but this is the one that strikes me the most: “Even your friend who says she loves it. She doesn’t.”
Dude, no. Why should I believe you and not my friend when she tells me her truths? Why should you demand agency but take it from others?
Yes, exactly. This. How do you know that the woman who says she enjoys being a booty call (or making her own booty calls) isn’t owning her body and her sexuality? When an essay like this powerfully underlines the gray areas in sexuality and consent, it seems odd to respond with absolutes.
SERIOUSLY. I’m happily monogamous now but for years before, I was happily non-monogamous and casual and in my personal experience, learning how to say “no, this is what I want, and this is not what I want” was so much easier with my casual partners, and gave me the foundation for the really lovely relationship I’m in now. The first time a man really LISTENED to me when I said, no, I’m done, this isn’t working for me, was within a “booty call” situation, and it was like being struck by lightening in reverse. Sure wasn’t with the sulky, mopey, angry boyfriends who I loved so much in my early days.
“Sex between men and women is, quite often, a physically violent, jarring experience.”
I am so sorry you must have had a LOT of really bad (best case scenario), borderline nonconsensual-to actually nonconsensual sex (worst case scenario) if that’s how you feel. This is…not how it should be.
Yeah. Also I feel like there is/should a pretty gap between “uncomfortable” and “violent”.
No.
Sex isn’t supposed to hurt (outside of specific consensual and negotiated scenarios).
Yes, sometimes you will have consensual sex that you will later regret. There are a lot of choices in life that we regret. But there is a difference between regretting a choice you made freely and regretting something that you felt you had no choice on.
Yes, sex takes practice to be good, and yes, it’s important for people to take time to learn what they like so they can pass that information on to their partners. But that doesn’t mean that we should simply accept that sex for young people will be physically and/or emotionally traumatic. Plenty of new things are hard to learn, and plenty of first tries are unsuccessful, but that doesn’t mean that they are painful or that they leave scars.
The point of this piece is that we don’t teach girls that they can say “maybe”, and we don’t teach boys to listen to it. We teach that it is “yes” or “no” and that in the absence of a “no”, it’s okay to assume a “yes”, even when there are a million things telling us “wait, slow down, not yet”.
Women can be booty calls if they want to. That, too, is part of owning your own body and being your own agent. Maybe you, personally, find that it doesn’t suit you and that you are not built that way. I am glad you know yourself. Trust other women to know themselves, to know what they want and what they do not, to know the difference between entertainment and exploitation, between choice and coercion, regret and rape.
When people who care about each other’s boundaries have sex and it hurts, they do something to address it. Maybe you accidentally elbow your lover in the ribs while changing positions, or your hand cramps up, or you haven’t figured out how much lube you need to make some activities comfortable, so then one of you says “ow” or “wait” or “stop” and you either try to fix the issue or you stop having sex in that way for the moment. Maybe it’s a bigger kind of hurt, like dissociation or a traumatic flashback, and you stop having sex at all for the moment to figure out how to support each other in that hurt.
None of those kinds of hurt, however, involve experiencing sex as something that just feels physically violent and jarring as a matter of course. If sex is feeling physically violent and jarring, that means some very basic health and safety needs aren’t being met on both physical and emotional levels.
I’m still a virgin and I think a bit younger than some of the other people here so I’ve been reading the original post and all the comments with like increasing horror and dread but thank you so so much for this one, I feel a bit better.
Right. And sometimes, you know, you’re mid-sex and the guy is clearly all about Jackrabbit Mode, or he thinks licking your chin does anything for you (I KNOW!) or whatever, and hints aren’t getting through, but you’ll never see him again and that shit probably turns some women on, so it’s less awkward to just get through it and then tell your friends at brunch. I’ve done that, and I consider myself a reasonably empowered woman. But that sort of thing should be an unfortunate outlier, not the usual, and “uncomfortable and kind of boring” is a far cry from “physically violent and jarring.”
It’s like trains. If *once in a while*, your train is really late or stupidly crowded or someone pukes on a seat, that’s a thing that happens. If you have to allow for twenty minutes standing in the snow per trip, then your public transportation is awful (BOSTON) and needs to change. If the train crashes because the driver was texting, that person needs to be fired and maybe go to jail, because WTF.
…I think that analogy works?
Running a marathon, getting a new job, going on a road trip, ordering foie gras — none of those things, NONE OF THEM, involve another person. You choose to run the marathon. You choose to take a new job. You choose to go on a road trip. You choose to order foie gras. If those things are painful or violent, then that is entirely on you. But sex involves two people, and when you get more than one person involved in something, it becomes more than just what works for one person. It should be what works for two people. And if it’s violent or scary or painful then it’s not working for someone, and it should stop.
