Coercion / - Tumblr Posts

Let us be hanging out, watching a movie, playing a card game, chatting about anything fun. Suggest I try one of your edibles, just for the shit's and giggles of it.

Over the next hour, start being more suggestive. Glances at my lips, ahand on the thigh, verbal advances. Get me in my head and flustered as the weed takes my inhibitions.

I'll gasp when you finally steal that first kiss and roll your hips against me. Mock my surprise when I grind back into you, my body begging for your attention.

"Oh baby, are you getting needy on me now? I'd love to touch you, but you got to work for it first, okay?"

Push a finger in my mouth and watch me start to suck on it. Tentatively, at first, of course. But with each swipe of my tongue, I get braver and you get rougher.

When you pull your fingers out of my mouth and start to rub my pussy, my eyes glaze over. I'll be soaking wet.

You wouldn't even have to move your hand or do anything, and I'd be bucking my hips into your hand, unraveling beneath you.

Mockery

TW - vague reference to sexual assualt, calling my assailant by what he is, coercion

After my assault my dislike for anal penetration skyrocketed. At the time he didn’t know the reason outside of the physical discomfort. Silly me for thinking “I just don’t want to, I don’t like it” is reason enough to not have to perform a sex act. Not having a “legitimate” reason for not wanting it made it fair game to badger me about it.  It wasn’t every day, but he regularly requested it, lamented my aversion, and using emotional blackmail to get it.  

Admittedly, I gave in quite a few times, which is how I managed to get to a point where it didn’t physically hurt anymore. However that did not mean that I enjoyed it.  

Each time was traumatizing to various degrees.  The event itself less so than  having to agree to that which was demanded of me by Rapist.  Mix in the stress of pending pain and discomfort, getting the prep just right (which included me fasting because I’m paranoid) and the anxiety of something going wrong (have I ever mentioned he was a germaphobe?) and you have the recipe for the  most unsexy sexual experiences I’ve ever agreed to.

I thought his attitude would have changed after he found out what had happened to me. 

I was very wrong. 

Cishet man makes woman extremely uncomfortable: volume 2318864314652217

I am a woman out after dark, so we all know I was asking for it, but this guy was something else. I was cruising on my phone on a bench in my city’s downtown.

Enter overly confident stranger stage right who invites me for a drink at a bar.  I hesitate for half a second which of course he takes to mean yes. 

Man: Of course you do, come on, we’re going. 

He’s invited me to one of my regular haunts, and it’s not far from where I parked, so I reluctantly agree at his insistence.  I order my usual and have to explain that I don’t drink.  He looks dejected for a moment.

Man: Maybe I should stop drinking too.

Uh huh.  Some chitchat was pleasant enough, then after some silly back and forth about “honesty” (”I have to be honest, I’m an engineer.  Do you hate me?  *eyeroll*) I let him know that I’m queer.  Silly me, thinking that this would shut his ass down.

He “doesn’t get” queer. So I, thinking his question was genuine, attempt to explain that it’s handy for those of us who don’t fit under the first four letters of the alphabet soup.  An umbrella term of sorts.

He asked about my sexuality personally.  This was a bit presumptuous I though.  However I explained that I am pansexual, and what that means.  

Man: So you’re still attracted to men!

Me: ...theoretically.  However my experiences have made me uninterested in men.

Man: Just experiences did that?  You can’t overcome them?

Me:  *a little more firmly* ... I don’t do men.

Man:  So tell me, do you find me attractive?

Me:  *takes a deep breathe*

Man:  No, no, I guess you don’t.  Don’t tell me.  I don’t want to hear it.

Me:  You are an attractive person.  I just don’t like men.

Man:  So what would make me attractive to you? 

Me:  ....  you could start with not being a man?

Man:   Well, maybe I should try to be a woman.  Or nonbinary.  Maybe I am a woman.  Or nonbinary.  I might like it.  I’ve never tried it. 

Me:  .... it’s not like.. trying gin for the first time...

Man:  but I’ve never tried it!

Me:  ... That’s not the way it works.

Man:  Do you want me to cut if off?

Me:  This is getting weird.

Man:  It sure is.  Do you have a knife on you?

Me:  Please... don’t.  I have to go to the washroom.

I told him I needed to be up for work in the morning, thanked him for the drink and ducked out despite his protestations 

Man: “Don’t you want to chill or something?”

No.  I didn’t.  I don’t.  My sexuality is not a whim or a joke or whatever you were trying to make it.  Furthermore, the gall of trying to continue to get me to fuck you after I’ve straight up told you I’m not interested is coercion  and I’m not interested in being with someone who can’t take a hint glaring, obvious note.  

