I was lying on my back, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. His arm was around me. An arm I didn’t know. An arm whose skin was supposed to feel safe, whose weight on my body should be familiar. An arm that I wished so hard meant million beautiful things to me, yet all it did was remind me of my own emptiness.
An arm of a stranger. An intruder. A human body that shouldn’t have kissed mine, shouldn’t have touched mine, shouldn’t have discovered me the way it had.
His breath in my ear. His skin warming mine. His memories of me that I couldn’t peel away from his brain, not now, not ever. He stole a part of me.
No, that’s not right. Because I offered it to him. I let him take it. And when I wasn’t enjoying it, when I was wishing for it to be over, when I was feeling like my body didn’t belong to me, like it was somebody else acting on my behalf, somebody else using me, when all of this was happening, I didn’t say no. I didn’t stop him.
I let him take that part of me. And I let myself snatch a part of him in return, a part I’d rather return with a polite no, thank you, a part that would forever be imprinted in my brain until I finally crook my memories in the course of time, until time dilutes them with new, more acute experiences. Until I bury him and only hope he’s done the same. I’ll never know for sure, though.
I’ll never know if he forgets how I moaned and pretended to have fun.
I still haven’t forgotten that he loved my moans. He repeated it over and over again, and for some reason, his obsessive enamourment with it evoked a slight feeling of shame in me. As if even my moans didn’t belong to me, not really. It was all for him. And it was a lie.
I still haven’t forgotten that he kept calling me his, that he kept using the diminutive form of my name, a word that kept marching out of his lips like a foreigner who usurped me without even asking what I wanted.
He did ask many things. It was implied I’d have sex with him. I didn’t give him any reason to think I wouldn’t, on the contrary. Until the last minute, I wasn’t sure what I wanted, if I liked him enough, if a hook-up was what I was after. I just went with the flow.
I let him slide his hand up my thigh. I let him stroke my hand, inhale my hair, force his tongue into my mouth. We talked about what we liked in sex. I was very open, discussing everything with silent stress on the hypothetical. It was too silent, though. Even I couldn’t hear it properly. As thoughts were shaping into their concrete forms, I found myself realising that it should have all stayed in the realm of imagination. But it was too late now.
Or was it?
As I laid there in the darkness of his room, a room I didn’t know, filled with things that meant nothing to me, occupied by a person that, I poignantly knew, didn’t mean much either, I wanted to evaporate from my own body. A feeling buried deep down inside of my flesh was reaching out to me, calling for attention. I gulped.
I need to leave, I thought with a sudden urgency.
You don’t want to make him uncomfortable, though, popped into my head immediately. You don’t want to cause drama. You don’t want to hurt him, make it seem like you didn’t like it.
But I didn’t like it. I battled with myself for minutes that stretched for ages. And then I finally did it. I collected what was left of me and I decided to fight for it, to do what I so desperately needed — to leave and be left alone.
To leave and never be in a situation like this ever again.
He asked me to stay, asked me if I was sure. When he saw I was set on my decision, he made me blow him until he came in my mouth, and all I could think about was that I’d soon be able to go home. I was also acutely aware of how boring and meaningless it was, making my jaw ache for somebody who didn’t mean anything to me, who saw me only as an opportunity for an orgasm that he snatched as fast as possible when he realised I could slip through his fingers a little too soon.
He wanted me to stay until morning because then he wouldn’t be drunk, I knew when I was leaving his flat, smiling and waving, the taste of him still in my mouth. Because then he could have penetrative sex with me. It seemed understandable — after all, we hooked up to have sex. So why did it only make me feel emptier? Why did I feel unsafe next to him, why did I want to go back home and read a book because that’d surely be a better way to spend my time, why did I feel so very used? Did I not agree to this?
Strictly speaking, I did not agree to him shoving his penis in my face after telling him I wanted to leave. I did not tell him he could kiss me when he did or touch my lower back a few seconds after we met up for our date. But I didn’t stop him, I didn’t tell him to back off, to go slower, I didn’t say no. I pretended everything was just fine.
Why?
It’s a recurring theme I’ve discussed with my friends who have had the same thing happen to them. When you’re in a sexual situation and you don’t like what’s happening, why don’t you just say so? What’s stopping you?