Your experiences do not the reality of every woman’s sexual experience make. The fact that you suffered these things is your own life. It doesn’t mean every woman should have to.
For someone who is so opposed to the concept of “supposed to,” you seem awfully invested in telling other women what we should do, think, and feel.
“The reason why this is resonating with many of you is because you are letting yourself be used because you feel like you’re ‘supposed to’.”
Don’t fucking tell me what I’m feeling. You say you’re worried about generalizations in this piece, and then you tell us to ignore our own experience and listen to you because you know exactly how everyone is thinking – do you seriously not see how that’s a problem?
I read this comment two hours ago and hated it so much that I closed the Toast for a bit and went on my way. Now I am back to lovingly read all the excellent responses and bask in the fact that my Toasties are not gonna put up with this bullshit.
Howling maenads to the rescue. 🙂
Look, I think most of the Toast has explained the wrong things inherent in your comment, but I want you to read this piece about how this attitude can be dangerous and pervasive and leaks into judicial decisions.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/myths…
I’m 37. I think our generation got very different messages about sex and consent than people 10 or 15 or 20 years younger. We grew up thinking it was dumb to go to a guy’s room if you didn’t want sex, that enthusiastic consent was nice but not necessary. That if you said okay, even if it was just because you were drunk and confused and wanted things to be over with and yes was easier than no, it wasn’t rape.
Things have changed. And while I struggled with some of the same things you’re struggling with — is it so bad, really, for women to feel more comfortable admitting their discomfort? For fewer people to have that “it wasn’t rape but I didn’t like it” feeling the next morning? I don’t think it’s generally about making women perpetual victims; it’s about articulating full ownership over one’s body and experience. And while I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the viewpoint expressed in this essay, I have full faith that in 20 years it’ll be not a new view, but an entirely mainstream one.
46, and yes. I was just telling my teen son about this – about going out in a miniskirt and even if you felt you were owning your power, you knew if something happened others would say you were ‘asking for it.’ You knew you were an object others would look at, speak of, touch, and that the skin on display meant you were not welcoming it, but accepting it as part of the landscape. Navigating it.
Same with drinking around guys, going to guys’ rooms. Opening that door a crack was opening it wide, and it was your job to maintain tight control of the boundaries if you didn’t want to risk them being crossed. Cause guys just want sex, and they could be really sweet about it, really caring about snuggling, calling later, whatever, but they have their urges and it’s not their job to maintain the line, it’s yours. Of course they think sloppy kisses and some near-public groping means later they’ll get their rocks off. They’re guys. And once you say, “I guess,” you’ve said “yes, and later: yes, too, because no take-backs.”
Everyone else has pointed out everything that is wrong with this comment but I have a couple of questions for you. Why are you so concerned about young men getting blamed more and more? Why do you expect that your generation’s experiences should go on and on?
What I want is for my children (regardless of their gender) to feel comfortable asking their partner to stop or wait and to know that it’s ok to consent to one thing but not another, no pressure. I want my children to apply this to their partners. I want my children to not have to read between the lines about what they’re entitled to do or feel comfortable about.
Asking for things to change isn’t putting an unfair burden or blame on young men. It’s putting the burden on society to give people better models and information. Expecting this to happen would mean both people being responsible for themselves and their partners. It’s a lot more than men are taught to do but so what? It’s not fair or right as it is.
I’m a lot younger than you are and I know this sort of thing still happens in my generation. Hopefully, it’s changing. Pointing out the responsibility of partners in situations with sh*tty consent or speaking up about it is not blaming young men more and more, it’s talking more and more about something that’s been happening for ages and is just not right.
I agree with the rest of the commenters that your reply here is judgemental and taking women’s agency away.
But I wanted to reply to your point about trying difficult things, because I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had about risk, and which kind of risk-taking is seen as morally acceptable.
Sex can be an adventure, and it should be allowed to be thrilling and unpredictable. Making sex safe shouldn’t mean making it unexciting. Danger, risk, thrill, excitement, novelty, curiosity, exploration and discovery are on the same spectrum (imagine that excitement and novelty are at the midpoint, and danger and discovery are the respective end points). You step into the unknown, and what are you going to find? You don’t know, and that’s one of the fun parts.
Accepting a new job and running a marathon usually fall somewhere between thrill and discovery, right? There’s usually not a significant risk, and you shouldn’t be in real danger. When you accept a job, you’re aware that you might be in over your head, you know that you may fail or quit. But you DON’T expect that you’ll feel sick to your stomach. You don’t expect that you might be dragged into things that feel wrong and horrible. You agree that your pride can get hurt, but not your actual well-being, your soul or your sense of self. And even if you do play with risk, you steer clear of actual danger. Accepting a job you’re not sure you can do is NOT fun if you know you’ll be homeless if you fail. That’s the difference between thrill and danger.