I didn’t say any of the last bit, and I wish I had.  But  I’m proud that I got myself out of there.  It’s progress.  The old me would have suffered through that interaction further with the guilt of him having bought me a $1.75 drink. I may have even let him have me.

Not this time.  Not anymore.

To give you an idea about when my sex life was like with him, i had two days of what I can only describe as a full body exhale ( complete with tears, shakes and waves of unexplained exhaustion) when I realized that I could still have sex, but would never have to humour someone's request demand for anal again.

My chest still relaxes a bit every time I think "never again".

“Of course, because she posted her story on Reddit, many commenters did the exact opposite of sympathizing with her predicament. Instead, they took the opportunity to tell her what a selfish bitch she was being, and how awful it was that she would not greet her husband every evening with her vulva laid out and fully garnished on a silver platter.”

Click here for full article.

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.

I COMPLETELY AGREE WITH THIS!!

But why tf is my ex, who has coerced me (more than once) reblogging this? Does he really think he's the victim here? Especially since he has received no negative impact for his actions. I received negative impact, I am still receiving negative impact. I am aware I told many people about it, probably too many, but he does not see how his actions are damaging. He hurt me and he will continue to hurt others.

Hey, so just with some of the discourse floating around this site, I just wanted to remind people of one thing:

It does not matter if you’ve been dating for a week or have been married for twenty years, being in a relationship does not and never will mean that you owe your partner(s) any form of intimacy. You do not owe them sex, you do not owe them xyz type of sex, you do not even owe them cuddling. Being in a relationship does not change the fact that you have bodily autonomy.

Has your #1 comfort character committed a crime?

sidney prescott and billy loomis, or: abusive relationships for dummies

no, but seriously: nothing about sidney and billy’s relationship is healthy. when you deconstruct the timeline of scream, and take into account the details roman gives sidney and the audience in scream 3 (most notably, that he showed billy a video of maureen and hank slinking off together and gave him the idea to murder maureen as a revenge plot), you can quickly figure out that for the majority of sidney and billy’s relationship (if not the whole thing), billy was planning to murder maureen. and leading up to maureen’s murder, sidney didn’t have a clue.

in the first movie (and hell, the first scene with sidney and billy), billy describes the early stages of their relationship as “hot and heavy,” implying to the audience that sidney wasn’t shy with her affection, wasn’t afraid to be alone with billy in her room, and was open to the idea of sleeping with him, perhaps after she had been dating him for an “appropriate” length of time (i.e., the prom night cliché). this is cut abruptly when her mother is murdered. keep in mind, sidney is the one who found the body. sidney is the one who reported it to police. sidney is the one who had to testify in court, recount the details of that night, relive the details of her mother being what the media describes, in canon, as being “savagely raped and tortured.” because her mother died in such a violent way, and because she was the one who had to witness and report it and live through the trial and deal with the subsequent impact of the media, she becomes numb. she’s not the same person she was before. while she didn’t personally experience what her mother did, she’s still a victim—the loss of a parent is a heavy one to cope with, and it’s not something you really ever get over, especially when you’re close to them. i like to think that because neil travels a lot for business, sidney was always close with maureen, but that’s another post for another time.

sidney falls into depression following her mother’s death, and fortunately, she has a strong support system around her; however, it’s clear during the movie that billy’s been a little wishy-washy with that support. while he, at first, does seem like a caring boyfriend ( “i wouldn’t dream of breaking your underwear rule” ), on further observation there’s plenty of indication that he’s carefully manipulating sidney. when he sneaks into her bedroom, she tells him he needs to leave. instead of leaving, he launches into that infamous exorcist speech, which lends itself to talking about how sidney was before her mother’s death. how she was more open and carefree and basically, how they made out more, and now she’s not doing that as much, and *straight white boy voice* it sucks. she teases him, albeit a little indignantly, about how he thought he’d sneak in and they’d just go at it, and he brings up how he’d never dream of breaking her “underwear rule”—this indicates that similar situations have happened before, to a point where sidney’s had to lay out specific boundaries and give it all a name so she can drop it whenever billy’s pushing her past her boundaries, or when she’s just uncomfortable with something and wants to stop. and sidney sheepishly gives an “okay,” which is closer to sounding “worn down” than enthusiastic consent. they make out a bit on her bed, and the second billy slides a hand up under her nightgown, she pushes him off of her, teasing him about it, pretty much gently trying to ease him off of her and out of her room because she was already not completely comfortable with it, but she doesn’t want to make him mad. they exchange a few lines, sidney stresses how she “appreciates the romantic gesture” ( again, likely doesn’t want him to be upset, because subconsciously she’s more concerned about sparing his feelings than actively claiming her own boundaries ). billy flat-out says “about the no sex thing, i was only half-serious.”—this is such a shitty thing to say to somebody, not only because it’s guilt-trippy as hell, but it’s extremely manipulative. he’s basically dangling it over her head, as if to say he’s been patient with her for a year now, but he’s getting tired of waiting around for her to get over her personal shit, i.e. give me what i want or i’m going to leave you. sidney responds to the above…. rather well, asking if he’d settle for a pg-13 relationship before flashing him. he finally leaves, and sidney goes from grinning and giggling, to this:

