Heres A Cool Trick To See If A Man Actually Respects You: Try Disagreeing With Him

Here’s a cool trick to see if a man actually respects you: try disagreeing with him

The “only have sex with people you are attracted to” discourse may be a reaction against women and teen girls (often lesbians in denial) being coerced into sex with people/men they didn’t want to have sex with, with their rapists not respecting “I’m not attracted to you” as a reason to refuse. So the logic is that if it’s a thing to have sex with people you’re not attracted to, that will be used as a weapon in lgbtq spaces to coerce/rape even more young women. Do you have thoughts on this?

Wanting to have sex with someone doesn’t require enthusiasm or attraction, but it does require want.

It’s up to the individual to decide if the desire to have sex with another person is rooted in expectations from others, or for personal interest.

I’ve had a lot of sex most of it wanted, some of it emphatically not, and some of it falling into an uncomfortable grey area.

I’m going to give examples of some of my sexual encounters, because humans are exceptional pattern matchers, and this is a very difficult and complex concept to express verbally. Usually it would be the kind of thing you learn from experience, first or second hand. So, here’s some experiences, second hand.

As an example of “enthusiastic consent,” there was a man I knew in college, let’s call him Kismet. Kismet and I had a very fraught relationship. We never dated, and in fact were rivals in our software development department. We had more shouting matches than not, about what constitutes meaningful fucking technical comments, primarily.

We also had a lot of extremely aggressive sex. We both looked forward to it at the end of long projects, and as I was something of a slut at the time, I enjoyed flirting shamelessly with pretty boys and girls in front of him as foreplay. When we fucked, it was with extreme desire on both our parts. We were hot college kids with a lot of emotions and shit. It was everything your entry level consent education courses say it should be: freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, explicit, specific.

I would consider that the kind of gold standard that a lot of people imagine, but it’s only one way to have consensual sex.

As another example of consent, I was a popular “practice partner” in school. I always happily agreed to let other queer kids use my body as a way to explore their own desires. It was fun. I wasn’t attracted to most of them, in fact I only remember two of them out of around a dozen. I doubt most of them were attracted to me, beyond the fact that I was representative of some kind of opportunity. We all had fun, learned about ourselves, and moved on. This is what consent looks like without attraction, but with enthusiasm.

I have long term partners, now. And lifelong disabling illnesses. Sometimes, we want to have sex, but it’s impossible to get the energy together to be excited by the idea of it. Sometimes, we have sex lazily or after taking my painkillers, to make the physical activity of it easier. This is what consent looks like, without enthusiasm, but with want.

I also do sex work. I was full service for a while, and that required a very different type of consent. I had no desire to sleep with my clients. Only one was even moderately attractive to me physically, and all of them were rude and condescending. But, I did want their money, and I was more than willing to provide a service to get it. So, by extension, I wanted to have sex with them, for reasons other than my own physical satisfaction.

It was the easiest work I’ve ever done, and if I hadn’t literally doubled my weight in the last 6 years, I would go back to it. Because it benefits me. This is what convent looks like with none of the trappings of desire. A choice made on the belief that it will benefit you. This is how you can want to have sex with a person, without wanting that person’s body or mind.

That’s where the bottom line of consensual sex lies for me.

Then there’s coercive rape.

That’s the name for the type of pressuring you describe. And I’ve been there too. Careless sex positivity that doesn’t adequately educate kids on what the bottom line of consent is, is one of the worst things that a victim of this kind of rape can use against themselves.

Sexual consent is, at its root, no different than contract consent or medical consent: if you’ve been lied to, or been pressured into signing, it’s not a valid deal. It’s just rape.

Knowing what consent looks like, in all its forms, can help keep kids from getting cornered into sexual experimentation they’re too young for, or too scared of, just because someone else tells them to.

But, so often, people focus on only a single form of consent, that gold standard one up there that I led with. And then every other consensual act on this list becomes a cloud of grey that covers up what consent can look like. And if you don’t know what it looks like, it’s too easy to get confused and end up lost and hurt.

The fault always lies with the rapist here (though in cases like this, many of them don’t even know they’re being rapists), but when you learn that you could have avoided it somehow, it’s very easy to say you SHOULD have avoided it, and wrack yourself with guilt.

