we can change the culture: a few observations of language, assumptions, and consent
content warning: this article contains descriptions of sexually coercive situations and references to assault and street harassment.
a note on gendered terms: this piece is about my experiences as a cis woman, in interactions with cis men. I welcome any discussion that expands its premise beyond those identifiers.
Despite the best efforts of my mother, a second-wave feminist, I grew up a romantic, daydreamy child. I spent every spare minute in fiction, escaping my mundane life in my midsize hometown, where no one asked if I had anything to say or cared what I did. In books, I could spend my days and nights in stone-clad hamlets on the eastern seaboard, early 20th century American cities on the make, or 19th century European ballrooms with moody, intellectual men in possession of good fortunes, who must be in want of someone like me.
The first time someone held me down in an attempt to have sex with me against my will, I was 15. He was not my first kiss, but he was my first sort-of boyfriend, a classmate, one of the few people who paid the briefest attention to me and so, by reminding me I existed, made himself attractive to me. When he pinned me to his bed, I tried to push him off but to little effect. He let me go only when his mom walked by the room, and I scrambled up from the bed as fast as I could and left.
The second time a man held me down, I was 20. I was on a first date at his house, and he thought we would Netflix and chill before Netflix and chill was a thing. Over and over he made me lie down next to him, his arm tensed around me to keep me from getting up. Over and over I pushed him off, moving away, trying to find the right words that would stop him without escalating the situation. This encounter ended only when my ex-boyfriend happened to call, and I pretended — much to his confusion — that he was in dire straits and needed a ride, running out the front door and offering excuses the whole way.
In neither of these situations did I ever actually say the word “no.” I also never considered either experience as anything more than a shitty date. Neither did I tally up all the times I was groped, catcalled, shouted at from cars, propositioned for sex by strangers, or exposed to a random man’s genitals, all because I was a woman on a public street. All of this I just accepted — accepted! — as things men did to women. None of these things was an assault as I knew it, and I could not quantify the overwhelming fear I felt in those more dangerous moments, when those men held me down but I didn’t know how to express what I didn’t want. “Rape” was something that a stranger did to you on a darkened street corner or, more terribly, an unspeakable crime perpetrated by an older relative or family acquaintance. “Rape” required a victim who fought and clawed and shouted her refusal loudly enough for other people to believe her. “Rape” was undeniable in its presentation. Though it should have been clear to either of those men that I was not interested in sex, the way I had been acculturated to understand consent — that it was implied unless it was very explicitly denied — left me vulnerable to assault, trauma, and self-recrimination.
It was #MeToo that finally gave me the context to understand what each of these experiences had done to amplify my innate fear of men — of their strength, of the authority society gave them to be aggressive, of the power of their capricious whims to affect the rest of my life. #MeToo helped me understand the ways in which I had made myself small to keep from becoming a victim, that even in my frantic escapes, I was concerned with protecting the egos of my would-be assaulters. It was #MeToo that made me feel that not only was I not alone, but that the era of doing those things to someone without consequence was over. Of course, later revelations and their subsequent lack of legal repercussions would prove that era was not, in fact, over, but at the time the reckoning was exhilarating.
The thing is, I would not have called either of those men a predator for attempting to coerce me into sex. At the time, I thought of what they did as the “natural” expression (and please know that that phrase sticks in my throat as I type this) of what I had seen in love stories: that it was the role of a woman to present herself as selective and virtuous, and it was the role of a man to convince her to relinquish her virtues in favor of his desire — which was always also her desire, of course, but chastely, appropriately suppressed until his victorious male potency called it forth. There wasn’t room between the extremes for wanting a relationship, but not sex, not right now. The coercion, in other words, seemed part of the dance.
For years I wondered why these gendered roles figured so heavily in my romantic fantasies growing up. I always wanted to play the princess who needed someone to save her because, in being saved, I would also be loved. This persistent, latent neediness extended itself naturally into my sexual desires as I grew up, but it also cultivated a sharper, more repressed longing that I didn’t have the words to describe and knew I could not speak aloud even if I had. Not long after Aggressive Netflix-and-Chill Guy, I met someone online, a Dominant in search of a submissive. I didn’t know these terms at the time, but he wanted to enter into this kind of a relationship with me, and everything he promised made my heart race and my skin blaze with electricity. Because I didn’t dare share his texts with anyone else, my distrust of men and self-protective instinct caused me to cut things off with him before I sank too deep, retreating back into largely vanilla relationships with men and women.
But the need didn’t go away. Even as I settled down into a committed long-term relationship, I fantasized about consensual non-consent, consuming erotica that made me feel guilty but incredibly alive. Over the years, as that relationship drifted into unintentional celibacy and emotional distance, I retreated online. It didn’t take long for the algorithms, based on my likes and follows, to lead me back to BDSM, so intoxicating even as it felt incompatible with my disgust at the cishet men who had exerted control over me. I thought I was broken, defective, for secretly wanting to submit.
Yet to my amazement I found people who made love stories about white-hot, aggressive desperation that overwhelmed but also consoled, about lazy mornings filled with begging and transgression, about restraint, pain, and control that always originated in respect and consent. These stories assuaged all of my needs: to finally relinquish some of the control ingrained by my upbringing and made necessary by a fragile partner, to gain the sexual sovereignty I had never had, and to imagine that I was capable of being loved, protected, and cared for even as I gained confidence and power.
When #MeToo happened, a lot of reply guys asked incredulously if they were supposed to interrupt their sexual exploits to ask for consent, waxing indignantly that no one would ever be turned on again if we all had to start making sure that our partners were affirmatively into the things we wanted to do to them. Obviously it’s irrelevant to the question of consent whether getting that consent heightens or dampens arousal. But when I tell you that the hottest thing I’ve ever heard was a male Dominant in a roleplay asking, breathlessly, for true consent, it’s because I agree with those proposing that we can have it all: romantic love with hot, amazing, kinky sex, where everyone is on the same page, safe and protected, with autonomy over their bodies and experiences.
To be clear, I am not in a Dom/sub relationship, and I am not glossing over the very real issues of abuse, manipulation, or amateurism which neglects established safety practices. But when I started writing romance and erotica, I wanted the characters I wrote to reflect not my painful, frustrating, shame-filled past, but the promise of this kinky, sustainable, consensual future. I hope to follow the lantern-light of erotica creators who are already telling these stories, who helped me get through some very dark, isolating days with these imagined other lives. I want to reframe the stories that led me down this road in the first place. As a society, we have a lot to do to prevent the crimes that led to #MeToo. As writers and creators, we‘re changing the language society uses to talk about love and sex, consent and coercion, dominance and submission. Changing the language changes the culture. It transforms what we will accept, and expect, from one another.
This is the first article published under my name. Consider it my mission statement for the work to come.
