I’ve been through my fair share of sexual trauma in my life. Only recently have I really started to tune into how it has really altered me and my sexual behaviour. I want to dissect three distinct instances where I didn’t want to have sex and somebody tried to make me do it anyway, in order to properly understand the way these experiences have affected me.
Rape
I was 18. I had been having a secret affair with my 34 year old next door neighbour. We didn’t know each other too well, it had been going on for a couple of weeks and we’d met a handful of times in his car, where we’d played around but not had sex- I was a virgin, and he knew this. I didn’t feel any emotional attachment towards him, but I liked the fact that he was older and the circumstance was exciting. Tonight, his girlfriend was away. I was going to his place for the first time. I met him at his back gate, and he took me through to his house. He told me that his kids were asleep upstairs. I felt kind of weird about this, as I didn’t expect it, but I was there now. I was going through with it. He poured me some wine. We stood in the kitchen drinking; it felt kind of awkward. After a couple of minutes he pointed to some lines of coke on his kitchen counter. He said I could do one. I’d only done cocaine once before. I leaned down towards the counter to do it, and as I did, he lifted my skirt, pulled down my underwear and put himself inside me. It felt so strong and intense, it was very rough and it was over very quickly. I remember feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me. Afterwards, he went upstairs to check that his kids were asleep and I found myself crying. I didn’t feel sad, I just felt overwhelmed. At the time I told myself it was a good thing and I didn’t fully process the fact that it was rape until years later.
Attempted Rape
I was 19, in my first year of university. Ed was 21, retaking first year for the third time and living in my halls apartment with me. I wasn’t his biggest fan; he was unbearably posh, he always made fun of me in front of my other flatmates and to top things off he was a Trump supporter. Most of the time I steered clear of him. On this particular night, there was a large group of us from my halls on a night out together. At a later point in the night, the group stood outside the club, debating when to leave and Ed announced that he would walk me back to our apartment. He wanted to leave and I was pretty drunk and ready to go too, so I went along with it, without thinking too much. He was pleasant on the walk home, we spoke about normal, everyday things. Once we got in the halls building and into the lift (where there was no camera), he hit me hard across my face. He told me I’d been flirting with people all evening and how angry he was. I was totally shocked. I barely knew him. I don’t recall how I reacted. When we came out of the lift, he picked me up and took me down the empty corridor and into our flat as I tried my best to get away. Of course, nobody was home as everyone was still at the club. He took me into his bedroom and threw me onto the bed. As soon as he let go of me I tried to escape. He pushed me down in the corner of his bed. He told me there and then that he was going to rape me and that if I didn’t behave he could easily tie me up to make sure I did. He ripped off my clothes, breaking the zip on my skirt and tearing my underwear in half. At that point, I heard the apartment door open, and the voices of my flatmates. Ed told me not to make a sound. I screamed at the top of my voice, and he released his grip immediately. I grabbed my clothes and ran out of the door. I didn’t cry afterwards.
Coerced Sex
I was 20. Ky was my first real love. Most of the time the sex was amazing. On this particular night, I wasn’t really in the mood. He initiated, and I went along with it, playing around, but when it came to the actual sex, I decided to stop and told him I wasn’t feeling it. He was hurt, he turned away from me in bed and went quiet. I tried to explain that it of course wasn’t personal, I, in myself just wasn’t feeling like sex. He stayed in his mood and I gradually started to feel bad, and like a girlfriend who couldn’t satisfy his desires. So after a while I tried to touch him. It led back to playing around and this time I let him have sex with me. I told myself that I would get into it. I mean, it wasn’t like it felt *bad*, I was just kind of indifferent. Because I wasn’t properly into it, I was more in my thoughts than usual. I tried to focus on enjoying it, for him but it felt so fake, and I felt so disconnected. In turn, I could see that he felt disconnected too. This only seemed to make him more determined to come, and he became more adamant, angry even, in his movements, which made me feel like I was simply being used for his enjoyment, that I could be anyone, I was just a hole, that maybe it would be easier for him to come if I was just a hole, if he couldn’t see me at all. So I felt myself drifting into another place. I closed my eyes, I focused on the rhythm of his movements, I froze in my physicality, pretending I wasn’t there, until eventually he came. After, I felt so empty, relieved that it was over, but empty. Tears fell down my face without me processing it. Because I wasn’t overtly ‘forced’ into it, I blamed myself for the experience being bad for both of us.
