Picking up from yesterday –
And then, there’s assault. [trigger warning: assault]
Some seemingly relevant details from another personal story (that you very well may have heard at this point, go to the next dashed line to skip it):
I was with a man and the situation got way out of hand really fast. He started to scare me. I begged him to let me go. And he wouldn’t. (He literally laughed in my ear about it.) I cried underneath him. I was under threat/in danger/being controlled.
And after realizing that asking him to let go of me was only making things worse, I laid there ’til he finished because it seemed like the safest option at the time. I had PTSD after that. I had to go to trauma therapy. I started crying during normal sex. Everything about it was awful. And I think maybe the worst part was all the people who asked “why didn’t you do more?”
And it’s like, how much more should I have done exactly? I said out loud that he was making me really uncomfortable. I asked him to let me go, as he held me too tight. I was crying. My body went *completely* limp. He had to physically move me when he needed my body position changed, because I would/could no longer move for him.
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People love to ask, “Well, why didn’t you scream or just punch him in the face?” And it’s like, “Well, because that didn’t seem like a great, safe option.” Still, people will always ask you why you didn’t do more.
So, when people [sometimes “strawmen,” but sometimes well-meaning] try to lump everything in together – people who weren’t in a dangerous or threatened situation, with people who weren’t 100% in the mood, but willingly were like “eh, why not?”, it makes me feel even more on the defensive, because it feels like a step back – like people are going to start making that assumption of “why didn’t you do more?” even more often and with more blind confidence.
(I hope I’m being clear that no one should ever feel they need to have sex when they don’t want to. But, for me, the difference between throwing up my hands in exhaustion and just doing something with someone who just wouldn’t shut up [but I tooootally had freedom/safety/autonomy to leave the situation, had I so chosen] vs. knowing there was no safe way out from this scary strong dude – is huge. Those were two reaaaaally different experiences. One left me annoyed, and one left me beyond devastated, and not the same person I was.)
[Basically, “Why didn’t she do more?” is a way too prevalent unfair question to victims of assault, and I don’t want to give people more excuses to use it.]
And so, for me, I have a hard time when it seems like some people/some of this general public conversation uses words like “bad sex,” “coerced sex” and “sexual assault” interchangeably. I don’t find them interchangeable. They’ve all felt very different to me.
[I think every person has a right to tell their story. And I think if someone wants to talk about how they feel from ‘bad behavior’ or feeling coerced, or someone being very overly-pressuring, they have a right to do that. (It’s not like their problem isn’t “worthy” or something, just because it’s not a different thing.)]
And I think it’s totally a conversation worth having that as a society (and maybe also individually) that we’ve conditioned some really not okay things to seem like great ideas, or to seem “romantic.” We all can learn and grow and get better.
BUT, I think we should really try to build a vocabulary about this stuff, so it’s less confusing, and people aren’t so quick to get so defensive and up in arms – So that, for instance, someone has the ability to say something like, “Hey, before I decided to go home, you pushed really hard last night after I made it clear this wasn’t something I wanted, and it made me uncomfortable. I want you to know that, so you can try to be aware of this behavior, and treat me and/or future potential sex partners differently,” without that person (or the world) hearing “you’re a big bad rapist!” if that’s really definitely not what you’re saying.
So that we can explain how we feel, and we can all take that in and grow, without people being so on eggshells that saying “hey, this thing made me feel sort of weird,” has to translate into “you’re a criminal!” when it so doesn’t have to mean that at all.
A few lines up, I said I think this all is a conversation worth having – and a conversation involves listening and building on ideas, and taking in what people are saying. And if we have no words (and/or no agreed upon definitions of those words) to convey what we’re saying, that makes it much harder.
(So, I hope as a society, we build a better vocabulary about all this.)
[For more on my sexual assault series, you can go here.]