Sex isn’t dangerous, except that you can get an STD or accidentally get hurt in the same way that people get hurt playing sports. But otherwise, doing sexual things with other people is harmless. So, that’s what people agree to when they have sex, much like an athlete knows that they can trip or be slightly roughed up during the game. Someone who uses an agreement of sex as an opportunity to harm others or satisfy themselves without caring what their partner wants – they’re not playing by the rules. It’s not part of the game that someone uses the pretense of the game to actually hurt the other players. A boxer can’t kid themselves that they have a special license to hit people for fun as much as they want. When you rock climb, you know that you might fall, that the rope can break or that you might be hit by a falling rock, but you don’t agree that your partner may carelessly throw rocks around just because they think it’s fun and don’t care that you get hit, and you definitely don’t agree that they can cut your rope. Those things can happen, but they aren’t allowed. It’s part of the game that it’s all a game. Putting someone else in danger and unwanted pain always breaks the social contract.
So, I agree that life doesn’t have to be “safe” meaning free of uncertainty and excitement, but this isn’t that kind of fun thrill. Being used, abused, raped, bullied and harmed is dangerous, and no one who agrees to sex agreed to put themselves in harm’s way. If we always assume that other people can and will hurt us, we wouldn’t be able to be around others at all. You couldn’t go into a kitchen when someone’s cooking, because they could stab you. You can’t talk to people, because they could stalk you. You could never move in with anyone, because they could murder you. Being abused is not like losing a job, hurting from a marathon or getting injured during sports. It’s not only the injury that hurts, it’s the betrayal.
Society is built on the assumption that it’s wrong to abuse trust, because trust is what makes everything work. If sex was assumed to be an opportunity to hurt, no one would have sex. But nobody wants that, not even the most conservative Conservative that ever conserved. They still think that people should have sex, they just assign women the duty of picking out male traitors in advance and only have sex with non-traitors. That’s probably why they’re so obsessed with the marriage contract – it’s viewed as a very strong agreement to not do harm that only honest people would accept. But they still blame the women if they pick wrong, or if a trusted man decides to betray them anyway.
Really, abusive men certainly don’t assume that their partners might bite their dick off during a blowjob, even though the possibility exists. They would feel incredibly betrayed if a woman did that. So why should women assume the risk that men may rape? Why? Acting like other people can and will betray you at any time is usually considered a psychological condition, why should it be expected of women who have sex with men?
Sex between men and women (or men and men, or women and women) shouldn’t ever be violent unless *all involved parties have agreed to that.* The idea that it’s natural for it to be violent is rape apologism, and it’s not okay.
And wow, take your slut-shaming elsewhere. “Don’t be a bootie [sic] call?” Be a booty call if you damn well please. There’s nothing wrong with casual, no-strings attached sex if that’s what the participants want. That’s not about lack of respect. It’s about everyone having their expectations set accurately.
Between this and the piece from the link roundup, you are absolutely on FIRE today. This is so gracefully and honestly written. Thank you for sharing it.
I have been, of late, coming to terms with the profound realization that this has been the majority of my sexual experiences, and not only with men, either. So, reading this piece has crystallized a lot of my feelings in a coherent fashion.
Thank you for writing this and thank you for sharing it.
I have had this conversation so many times, and come to the same realization, “every woman in the world has had an experience like this.”
(Rhetorical questions ahead.) What do you call it if you consented and feel traumatized? What do you call it if you DON’T feel traumatized? What if you feel nothing at all, but someone else would, and you feel that you should? What do you say in response to “We have all been hurt. And … that’s just the way it is. Suck it up, buttercup. You get hurt.”
I want my loved ones to admire be for being tough and strong, but I want to talk about this shit too, because I can, because not everyone can, and there should be no shame in it.
Anyway there’s a bunch of words and feelings. Thank you for writing this.
We know. We all could have written this.
Another thank you for writing this, what an extraordinarily beautiful and eloquent piece of writing. i can’t quite say how i feel right now. this shared experience between women must be talked about more often, how too often our formative sexual experiences are, yes, consensual, but not present, not pleasurable. for way too long i acted like i thought women should behave during sex, i thought i was a sexual being but maybe i just didn’t enjoy sex?
such a confusing way to navigate sexuality as a teenager and young woman. sadly, it had to take a loving and caring man to allow me to understand how to demand what i wanted during sex, that he wasn’t satisfied unless i was shocked me. which is now in itself, shocking.
this is how we must educate our boys, that sexual satisfaction is not something that can happen in isolation – it is dependent upon the satisfaction of your partner. something which is missing entirely from the porn industry, which is where i, and pretty much all others my age, started to understand sex.
