Get Free

part one: on consent

i.

I ain't no candle in the wind / I'm the board, the lightning, the thunder

— Lana Del Rey, “Mariner’s Apartment Complex”

I used to rent a three-bedroom apartment in East Hollywood. I was young (twenty-one), rich (just passed a six-figure income), and well-acquainted with my desires (being young and rich). Once the child bartering with psych-ward nurses on her mother’s behalf and worrying about her father’s bankruptcy, now a nouveau-riche SHE-O with enough disposable income to buy Parachute sheets. I was living across the country from everyone I’d ever known, dependent on no one, and willing to prove it.

I was obsessed with agency — the power of living your life your way (or, in Los Angeles, the power of allowing the universe to guide your life in its way which, conveniently, usually aligned with your way). I throttled my naturally dark hair into a platinum blonde. I didn’t have a savings account. I talked freely into the pulsing current of the internet. No man had power over me, but there was one particular boy who could melt me on impact and did.

We were fucking on the Fourth of July just a few months after becoming official. I remember the fireworks, the way they exploded like popcorn in my auditory periphery. I lay on the couch in the back room of my apartment, the one that I paid for, with the boy I loved and chose. And then I asked that boy to slap me in the face. And he did.

It’s not so transgressive. Some light slapping about, being restrained, and being erotically asphyxiated all appear to be part and parcel in our modern vanilla sex lives. In 2020, 58 percent of female college students reported having been choked during sex. I recall a brief Twitter discourse surrounding Armie Hammer’s 2021 allegations — was a desire to engage in sadomasochistic sex what made a predator? Weren’t we all having sadomasochistic sex?

I definitely thought so. Not only was I and basically every woman I knew (who was having sex with men) getting roughed up in bed but we were, mostly, agreeing to it. Sometimes we would request it. We might share knowing laughter about a guy who felt squeamish over it. Isn’t that sweet, though ultimately unnecessary? It was nice when the boys asked before doing it, but this was rarely expected. It wasn’t that these acts were a common feature of the sex my friends and I were having — they were the sex we were having. Looking back, I struggle to remember a time between the ages of 15-21 when I wasn’t slapped, choked, or restrained during sex.

I was thinking about this — imagining the cradle of my own teenage neck in the grips of some boy (or man) — while I leaned across the toilet on the Fourth of July. My boyfriend apologized profusely. I told him that he had nothing to be sorry for. That, with all the weight of the phrase, I had asked for it. We looked at each other across the tile, his hand on my back, knowing that this was all a bit more complicated than that.

Here are the facts:

We were having consensual sex. I asked — explicitly, clearly, and enthusiastically, if he would slap me in the face. He slapped me in the face. I suddenly left to go throw up.

We were sober and clear-headed. We both remembered the event. There is no significant power differential between the two of us. In the jury of my mind, there were no complicating factors. Most saliently, it was my suggestion. It was supposed to be simple: did I or did I not want it?

But, of course, it wasn’t simple, and the answer to this question is what began the gradual unspooling of my relationship with my own sexuality.

ii.

The fantasy of total autonomy, and of total self-knowledge, is not only a fantasy; it’s a nightmare.

— Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

I had thrown up after sex once before, after what I call a “gray-area sexual experience.” When I use this term amongst other women, there is usually no additional explanation necessary. When I use it here, I mean to say that it is a kind of sex where the answer to the question “did I want it?” seems to lie outside of the yes/no binary. The term also denotes no blame, no perpetrator, and no victim. Perhaps this is why I am comfortable using it.

In her 1994 essay, “The Trouble With Following the Rules,” Mary Gaitskill refers to a personal experience that “could be described as” date rape:

“I knew when I said it that the description wasn’t accurate, that I had not said no, and that I had not been physically forced. Yet it felt accurate to me. In spite of my ambiguous, even empathetic feelings for my chosen partner, unwanted sex on acid is a nightmare, and I did feel violated by the experience.”

There’s an interesting angle here. I do think many feminists today would classify Gaitskill’s experience, as she describes it, as assault. But how necessary is it to insist upon disagreeing with someone’s own identification with their experience? Where’s the line between building coherent social categories and taking more power away from someone who’s already been violated?

Rape is a scary word. I have noticed that women do not like to use it, even those I know who have been raped in the “classic” (read: highly SVU-ed and relatively rare) way, involving strangers and alleyways and drugs. Here, Gaitskill uses it as an imperfect substitute — an approximation to communicate, if not the literal occurrence, the emotional experience.

Rape is also a legal word. I remember being asked, as the President of the Feminist Club in high school (did I not mention that I was incredibly popular?), if two married adults having mutually drunk sex constituted rape. My face flushed and I remember saying something along the lines of “legally, it could be argued that way, yes.” But this did not satisfy the freshman girl in front of me because no one was wondering about the law. They were wondering where the line of violation was supposed to lay.

Being squarely Gen-Z, I grew up in the age of slut-walks and consent guidelines. I was lucky enough to attend a middle and high school that included discussions on assault and consent as a part of our sex-ed. My generation, for the most part (although we are definitely sliding soaring backward), had an easier time over the hurdle that rape existed and was a problem. We learned that NO meant NO (and, later, that only YES meant YES).