she’s not happy. she feels disconnected, she feels sad. she wasn’t comfortable with the situation, but she went through with it anyway, because she felt an obligation to. here’s your boyfriend, who drove all the way out to you, who is reminding you about how you two used to be, and he’s been so patient, so what’s a little kiss? what’s a little tongue? what’s a little touching? give a little, it’ll be fine. swallow that discomfort, it’s only getting in the way.

the next example we get of this is two days later, after the news about casey and steve’s deaths break, and sidney’s attacked in her home, and billy’s held in the sheriff’s station overnight because he’s the prime suspect. when sidney finds out from stu that billy was released, her first instinct is to ask him if he was pissed off at her. stu carefully throws out that he’s heartbroken because she didn’t trust him. sidney ends up tearing down the hallway a minute later because of a student running through the hall in a ghostface costume as a prank, and she bumps into billy.

the conversation’s awkward. sidney’s quick to try and clear the air, letting billy know sheknows he’s not the killer, because the killer called her while he was in jail, and billy guilt trips her, again.

“please try to understand—”   “understand what? that my girlfriend would rather accuse me of being a psychopathic killer than touch me?”

he’s quick to go for the jugular with gaslighting techniques. sidney points out that she was attacked and almost killed, and billy immediately points to how sidney hasn’t been the same since her mother died. sidney’s affronted by this, pointing out that her mother wasmurdereda year ago, almost to the day, to which billy pretty much tells her she needs to get over it because “i want my girlfriend back.” and understandably, sidney’s upset by this, and she runs off.

( while this doesn’t apply to billy specifically, it’s important to note that sidney overhears two girls in the bathroom talking about her mother, and how she was a “tramp,” and how sidney’s possibly just like her in that respect. this ties in with the rumors gale weathers has been spreading about cotton being innocent and simply a lover of maureen’s. when sidney and tatum are talking on the porch later that afternoon, tatum also brings up the rumors of maureen having affairs with other men, citing that because sidney’s father was always out of town, it was possible that maureen was an unhappy woman. this becomes important at the end of the second act, when sidney ends up sleeping with billy. )

later that evening, sidney and tatum go to the party at stu’s house. right when sidney’s looking for tatum so they can leave, billy shows up, and they end up going up to stu’s parents’ room to talk.

sidney immediately starts taking blame for everything, saying she’s been “self-absorbed with all this post-traumatic stress,” and pinning her victim complex entirely on herself. billy’s burrowed deep in her head and managed to warp her perception to where she feels like she’s at fault for her relationship being stale, and that her depression and PTSD surrounding her mother’s death is no excuse for her to put up barriers so she can be comfortable in her relationship while she mourns. she’s hoping that cotton weary’s death sentence will bring her closure; and yet with the possibility that she was wrong and the killer might still be out there hanging over her head, she’s not entirely sure she’s ever going to get that closure, so she needs her support system: and while billy hasn’t been supportive of her, and has been more concerned with himself and his needs, she can’t see that. all she can see is that he’s put up with her for a year, and that if she doesn’t give him sex soon, he’s going to leave. she’s lost her mother and her entire world’s pretty much changed for the worse; she doesn’t want to lose relationships she values, and she doesn’t want to lose billy. part of her is afraid to because she doesn’t know if she’ll ever find anyone who will “deal” with her hang-ups like billy has. she’s insecure in that respect, so she gives billy sex because she sees it as the only way she’ll be able to keep him around, and she’s so desperate to maintain that relationship. she no longer sees the validity in her emotions and her limitations because billy’s warped it all to where she thinks she’s being unreasonable and selfish, when it’s the opposite. billy feels like he won’t be able to properly kill sidney unless she’s no longer pure and virginal. what he doesn’t see is that she’s already a victim of trauma, and that’s what ultimately aids her survival in the end.