Thank you again, your words are poignant and resonate to somewhere deep inside me, keep writing.
“But a woman is not a child, and the world is subtle. Nobody teaches us to say, maybe. To say, I’m not sure. Please wait. On second thought, maybe we shouldn’t. On second thought, I don’t want this. I’m not ready. To say, touch me a little longer first. Touch me at all. Be gentle. Go slow. Nobody teaches us to protect ourselves from selfish drunk boys who are not taught to recognize hesitation as anything other than another boundary to be skirted, a roadblock on the separate map from which they learned to navigate.”
This. This completely. This was 100% my first time. I didn’t know how to say what I needed, so I just said yes until I said no. Selfish drunk boy describes him perfectly. It was ten days ago, so I’m still feeling bad about it. This piece is the first time that someone has told me that a consensual sexual experience can be traumatic and that it is okay and maybe even normal to feel that way. So thank you for writing it. I needed to hear it.
I’m sorry you needed this, that it was so timely for you. I hope that your transition from that place to a new place where you have the words and the pleasure you deserve is a smooth one. Remember that it’s not an expressway, this road you’ve joined. There are roundabouts and cul-de-sacs and the occasional meandering path, and you can take it at whatever speed works for you. Pull over and go spelunking or zoom along with the top down and your music blaring: you are at the wheel.
I don’t have anything constructive to say,but I just wanted to added another ‘thank you for writing this’ to the chorus of others. This piece, and your My Teen Diary essay from the Link Roundup, are going to be going round my head for while, I think. Thank you.
Edited to add a couple of forgotten spaces.
Wow, thanks for writing this. It’s so important to have this conversation. I think about this a lot, how we can acknowledge the ambiguity in defining rape and consent, but in a way which allows us to make progress and support survivors of rape and sexual assault.
I think it’s both true and untrue that consent isn’t as clear-cut as we think it is. On the one hand, there’s this weird murky area that many people inhabit where they don’t consider themselves survivors, don’t want to think of themselves as victims, don’t hold it against him – but wish so badly that it had gone differently. It’s important to look past the dichotomy of good guys versus evil rapists who grab you in an alley, because this lets off the hook all those rapists whose mothers and friends love them, of which there are many. THIS is what rape culture actually means, and so many people don’t get that.
One the other hand, sometimes the version of the story that we feel we can live with at a given moment just isn’t accurate! It’s very hard to acknowledge that you were sexually assaulted, I think maybe because it means that you lose all agency in the narrative of the encounter, which feels like a denial of your own personhood? But doing so helps, eventually, because blaming yourself is such a heavy thing to carry.
Mallory’s essay which was posted on The Toast a while ago about men refusing to hear it when you say no was incredibly important for me in figuring out how to feel about my own experiences, because it articulated that anger and sense of betrayal with absolute moral clarity. That’s how it was with me: I said that I didn’t want to, four times, and he flat-out refused to hear it, and I said “Well okay, I guess” and it happened and was terrible, which, a month or so later, I was absolutely FURIOUS at myself about. So then you think – how much of this anger should I be turning on him? Surely it’s justified to direct a little bit on myself, for not putting up a fight? Can I be angry at my friend who didn’t really figure out that my attempts to reach out meant that I actually needed her support? And, if you don’t talk about it, it sits inside you and makes you feel bitter and isolated and makes forming meaningful personal relationships just that bit harder.
Recently I was with a guy who said “Do you want to?” like he genuinely cared about the answer, and “Hey, I don’t have to come” like it was obvious, and it took me by surprise but also, it WAS obvious! This is how we should communicate!
So yeah, there are some bits that are really hard to say (for me the bits that you can’t turn into a joke) and I appreciate so much the bravery of the people who choose to make themselves emotionally vulnerable and share their story. I have a lot to say about this but I can’t bear the thought of my parents knowing that I spent a significant part of 2014 feeling miserable and lonely because of rape. I expect it would be a very healing conversation but I just don’t want to! But hey, baby steps.
(lol I wrote a whole other consent essay in the comments to your consent essay. These things happen sometimes!)
I’m sorry to hear about what you experienced. I agree with you so much about moving past the good guys vs. bad guys in alleys. I think that’s why there isn’t better education and better conversations about what consent really is. It’s just sort of implied that none of the guys you meet would ever do that, they’re not that bad, so it’s like people wonder what’s the point in trying to teach them anything or blaming them for something that looks so different in the popular imagination.
“Well, okay, I guess” is almost verbatim what I said. I’m sorry that we share this pain.