Armed with my new knowledge, I was very excited to say yes. I felt comforted in my moral position — that, should any of my sexual partners reject my “no” or fail to solicit my enthusiastic “yes,” they would be in the wrong.

Everything would be easy. All I had to do was decide when to say “no” and when to say “yes.” And how I knew when I really wanted to say “yes” versus when I felt afraid of not saying “yes.” And what to do if it was my idea. And what to do if it was hard to tell what was my idea and what was many years of sexual and social programming. And what to do if I said “yes” and meant it then but then didn’t mean it later. And what to do if I really didn’t think that anyone I had sex with was a rapist. And what to do when I asked for something and it was given. And

iii.

Sometimes it feels like I've got a war in my mind
I wanna get off, but I keep riding the ride
I never really noticed that I had to decide

— Lana Del Rey, “Get Free”

I have, emphatically, told more than one man that they are not a rapist. I meant it each time. I looked at their worried eyes, darting about the room. I listened to them recount the experience to themselves, checking off boxes in their mind. Men, I have found, are generally far more horrified at the idea of being a rapist than they are at the idea of actually having raped someone.

This made conversations around sex increasingly complicated — I had to constantly affirm: I DON’T THINK YOU’RE A RAPIST. Also, can you maybe stop shoving my face into the pillow during sex because I can’t breathe? But it was like training puppies. Their eyes glazed over, they retreated into their shiny mind palace of horror, the one that played the movie of me Tweeting About My Rapist over and over and over again. I nearly had to snap — hey! I just said that I DON’T THINK YOU’RE A RAPIST. Just a note here! Again, NO RAPE OCCURRED!

I told men they weren’t rapists when they choked me without asking, when they came inside me after agreeing not to, when they fucked me from behind while I lay unmoving and uncommunicative. It’s a common assurance given from woman to man: I’m sorry you hurt me, please don’t feel bad about it.

At that point in my life, before my current partner, I had little experience with conversations about sex. It was unclear to me how I was to go about articulating my pain without defaulting to moral or legal categories. This distraction interfered with what I really wanted to discuss with these boys, with these men. I wanted to talk about our shared sexual experience — how the dynamic we participated in together came about, how I felt hurt. I wanted to ask them how it felt when they hurt me, if they noticed, if they cared.

Though, not every man cared if he had hurt me. I have often run mental gymnastics of communication for men who, if they had the capability of articulate speech, would have said: “oh, for me, sex is something I do to make myself feel good.” This is an obvious problem, but to me it is one more easily wrangled than the problem of having sex when sex is sometimes, as Angel puts it, “frightening, shame-inducing, [and] upsetting.”

I wanted to have an intimate conversation, one that shouldn’t have felt so alien given that we were just recently inside each other. I wanted to create the opportunity for repair to happen, as I believe it can when people are trying not to hurt each other.

I couldn’t do this when the rapist question was in the room. I wanted to say: “it’s not about being a rapist.” But, of course, he wanted to know: “am I a rapist?” And I wanted to know: “was I raped?”

Despite the many “gray area” sexual experiences I’ve had throughout my teens and twenties, I do not identify as someone who has been raped. To be absolutely clear, the fact that I do not personally identify this way casts no judgement on the way anyone else may choose to process their own experiences and identify themselves. For me, there is not really a word for the way I feel or for the sludgy, complex experiences I’ve had surrounding sex. Many men have hurt me, and to that end, I have used many men to hurt myself. Gaitskill writes:

“Sometimes I did it for the same reason I did in Detroit: I was secretly afraid things might get ugly if I said no. But sometimes it was for a different reason, one that may be subtly related to the prior one: Part of me wanted the adventure, and that more questing side ran roughshod over the side of me that was far more sensitive and shy.

This is not to say that the categories of “rapist” and “rape victim” are useless or harmful — certainly not. It is integral to be able to describe these experiences of violation, to be able to warn others in our community about people with a pattern of violence. This is to say that when the options stand opposed, “rape” versus “enthusiastic consent,” it leaves room for a great number of sexual experiences to fall between the binary, in a relatively dark place for interrogation.

iiv.

Lana sings “he hit me and it felt like a kiss.” Well, I asked him to hit me, he did, and it felt like a drain snake full of long hair where my spine is supposed to be. It felt like breathing someone’s perfume on a drawn-out elevator ride. It felt like throwing up in front of your perfect boyfriend who had only done as you had asked.

On the Fourth of July, I told my boyfriend: DON’T WORRY, YOU’RE NOT A RAPIST. He hardly reacted. He told me that I shouldn’t worry about how he was feeling right now, that he could handle his own emotional processing. He asked me if I needed water, if I needed to throw up again. If I wanted him to stay near me or if I’d rather take my space.

I paused, bewildered. I’d never been here before. It suddenly occurred to me that there were more questions someone could ask me. That there were, in fact, many questions that may be necessary before deciding a “no” versus a “yes.” That there was one particular question, creeping underneath it all — if I couldn’t trust my “yes,” how could he?

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This essay was supposed to be a quick one, about an adjacent topic, and then suddenly I was dismantling my entire bookshelf hunting down a Mary Gaitskill essay collection.

The second installment of this essay (hopefully about my intended subject, but why knows?!) will be up later this month, once I can percolate on my ideas a little bit more.