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Get Jinxed - Jinx’s Theme

I am surprised by how much sex I have had in my life that I didn’t want to have. Not exactly what’s considered “real” rape, or “date” rape, although it is a kind of rape of the spirit - a dishonest portrayal or distortion of my own desire in order to appease another person. I said yes because I felt it was too much trouble to say no. I said yes because I didn’t want to have to defend my “no,” qualify it, justify it - deserve it. I said yes because I thought I was so ugly and fat that I should just take sex every time it was offered, because who knew when it would be offered again. I said yes to partners I never wanted in the first place, because to say no at any point after saying yes for so long would make our entire relationship a lie, so I had to keep saying yes in order to keep the “no” I felt a secret. That is such a messed-up way to live, such an awful way to love. So these days, I say yes only when I mean yes. It does require some vigilance on my part to make sure I don’t just go on sexual automatic pilot and let people do whatever. It forces me to be really honest with myself and others. It makes me remember that loving myself is also about protecting myself and defending my own borders. I say yes to me.

Margaret Cho, “Yes Means Yes” (via lalondes)

I honestly think people don’t talk about this sort of thing enough. We’ll talk about how important it is to give consent, that rape happens when there is no consent at all, but we won’t discuss the gray area of what it means when  a woman feels obligated to consent when, in all honesty, she doesn’t actually want to.

She said yes, but not out of a desire for sex itself. She said yes because of outside, societal factors that dictated to her how she should feel about sex and that what she actually felt about it was “wrong.”

Looking back on it, so many of my sexual experiences are like this. To the point that I literally just stopped responding to a person I was dating when I realized he was, more or less, harassing me to have sex with him when I didn’t really want to and I couldn’t adequately express that, no, dating a person doesn’t mean having free, unmoderated access to their genitals. 

And as women, we’ll actually joke about this phenomenon. We’ll say that, oh, we’ve all had sex when we didn’t want to, just to shut him up! And instead of the punchline being about the societal expectation of woman trading the commodity of sex for the feeling of self-worth and acceptance, the punchline is about how men are whiny babies who just can’t control their hormones.

For me, this is how society normalizes rape. You don’t want to have sex, but societal pressures tell you that you have to have sex, so afterwards when you’ve had the sex you didn’t want to have in the first place, you can make it better because the joke is really on him!Hahaha! And, guess what, if you’re busy joking about him, you’re not going to be busy thinking about why you agreed to participate in something you had absolutely no desire to do.

(via abandonmentrequiresexpectation)