The Frailty of Consent when all you know is Shame
We need to change our attitudes on sex — but to what?
Since the revelations of #MeToo, we’ve started some important conversations about not just consent, but pleasure and communicating our desires to our partners. The two are natural bedfellows, but these conversations are difficult for those who have been brought up to feel that sex, and our own bodies, are inherently shameful.
Many of us have lived our sexual lives understanding consent to be what we would permit our partner to do, not what we actively wanted to do. Sex was something that women were not supposed to talk about, or desire. The best I could hope for is that whatever my partner chose to do, I would enjoy. My pleasure was something never to be talked about, and always secondary to my partner’s.
The programming that led to these beliefs began in childhood, like so many of our double-standards. When I was a small child, I always played with the boys, who never really accepted me as one of their own, but didn’t tell me to bog off, so I carried on hanging around with them. The first hint that there was something different that I didn’t yet understand, was when boys would use words like “slag” and “frigid” about other girls. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but teachers would indicate (usually by yelling) that these words were not to be…