When I look back at these experiences, the rape and the attempted rape evoked feelings of complete shock. But it was always clear in my head that the men in those situations were the problem. They had bad intentions, and I wasn’t active in any way during the physical act of what they did. I never felt that I dissatisfied them, because there was never any expectation of me ‘wanting it’ in the first place. Consequently, I never felt that it diminished my worth as a person and in my sex life. Of course, rape is incredibly different for all of its victims and affects everybody in different ways, but this is the truth of how I felt. I never cried about these experiences, other than from the shock straight afterwards. I think about them today in anger towards the perpetrators, but it doesn’t destabilise my mental wellbeing, and never has.
The coerced sex, which some would call a form of rape, is what has impacted me the most. I have numerous experiences of this in my life with different men, and the feeling afterwards has stuck with me so much more. I put this down to two aspects: the conflicting and confusing feelings about the situation, and the fact that the coerced sex has usually been a lot more emotionally loaded.
The Conflicting and Confusing Feelings
Coerced sex creates a confusion that more overt rape avoids. I always felt like because I consented, I had no one but myself to blame for the bad feelings that I felt afterwards. I felt frustrated, because in my head I hadn’t wanted to do it, but I had said yes anyway. I wanted to be angry with my partner, but felt I had no right. I felt I had been mentally raped. When I first watched what is now one of my favourite films, Catherine Breillat’s ‘A Ma Soeur’, I felt so seen. The film depicts two sister’s first sexual experiences. One sister is brutally raped by a stranger. The other sister is coerced into sex by a boy that she meets on holiday. The film creates a scene of coerced sex that is just as uncomfortable to watch than the rape, partly due to how gruellingly long it goes on for and how emotionally manipulative the boy is. Because the lines are so blurred in coerced sex, afterwards it’s common to feel confused and to blame yourself, for what you regard as ‘bad sex’ rather than rape.
Emotionally Loaded
Coerced sex happens so commonly with a long-term partner. When you care about someone, and they care about you, you want the sex to be good, you want the general vibe to be good, and you feel a pressure to make sure this is the case. You’re more willing to make a small sacrifice and have sex when you don’t necessarily feel like it to appease the situation. But if one person isn’t into it, it’s often felt, and creates a divide, even a resentment. When I dissociated during coerced sex, I would feel so bad, because I knew that this person, who was supposed to love and care for me, could see that I wasn’t into it, and was choosing to turn a blind eye, and manipulate the blurred boundaries of the situation for the sake of their own pleasure. Coerced sex was therefore a lot more mentally damaging to me.
Advice to myself, that might help you too.
In future, the moment that you feel that you are having sex for the sake of somebody else rather than yourself, that you are simply enduring it, explain that you want to stop right away. There is nothing good that can come from continuing. For a long time, after coerced sex, I didn’t understand why I felt so empty and terrible about myself. I brushed it off as an overreaction and as a ‘me’ problem that I needed to get past on my own. The problem actually begins the moment you feel pressured into sex and that’s not on you. You don’t owe anyone such a sacrifice, even in a relationship.
Here’s some links I found useful that helped me better understand coerced sex:
https://www.healthline.com/health/sexual-coercion#what-to-do-in-the-moment
https://www.womenshealth.gov/relationships-and-safety/other-types/sexual-coercion
https://www.thehotline.org/resources/a-closer-look-at-sexual-coercion/
Iso
Iso is a writer and filmmaker based in East London. She is passionate about all things erotic and leads a sexy, shame-free life in hope that she can inspire others to do the same. Originally from a Northern seaside town, she is naturally drawn to the best things in life: candyfloss, trashy karaoke bars and heart-shaped sunglasses.