It helped me a lot to learn about how trauma and fear affect the brain – when fight, flight, or freeze mode is activated your prefrontal cortex actually shuts down, making you unable to respond rationally. It is not your fault.
Thank you for this piece. I can’t figure out the words to write a comment about most of it.
The part about thinking that everyone has had experiences like that hit me hard. It’s something I’ve wondered about, when I hear from so many friends and acquaintances too.
“The older I get, the more I am certain that every woman in the world has had an experience like this.”
So far, I have not. I’m not saying that to brag. I’m well aware that more than anything, it’s just sheer luck that has kept me from such an experience. I was lucky enough that none of the men who cared for me as a child were men who would take sexual advantage of a child. I was lucky enough–and now in my adulthood I see that it WAS weird kind of luck even though it didn’t feel like it at the time–that in high school when my peers were beginning to date, I was too awkward, shy, and unpopular to attract the attention of the vast majority of the boys, and thus I was never in a position where a teenage boy who didn’t know how to treat uncertainty could take advantage of an uncertain girl. I was lucky enough that in college my friends were all pretty straight-laced, and my college boyfriends had no interest in pushing the boundaries. I was lucky that when I was in the first relationship where I realistically had the opportunity to have sex, and I sometimes thought I wanted to but ultimately wasn’t sure, my boyfriend at the time WAS sure that he DIDN’T want to, not yet, and so I wasn’t able to make the decision I might have regretted. I was lucky that when I finally did, it was with a man who was always respectful, who never tried anything checking in that I was okay, and I was lucky enough that by that time, with that man, I was finally sure, and there were no regrets.
I’ve just been lucky. And again, I’m not saying all this to brag or to invalidate the experiences of SO MANY women (because really there are so many, so so many). I’m only saying it to offer hope. There IS a chance. We CAN teach people to recognize others’ hesitation, and we CAN teach people that it’s okay to change their minds or to feel unsure and to say no, maybe, not yet, whatever.
And hey, I may not stay lucky. I so very much hope I do, but I know there’s always the chance my luck won’t hold. But I do know that there’s hope that the future can be better, and I hope to see a world in which so many people don’t have to rely on luck.
I loved this piece. Thank you for writing it.
I too would like to witness that, with incredible luck, a woman can miss the predators for her formative experiences in sex. And if one is lucky enough to miss the predators for long enough you can trust yourself and the partners you choose freely and with some knowledge, to be two humans during sex.
Personally I went through my twenties with kind, human partners, watched my friends meet the predators, and I knew I was lucky.
And then in my thirties I met the predators and I felt all the feelings in this essay and there was no way to stop them, even remembering the good partners of my twenties.
That a few predators could wipe out the happiness of my past made me very, very determined to listen hard and accept the stories of other women and men who experience abuse. I see it as the lesson the lucky few must learn; there is no luck in the world that will protect you from the real human reaction to pain and abuse.
I agreed with that part of the piece but I didn’t take it to mean that literally every woman has had bad experiences, only that it feels that way sometimes because of how discouraging it is to hear similar stories from so many friends. I don’t know if the writer meant it literally or not, though. That’s a good point.
Oh I agree that it’s probably not meant 100% literally, but it really does feel like that sometimes. I know for a long time growing up, I would think this kind of thing can’t be as common as they say it is, because it hasn’t happened to me or to this friend or that friend, only to find out later of course that it absolutely had happened to this friend and that friend and more. It can feel pretty hopeless sometimes.
Thank you for this comment. I felt the same way–I haven’t had this experience either. Of course, I didn’t exactly try to date/hook up with anyone until I was 23, and I was remarkably lucky in meeting my first girlfriend/current fiancée early on in that dating process. But that’s something else lost–in not trying to connect with people until you’re fully certain of yourself, you miss the mutual discovery. It was lower-risk, certainly, and for that I’m grateful—most of the time.
I’m in a similar place and I have so many feelings about it. I don’t know if I can articulate them right now!
I’m glad you have not! Thank you for writing this.
Chiming in, more complicatedly. It’s not that I never had a sexual experience that made me feel bad afterwards, it’s that when I did, well, this is how I remember it. It was the second time I’d had sex. I wasn’t sure I wanted it, but I clearly remember feeling capable of saying no, and saying to myself “hey, it’s sex, why not?” By which I meant that I thought I might enjoy it, and didn’t see any particular risk in going ahead.
It wasn’t bad or uncomfortable at the time, but I felt weird afterwards and took a month or two off from sex to figure out what went wrong. Eventually I decided that it was because I didn’t really know where I stood with this guy. He seemed to assume that I was at least vaguely interested in a relationship when I was kind of just in it for the sex, and the communication around that made me feel weird and uncertain. We “broke up” (if we’d ever been together at all) soon afterwards, and he wasn’t creepy or disrespectful about it.
