Exercises in how surfing blogs can, in itself, generate some ideas. Jessica put up the text of her speech on how the so-called “hook-up culture” is not the horror story it’s made out to be, M. LeBlanc wrote about her first major relationship that had a withholding affection/sexual assault cycle, and Jezebel posted this appalling picture from Details magazine:
This post, I hope, can be some synthesis. M’s assured me that she wants to hash out some of the issues raised in her very personal post, and so I’d like to start with hers. She had a real click moment at a reading of Yes Means Yes, and how it made her realize that a whole lot of non-consenting sex she’d been having in her youth with her first boyfriend was a form of rape.
You see, a few years after me and my first love, from Texas, got together, the sex dropped off precipitously. My boyfriend was very attractive to me, and I was constantly horny. I wanted to have boring sex, kinky sex, and everything in between. But he withheld. He withheld sex and most forms of physical affection from me until it made me crazy. I don’t know why he did it. But it became a constant form of negotiation, with me trying to get affection and sex, and him finding all kinds of reasons to decline. The nascent body-acceptance that I had formed before went off a cliff.
And then one night, after months of this, I awoke in the middle of the night to find him rubbing up against me with a hard-on. I was in that bizarre zone between wake and sleep, where everything seemed blurry and confused and it was difficult to identify reality. And before I could get out of that in-between zone, he was on top of me and penetrating me. I, of course, was not wet, having just been asleep, and not otherwise aroused. But this was what I wanted. I wanted sex and physical closeness so badly—how could I say no? Even in my diminished state, a “take-it-while-I-can-get-it” mentality took over, and I did not protest. I winced in a little pain. After he was done he kissed me and went back to sleep. I was left lying there, confused, upset. What about me? I was just starting to get aroused at the very end of the thing, and now, what was I supposed to do?
I went to the living room and cried my eyes out.