In Psychology Today, Robert P. Burriss PhD writes:
“Put simply, saying “no” to sex is awkward. This may be because we are not used to bluntly refusing offers or forbidding the behavior of others.”
The fear of seeming rude and hurting the feelings of another is a valid point, of course. However, I can’t seem to stop feeling like there’s much more to it.
Every single time I’ve found myself in these sorts of situations throughout my life, I wasn’t only scared of causing offence. There has always been another feeling, a dull emotion deep down, a fear I tried to hide from but didn’t quite manage to do so.
Taylor Jenkins Reid describes this emotion perfectly in her book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, where Evelyn recounts an unpleasant sexual encounter:
“He says, ‘C’mon, baby,’ and lies on top of you. You’re not sure he’d listen if you said no one more time. And you’re not sure you want to find out the answer. You’re not sure you could bear it.”
What if I said I wanted it to stop and he wouldn’t listen? What if I managed to say no, what if I tried to get him off me, what if I wanted to leave… and he wouldn’t let me?
The answer is easy, yet the effort it takes to deny it to yourself is immense: You’d become the victim of rape, wouldn’t you? You’d be raped. You’d fight for your freedom, your own body, your integrity — only to have someone steal it from you. You’d experience a traumatic event that would scar you for years, if not your whole life.
But if you stay quiet, if you make yourself believe that it’s not actually so bad, that you’ll just get it over with and go home, what then? You won’t be raped. It’ll be just a dissatisfying hook-up, won’t it? No big deal.
Except it is a big deal because in the effort to protect yourself from rape, you rape yourself, to put it bluntly. No, it’s not the same as real rape — I would never try to lessen the brutal impact of real rape — but it’s certainly not a good way to deal with undesired sexual encounters by any means.
As I was sitting in a taxi on my way home, I knew I had disrespected myself. I had used myself, and it hadn’t been the first time. But I swore to myself it would be the last. And I’ve kept that promise ever since.
The fear of refusing sex doesn’t lie only in the awkwardness that comes with saying no, it lies in the fact that we’re scared of the other person using their strength against us. We’re scared of men taking what they want, as harshly as they want to, because we live in a culture that permits this to a certain degree.
And that’s the core of the issue. As much progress as our culture has made in the last century, women are still scared to go out at night. They’re still scared when they pass a group of men on the street who examine them with their sneery looks as if looking for a prey, they’re terrified of saying no because what if no isn’t enough to stop a man?
Many men nowadays still feel entitled to a woman’s body. If she’s started something or has just gone with the flow, she has no right to stop now, and if she does, she’s being a tease. He’s conquered her and there’s no way to back out now. The sex is on. It wouldn’t be fair.
Only that it most certainly would. This attitude undermines not only the respect that every woman inherently deserves but also all men as a group. There are good, good men who would always stop if you said no — before, during or after, no questions asked apart from Are you okay? They wouldn’t get upset, they wouldn’t blame you. I know this because I’m now in a relationship with such a man.
The problem is that often, there’s just no way to tell what kind of a man he’ll turn out to be until you refuse to give him everything he wants. These men are happy and kind when they’re getting what they feel entitled to — the minute you restrict them, that’s when you truly know what you’re dealing with. But many women wouldn’t go that mile, myself included because the fear of being raped is simply too strong.
Our culture has taught men to feel like the world belongs to them while telling women they should be afraid of their opposite sex. History has a big part to play in this. The personal experience of almost every woman in the 21st century has a lot to do with it too, however, and that’s the part we can all collectively work on.
We can’t change history. But we can change today in the hope that it will bring a better tomorrow.
Let’s teach everyone, especially men, about consent from an early age. Let’s create a world where women aren’t afraid to refuse sex because they know that no means no, and they’re positive that men realise and respect this as well. Let’s fight for a world where men have an inherent respect for women’s bodies and choices, where they don’t use strength for violence, but rather to help and protect.
I knew that no means no when I let him touch me then, but I couldn’t be sure he knew it too because I live in a world where dealing with a kind man is not a certainty you can count on in such a situation.
So let’s change the narrative. Let’s make this world a better one. For women, men and everyone who comes after.
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Previously published on medium
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