I think I was just too young to know for sure what I needed in order to feel comfortable around sex. I didn’t know I wasn’t going to feel good about it afterwards, and when that did happen, I didn’t have enough experience to know why. But it wasn’t his fault as far as I can recall. I don’t remember ever thinking that he wouldn’t stop if I asked him to. I just didn’t know enough about myself to know that asking him to stop, or saying no to sex in the first place, might have been a good idea. In fact, in my opinion, I made the right decision with the information I had at the time, and then I used what I learned to make later sex and relationships better.
I think this is what “this story” (that so many women have) looks like when women do feel like they have the power to say “maybe,” “I’m not sure,” “please wait.” Like some of the other women on this thread, I came to sex late; I too was 23 years old. And I spent years reading about it before I did it, including a lot of feminist literature of the “yes means yes” variety. I had that info. I still made mistakes; we all do. But once I did become conscious that this particular variety of “feeling weird about it” was actually a sign that I wouldn’t feel good afterwards, I stopped. It would never have occurred to me that I did not have the power to do so. I think perhaps this is part of what consent culture looks like.
Sex can be both consensual and traumatic, that’s true. But you lay on me with the full weight of your body, and the weight of your words and everything behind them: “You’re such a tease.”
I cannot express how close to home this is for me. Thank you.
Thank you for this. I needed it so much. Just thank you.
Echoing all the thanks here for writing this piece.
It’s been something I’ve been trying to understand for the past couple of months. There was an encounter which I wordlessly consented to – consented in that I was there to sleep with him, I meant and I wanted to, but the experience itself was so painful and callous that it almost felt secondary to the fact that he never asked the question – or waited for an answer.
I wanted it to stop, but it was so obvious he was not taking my experience into account doing so felt almost pointless. There was an element of feeling it was too late, he’d already hurt me. Waiting it out, perversely, felt like the only option. Consenting to pain is illogical, but I seem to have done it too.
(I wasn’t expecting anything perfect. I was expecting him to be the kind boy he had been up until then.)
The lack of language to describe it was the thing that really bothered me. As he slept I stayed awake, hurting, trying to work it out. No one had treated me so badly in an intimate situation before – was it normal? I thought perhaps it was two different styles clashing or (ridiculously) I had some kind of fragile, Victorian lady parts.
After speaking with my friends, and re-telling and re-telling it to try to find the language (and finally, a week later, so angry at my inaction and wanting to fix it, that I told him), I finally felt justified in thinking that his behaviour was not okay.
I still don’t know how to think of it. My friends have pretty opposing views on it too; lack of experience, lack of respect, basing sex off porn and not people, lack of empathy, ignorance, something slightly darker. I can only see it as gray. I was there and I don’t know how to view it.
I’m not upset anymore. I told him how I experienced that night, and the act of doing so – even if it was too late – made me feel better. I hoped that if I laid it out in clear terms no one else would have that experience with him.
Hearing these stories has helped so much. So, thank you, again.
Thank you for writing so eloquently about something so nebulous. It is clear so many of us in this thread have occupied this same grey experience.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This articulates so many of my feelings towards sex and I think may be a good way in for me to discuss some issues in my current relationship. I’m crying at work, but this article is something that I’ve needed for a while.
WOW. This captures exactly what I have struggled to put into words for so long! Very refreshing to read such a poignant and honest piece of writing.
This speaks to me on so many levels. Never have I read something that so closely articulates my experiences- I thought it was impossible, because I couldn’t even articulate them. Even to the point where it’s not just about the bad, regrettable, traumatic sex, but the way I treat myself and my body in relation to sex. The way I beg for it and go out in search for it knowing full well it’s going to be as bad, traumatic and regrettable as the last time.
I always tell myself it could be worse though. I haven’t been raped. No one has ever been violent or made me feel scared. I’ve always just made myself present but not present and allowed men to do what they please to my body. I’ve just disregarded myself, and only cared about how it affects me afterwards, and yet inexplicably continued this cycle, these experiences over and over.
My first time he watched porn instead of me, and I wasn’t even surprised. I then, on the same night of ‘losing my virginity’ went and fucked his friend as well. He, my second, left me so many love bites on my neck I looked like I’d been strangled. I had questions for days. They lasted for weeks. I may have drunkingly consented to sex, but I didn’t consent to that. And yet, I expected my body to be violated.
The third time was the worst. This guy bent me over in the shower, started fucking me, and then without words, without a question, without an answer, started fucking my ass. He just put his hand over my mouth and didn’t say a thing, and I was too frozen in surprise and fear to. The fourth just kept taking off the condom and when he’d used all 6 that I had with me shouted at me when I refused to have sex without one. The fifth, I cried for 20 minutes to him, then he fucked me anyway. (I continued to cry).