The whole “nuanced discussions of consent will get more girls coercively raped” line of thought is fault.

By having nuanced discussions of consent, more men will realize that their behaviour is unacceptable, and more women will be given the confidence to explain exactly why it’s unacceptable.

These kinds of discussions benefit people.

If, after having been given all this information, a man still does not take “no” for an answer, then he was never operating in good faith to begin with, and needs to be kicked in the teeth and sent away until he gets his act together.

But, generally, people want to be good, and having a discussion about the myriad types of consent will help people be good.

Apartment hacks masterpost

Kitchen

How to clean up kitchen (particularly the sink, burnt pots and small aplliances)

How to take care of kitchen stuff so that it lives longer

10 commandments of a clutter-free kitchen

Organizing kitchen mini masterpost

5 things to do in the kitchen before you go to bed

What is soapy bowl and why it’s awesome

How to organize your fridge (also here, here and here)

Thins you should know about your fridge

Adding more storage space in a tiny kitchen

Cleaning

Lots of cleaning tutorials and tips. And some more

How to clean up pantry

How to make your house look cleaner than it really is

How to wash pillows

Cleaning the bathroom

How to clean the nastiest places (and get rid of bad smells, etc.)

Floor-to-celling guide to spring cleaning

Recaulking your bathtub

Cleaning grout

How to dispose of toxic waste

Cleaning the medicine cabinet

How to make chores more fun

You mustn’t skip these chores, but you can delay these if you’re busy

Easily forgotten things that you should clean/replace

Why you need a catch-up day

Small cleaning tasks to do in under 15 minutes (also here)

Looking for a flat/moving

First apartment checklist

Where too look during an apartment hunt (and some more tips)

Negotiate these things with your landlord

What to do first in a new place

What do clean before moving out

How not to get crazy during moving flats

How to downgrade to a smaller place

Organisation, storage

10 habits for better home organisation

How to store off-season items

10 storage ideas for small spaces (more here)

Storage secret weapons

How to organise your closet

Things to do before twice-yearly closet switchout

How to store and maintain your sweaters

Decluttering

Why it feels great

How to get rid of clutter

How to declutter (not only a flat)

What needs to be thrown away from your flat

How to let go of the things you no longer need

Things you own too many of; you can throw away these too

Decuttering the bathroom

Decluterring masterpost

Decorating

Projects for every room in your home/flat

Add style to your home

DIY decorating ideas

How to use negative space

4 common decorating mistakes and how to avoid them

Questions to ask yourself before buying something new

How to choose furniture that’ll be easier to clean

Season-specific tips

Things to do before the cold season

Household hacks for winter

Preparing for Christmas

Green thumb 101

How to take care of succulents

Never kill a plant again

Living alone / Sharing a flat

How not to be lonely when living alone

12 things you can only do when home alone

What you learn by living alone

Things you learn while sharing a flat

What to pack when leaving for a dorm

How to seamlessly share a kitchen (or a flat in general)

Safety issues to discuss with flatmates

Benefits of living with strangers

And also how to turn a house into a home

hey, here’s a radical idea: someone saying “no” when you ask for sex is never an act of abuse, and saying otherwise in a conversation about rape victims is deplorable.

if there are other things that were done to you that were abusive, your trauma is always valid. but “not having sex with me” can never be added to the abuser’s list of offenses, because you are never owed sex. 

 if your partner says the reason they said ‘no’ was that you’re ugly, or stupid, or any number of demoralizing things- that is an act of abuse. but the act of abuse is in attacking your sense of self worth, and not in refusing sex. 

the abusive act is that your abuser attributed their ‘no’ to a supposed lack of worthiness on your part. but denying sex in itself is never an act of abuse. when this occurs, you point out that you had your self worth attacked.

 you don’t go around preaching that saying ‘no’ to sex is an abuse tactic, and you especially don’t do it in the chronological middle of a discussion regarding people being pressured into sex. 

Straight dudes are their own worst enemies when it comes to getting laid.

“Poison Kitchen” from the book Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor.

This is the local cafe, in Prague, where Karou and Zuzana hang out in book one. I adore the place and would really love to find a real world replica in my own town.

Prints up at Society6 and RedBubble