volition and coercion
on agency and repetition compulsion beyond the consent paradigm
I’ve been thinking a lot about rape and coercion. There are so many tricky levels between rape and fully, consciously chosen sex. In this piece I don’t want to assign blame or suggest that some acts are ‘rape-lite’. I want to think about how it feels as a woman to engage in sex which is more or less wanted, more or less chosen, the degrees of violation that stay with us afterwards. Why some memories wake us screaming in the night and some make us avoid men wearing certain shirt and trouser combos and why some, even though they might appear worse, cause no such trauma.
I want to link Aella’s rape spectrum diagram at this point, which I don’t think is accurate, nor do I think it’s especially helpful to put RAPE as the title for a bunch of acts that certainly fall short of rape, but that’s one way to look at it. You can read her blog here:
One of my worst experiences was sexual assault, not rape. My friend’s drink had been spiked. She was fourteen, I had just turned fifteen. Neither us were virgins and we had a reputation in our small school. The stories had made it to an older boy who’d been expelled and he’d offered to buy us vodka from ASDA. We waited in the car park for him. He’d forgotten mixer so had to go back. When he returned, my friend drank the vodka with the mixer and I drank the vodka straight, because I was anorexic and it was full-fat coke. Within ten minutes, she was collapsing on the street, couldn’t get her words out, and after about twenty minutes she was lying on the ground throwing up. I wanted to call my mum to pick us up but the boy took my phone off me. He wanted to take us to a house. It wasn’t far, he said. I decided I would have to let him sexually assault me to think we were chill so I could snatch my phone off him. As soon as I got it, he backed off. Game over. I dragged my friend’s body through the field and we got in the car. I didn’t mention what happened. The next day in school one of the boys said I’d ruined their fun, which leads me to suppose that there were others waiting for us in the house.
I suppressed all memory of this. It came back when I was 19, starting with full body flashbacks until I recovered more and more of the memory, until I could remember the boy’s name. It was a horrible, creepy process, finding out there’s something locked in your brain that you’ve been unable to access. The somatic symptoms came before the conscious memory. I felt hands on me when I went to sleep. I went crazy, real crazy. I sought out danger, I used drugs, I had sex with strangers where I saw myself looking down from above and watching an inert, barely conscious body. I got scared and I got violent. But that was an acute trauma: I did narrative therapy for it and it resolved. There are still some things that trigger it, like being grabbed in a certain way from behind, but mostly that one was easy to fit into my conscious memory. It was also straightforward. I didn’t will it. I’d gone along with it only as a strategy to get us back safely, because if I’d tried to fight there’s no way I’d have won or had a shot at getting my friend out of there.
In other cases of sex that I didn’t really want, I had a tactic to make it not rape: just reframe it as something I’m into, just pretend. It’s kind of ambivalent anyway. Like it doesn’t feel great but I don’t really mind. Sure, you end up feeling more like a piece of meat than a real person. But it’s mostly fine.
The other time that stressed me out, but didn’t traumatise me, was the time a guy tried to get me pregnant when I’d asked him not to do that. I wasn’t on birth control and we didn’t use protection, which is typical for me, but I’ve never had the experience of someone ignoring me when I say pull out. That felt pretty violating. It ruined the relationship and he left shortly after but we still speak. I think he knows that was wrong. But it’s also not so wrong that I don’t understand it. He had a lot going on and he really wanted a baby. He was unhinged but not actually malevolent. Even though that was technically rape it doesn’t feel like rape. My brain processed it as a slight wound to my sense of independence but not as a catastrophic breakdown of myself as a free and independent person. I think the thing that causes trauma is being stuck in a situation that you can’t escape. The total sense of disempowerment, the stripping of the agency and dignity which should be afforded to every person. That makes you feel sub-human. It fundamentally alters your ability to interface with the normal world.
So much shit has gone down in my life beyond the really bad stuff that it feels inane and harmless in comparison. I don’t think about it at all and it doesn’t arouse emotion in me beyond mild regret and embarrassment. But sometimes I sit down and think about it and wonder if I should feel more upset, if my numbness only means that I expect a certain level of ambient cruelty.
Almost a year ago I’d just been kicked out of my ex’s house and was crashing on my oldest friends’ sofa in Wood Green and feeling at the pit of everything. My survival instincts had kicked in and I was busy finding a new place to live and writing a review article for The Tablet and superficially seemed to have bounced back well. A guy I’d been on a date with six months prior messaged me inviting me to stay in his house in the countryside and I complied.
He picked me up from the station and I walked into his house, which was so beautiful and peaceful and full of antiques, and he got the fire going and I lay on the carpet and cried. He chose this moment to initiate sex. I didn’t exactly want to, but I was aware of the conditions of my being there. A beautiful, calm house, a comfortable bed, a fridge full of nourishing food which was duly cooked and fed to me, in exchange for sex—obviously unsaid and denied if it ever came up, but those were the implicit terms. And I guess it made me feel better too. It’s nice to be desired and to satisfy someone, even if the desire wasn’t there on my end.
It would be easy for me to retroactively reframe this, especially because I now regret my involvement with him. I was vulnerable, homeless and intensely sad. But I hadn’t taken leave of my rational faculties. The decisions I made were still my own, however much I might come to regret them. My vulnerability meant that I chose differently, but I chose rationally given the options available to me—comfort helped, having sex with someone new helped, putting my bare feet in the sea in the quiet English countryside helped. We make these calculations all the time and then we forget our workings once our circumstances improve.