There was more.
The worst thing is that I expected this. I asked for this. I went out looking for this. And if I got rejected, got laughed at, I’d feel at fault. Was I not even worthy of being used by them?
So thank you. Thank you for putting into words what I’ve grappled with for so long. Thank you for making me feel like I’m not the only one who lives in the shadow of mostly consensual, yet regrettable, traumatic and upsetting experiences.
Anon, your comment is really making me think. I definitely see men acting violently here, in all of these stories, and I’m sorry on your behalf that this happened to you. If you want to call one or more of these experiences rape (for example, if it feels that way but you’re not sure if the label fits), I think that you absolutely can.
That third man did something you had not consented to, without asking, in a way that seems really painful, while holding his hand over your mouth making it harder for you to speak or even breathe. This guy did the exact opposite of what people usually do when they have consensual anal sex – taking care to make it painless by using lube, warming up and going slowly. He chose instead to act in a way widely known to be painful, while also choosing to stop you from speaking. You said that no one has made you feel scared, but when you wrote about him, you also wrote that you were frozen in fear. That sends a chill down my spine. This event sounds really scary to me, and to my ears it sounds like a crime.
Of course, it’s up to you to name your own experiences, but to me, it seems that you’ve at least described how he used several kinds of physical violence (covering your mouth, knowingly causing pain) and made you feel scared. And who tries to take off condoms and yells when they don’t get their way, or starts to have sex with someone who’s crying? It sucks that they did this and that you didn’t get to start your sexual life in a way that actually was fun and felt good. It seems flippant or patronising to say that I hope your life is better now, but I hope it’s better now.
I have had a shift, in the past few years, in what sex felt like. When I identified what the shift was, it was devastating.
Because the shift was that sex had become something I was doing – instead of something which was happening to me.
In this piece you have captured every feeling I have ever had about the fucked up nuances of consent, the dread in realizing how many times I have done things I didn’t want to, most of all the incredibly confusing feeling that there was nobody, really, to resent for it but myself. Because I didn’t understand that it was okay to not want these things.
Consent is such a tricky beast, and we don’t teach young people to really understand or identify it, even in themselves, their own minds, in any kind of real or helpful way. We don’t talk about consent in relationships. We don’t talk about consent in situations where you intiated the encounter. We don’t talk about consent in terms of how people are influenced by unconscious beliefs about how they are expected to behave or feel. We don’t talk about what healthy encounters even look like in relationships. We don’t address the gray areas. We don’t teach women how to have agency, how to keep ownership of your own body and your choices. We don’t talk about how confusing it is. We don’t do it enough. We don’t do enough, period. I believe almost every woman I know will see themselves, one way or another, in this piece. You’re right. This has happened to everyone. It happened to me, over and over, in what I believed was a loving relationship – no, in a loving relationship. But then that’s confusing now, too.
You are brave and appreciated for putting this out there. It made me feel wrecked and sad and some other things too, and I am crying at my desk which, you know, isn’t convenient, but damn if it doesn’t show you how powerful this is. Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing it.
This hurt to read.
I’m not sure what to say. It mirrors some of my experiences as a teenager, some consenting, some not. I always thought I was alone in this. And the various people commenting about disregarding their bodies- well, you’re not alone in that either.
I’ve done some pretty ridiculous stuff that A Good Survivor would not do, but it was the only way to ease the pain at the time.
“The older I get, the more I am certain that every woman in the world has had an experience like this.”
Nope, I never have & I’m sure lots of women never have. I’m passionately interested in this type of experience since so many of my fellow women have gone through it. But there’s no need to try and position it as a universal experience–it resonates and it’s critically important even though it’s *not* universal among women.
there’s nothing i can say to you that others haven’t said above, but thank you again anyway. thank you so much for having the bravery to write this down, much less publish it. thank you for your analysis, and your compassion, and your honesty, and your careful words.
“We know it before there are words for it. We know it when there aren’t words to describe exactly what happened. The edges of a violation are not drawn in ink or stone or sand. They aren’t even written on the body, not always. The statute of limitations for feeling bad about this is up…”
^that right there cut me to the core because of how hard and deeply I feel it.
I wish i could just feel one emotion about what happened to me, or complete one reaction. but it isn’t written on the body and it’s barely written in the mind. sand indeed.
Thank you so much, and all the power and compassion in the world to you.
I think this was so well written, and it triggered me quite a bit, but I did want to finish it.
Thank you for writing about the uncertanty you felt about what happened to you. I think a lot of survivors can relate.
