Silence isn’t Yes

It’s time to talk about ‘bad sex’

Personal Essay by HALEY AUSBUN

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Yes and no are important words. They offer the language needed for consent with your partner in sexual relationships. But sometimes pressure, convenience and a sense of obligation can have you saying yes… because it’s easier.

#MeToo is pushing some men out of jobs for sexual harassment and assault. But there’s a deeper conversation taking place about power imbalances in intimate relationships.

Imagine meeting someone for the first time, you get to know each other texting, and then the first real date happens. You’ve built up this expectation of the other person, but then when the time comes and they’re driving you to their house, you realize you barely know them.

As the night gets longer, maybe after a few drinks, and you end up in their bedroom. But at this point you’re realizing how fast you’ve gone. You don’t know this person. Do you even like them? They aren’t as cute as you had made them to be in your head.

You want to turn around and take it all back, you aren’t really interested in having sex. But because you wanted this at some point, any point, it feels like you set the wheels in motion. You don’t ask the other person if you can say no, because it’s not worth the risk of hurting their feelings or them potentially hurting you. No turning back now, so you do it. And feel awful after.

This is what happens in “Cat Person,” a recent work of short fiction. Written by Kristen Roupenian, this short story was published in The New Yorker in December 2017. At her cinema job, Margot, a college student in her 20s meets Robert, a vague older man.

The story describes an experience that I didn’t realize was so universal. It took two people meeting for the first time and put them in a situation where a consensual encounter went bad, leaving a woman burdened by the experience. Her grief, guilt, disgust and rejection of Robert afterward was all too familiar.

In a Q&A published in The New Yorker, Roupenian explains why this moment resonated with so many people:

“It speaks to the way that many women, especially young women, move through the world: not making people angry, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, working extremely hard to keep everyone around them happy.”

Margot’s fictional experience resonated with a flood of people who had similar “bad dates.” I sent it to as many friends as I could to talk about it; I needed to try to unpack what this universal experience of a bad consensual date that leaves you feeling used, meant for our society.

I got my answer a few weeks later. I don’t remember where I was when I heard about Kevin Spacey or Harvey Weinstein, but I remember where I was when I heard about Aziz Ansari.

I checked my phone the morning when the Aziz Ansari sexual harassment story broke, and I remember the push notification. He was supposed to be one of the good ones, whatever that even meant to me. As I read the survivor’s story, I couldn’t help but think of “Cat Person.” Here was another situation where one partner thought it was consensual and the other left crying in a cab.

“If what happened to her is a violation, then we are all violated. And everyone is a violator. And that’s a scary fucking world to live in,” blogger Katy Anthony said.

In her post, Anthony discussed the various sides of the Ansari debate and found a way to show why they were all right.

This was my “Ah-ha” moment. Everyone is a violator, and we are all violated.

In December, another national #MeToo headline came when actor Matt Damon said media doesn’t focus enough on the Hollywood men who don’t sexually assault women. Immediately another hashtag, #NotAllMen, came to my mind. What Damon was missing in his statement is the patriarchy we already live in leaves everyone subjected to the same violent system that results in sexual assault.

As with Ansari, the way men are programmed by the patriarchy to put their needs first in a sexual encounter, and the way women are programmed to silence themselves in those encounters, can create moments that we’ve never dared call assault. We just call it “bad sex.”
They’re consensual, but one participant is left feeling disengaged, disgusted, ashamed, sad, terrified or even traumatized. And these are the moments we need to talk about. These are the moments that happen to our friends that we try to all laugh off together the next day. We say it was just a bad time.

These stories, these moments, show how sexual harassment and assault against women, as well as trans, binary and marginalized gender identities, is not the work of a few harassers or monsters and doesn’t just happen to a few survivors. This is the result of a larger cultural problem about how different gender identities relate to each other under the patriarchy. We need to not only support survivors of sexual assault but discuss how rape culture affects our day-to-day relationships, in sometimes subtle ways.

This patriarchy exists in Bellingham. We are all responsible for realizing when to call something out. Men who haven’t assaulted or raped someone are still engaged in this system that prioritizes their needs and wants, so much so they don’t even notice how disengaged or upset their sexual partner is in the moment. All men need to make sure they are paying attention to their partner’s enthusiasm during sexual encounters. Bellingham citizens can boast its liberal agenda that marches for womxn, but the conversation around intimate relationships and consent needs to take place.