‘I said yes, but the sex was weird’: Why consent isn’t the whole battle

“I’M being kissed. There’s a boy, then another boy. I keep asking if I’m pretty. I keep saying yes.”

When Reina Gattuso agreed to be passed around a group of young men at a high school party, there was no doubt she had consented, she wrote in Harvard’s student newspaper Crimson several years later. The next morning, she felt “weird” and “confused”. But she didn’t know who to turn to about the uncomfortable experience.

If you say “yes”, is exploitative, uncaring or even brutal sex solely your problem?

We hear a lot about rape culture and understanding consent. Children are now taught in school how to recognise when someone has not agreed to sex. But Reina says “yes” or “no” isn’t the whole battle. Just because someone has said yes, doesn’t mean that what happens afterwards is always respectful, ethical or warm. It doesn’t mean the sex can’t be traumatic or distressing.

Picking up on her point, Rebecca Traister wrote in New York Magazine about a college experience from 20 years earlier: “It was an encounter that today’s activists might call ‘rape’ ... and which I understood at the time to be not atypical of much of the sex available to my undergraduate peers: drunk, brief, rough, debatably agreed upon, and not one bit pleasurable. It was an encounter to which I consented for complicated reasons, and in which my body participated but I felt wholly absent.”

She said that in a modern world where feminists are increasingly “sex positive”, and liberated women are encouraged to enjoy sex, it’s become almost taboo to talk about bad experiences beyond rape. “Outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex,” she added.

Even after consent is given, sex can still be unhealthy and disrespectful.Source:istock

Reina is concerned that society is failing to discuss sex that may not be assault, but is on a “continuum” with it.

“A lot of sex feels like this,” she writes on feministing.com in a follow-up article. “Sex where we don’t matter. Where we may as well not be there. Sex where we don’t say no, because we don’t want to say no, sex where we say yes even, where we’re even into it, but where we fear — some little voice in us fears — that if we did say no, if we don’t like the pressure on our necks or the way they touch us, it wouldn’t matter.”

At Reina’s high school party, the boys who hosted had “expectations”, she said. They made bargains with the bisexual teenager: you can kiss my girlfriend if you hook up with that guy. And then there was her own desire to be liked, to be popular, to be cool.

“Let’s think about the question I kept asking: Do you think I’m pretty?,” she wrote. “Saying yes to hooking up meant more than just hands on my breasts. It meant desirability. It meant acceptance.”

Consent is still a big issue. Many men and women still don’t seem to fully understand when sex becomes rape or assault. Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety yesterday released a report that found two-thirds of women who had been sexually assaulted didn’t think a crime had been committed.

The Line campaign, part of the government’s National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, teaches Australians aged 12-20 how to have “healthy and respectful relationships” and “avoid crossing the line into behaviour that makes someone feel frightened, intimidated or diminished.”

Mary Crooks, executive director of the Victorian Women’s Trust, told news.com.au: “This is a cautionary, stark reminder that if you imagine what sexual equality should look like, you’d have many more factors than consent. You’d have women’s pleasure, you’d redress dominance by men, the situation of men operating in gangs, being able to overpower or deny the personhood of a woman.

“We’re stuck at the point where we focus on consent, but as [these women] say, that’s not the goal. People should have regard and respect for each other, but sexual activity is caught up in dominance and control.”

As we tackle sexual violence, assault and rape, let’s not forget the even more prevalent cases of unhappy sex, where the woman’s needs simply don’t matter as much — which is, after all, where rape culture begins.