It was mostly triggering to me because you’re talking about a grey area, and I’m not comfortable with that concept. Because, even though it was my boyfriend who hurt me, and even though I didn’t scream and participated in some of it, what happened wasn’t a grey area. I thought so for a long time. It was all very unclear to me, because I didn’t understand what was happening. But it WAS clear that I didn’t want it, was in pain, etc. And although it wasn’t a stranger rape, and quite a complicated experience, it wasn’t less serieus. The term grey area (or similar terms) triggers me severely, because I feel that it invalidates my experience, making it not ‘real’ rape.
I do understand that there are other women with different experiences or different ways of dealing with them. And a lot of what you said resonated with me. Especially when I think about me a couple of years ago. So thank you for that. It’s an important conversation to have.
Oh my god, I made so many typos in the above comment.. I’m sorry, English isn’t my first language and because I got emotional while writing it, I didn’t pay enough attention to what I was writing. Sorry!
You wrote it really well – I honestly would not have guessed it was your second language.
Thank you for writing it, I found it helpful to know that you find the situation clearer now than you did.
I feel dizzy.
you are an incredible writer!
I have complicated feelings about this.
It’s unsettling to hear so many people talk about this like it’s a universal or near-universal experience, and has me searching my memories, wondering if there’s something I should feel bad about that I’m forgetting. But all I’m coming up with are the very clear cut violations; the rape and then also the time that I had a great time and consented enthusiastically, then found out afterwards that he had lied about a thing that would have made me say no had I known. And he knew it would have been a dealbreaker, which is why he lied. I don’t call that rape but I also no longer speak to that person.
When I read pieces like this I start to wonder if maybe I have had experiences that other people would point at and label this way, but my particular bent makes me accept them. I have kinks around violence and force and consent, does that mean I am okay with boundary pushing that other women would call problematic? Should I be bothered by some of the things I’ve done and experienced?That’s how I react to pieces like this. I don’t identify with it but I have casual sex and drunk sex and rough sex and according to a lot of people that is apparently a recipe for having nebulous and not so nebulous regrets. So shouldn’t I have some?
It feels very strange that I feel strange about not having regrets.
I have complicated feelings about this.
It’s unsettling to hear so many people talk about this like it’s a universal or near-universal experience, and has me searching my memories, wondering if there’s something I should feel bad about that I’m forgetting. But all I’m coming up with are the very clear cut violations; the rape and then also the time that I had a great time and consented enthusiastically, then found out afterwards that he had lied about a thing that would have made me say no had I known. And he knew it would have been a dealbreaker, which is why he lied. I don’t call that rape but I also no longer speak to that person and I do feel like it was a pretty clear violation.
When I read pieces like this I start to wonder if maybe I have had experiences that other people would point at and label this way, but my particular bent makes me accept them. I have kinks around violence and force and consent, does that mean I am okay with boundary pushing that other women would call problematic? Should I be bothered by some of the things I’ve done and experienced?That’s how I react to pieces like this. I don’t identify with it but I have casual sex and drunk sex and rough sex and according to a lot of people that is apparently a recipe for having nebulous and not so nebulous regrets. So shouldn’t I have some?
It feels very strange that I feel strange about not having regrets.
This. This. This. is so important, and comes so close to expressing some of my experiences, which I struggle to name and which I go constantly back and forth about, trying to define them for myself and understand them for myself.
When I was fourteen, I had sex with a girl who asked over and over if I really wanted it, to which I always said yes. She was always gentle and always preferred touching me to being touched. I did my best to imitate what I thought sex was supposed to look and sound like, faked orgasms, the works. I don’t know why I did it (I wanted to prove my adulthood? I thought I could convince myself I could learn to love my body this way? I wanted to make her happy, didn’t want her to feel unwanted?), but I did, many times. Even though I wanted to crawl out of my skin every time. A decade later, I want to crawl out of my skin every time someone touches me. I freeze up with panic, and find myself faking again. I can’t talk to anyone about it, because it wasn’t rape and they wouldn’t understand. But all the same, I didn’t want it.
Sorry if that’s too much information.
I don’t think every woman has had this kind of experience, but I do think the vast majority have. This is not a coming-of-age event, or a mandatory event in every girl’s life. Yet it happens enough that it might as well be.
I wish I had known that I could ask to stop any time, even if I had said yes before. I wish I knew that it was supposed to be fun, and if I wasn’t enjoying myself, it was more than fine to ask to stop. (I wish I felt like I was any more capable of asking to stop now.) I wish I had known how to ask to stop – because shouting “no, no, no!” isn’t right for every situation. And I wish that I had known that I could say yes to sex and still feel the way I did about it later. I wish these were things that we had been told.