Is there any reason (other than an extremely low degree of awareness on health-related issues) why people don’t take these embarrassingly painstaking narratives of the sex acts they engaged in to an actual sexologist? There is a whole profession dedicated to answering the questions the linked post’s author has. Yet, instead of figuring all of this out with a professional, the journalist is engaging in a public disrobing that, judging by how eagerly she substitutes “I” with “we” at the end of the article, is not helping her in the least.
There is not a word for my experience,
the post’s author concludes. The really sad part, however, is that there is a whole bunch of words that could help her. Sadly, she is refusing to ask for help and, what is worse, she contributes to an environment where health-related issues are a matter of public debate instead of something that can and should be addressed by a doctor and a patient in the privacy of a doctor’s office.
Clarissa's Blog 
Clarissa,
I think I know how you would characterize her situation, but I don’t want to make assumptions on a complex topic. Would you mind sharing your opinion of how best to characterize what she experienced?
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I would categorize it as something that needs to be discussed with a sexologist or, at least, a therapist as soon as possible.
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So, just to make certain that I’m not making any wrong assumptions here, am I correct in guessing that you don’t consider this something that should involve law enforcement or university disciplinary authorities?
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How can it if it was never reported? How would the university authority find out about this?
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Should she have reported it? Is this the sort of conduct that, if reported, the university authorities should have responded to?
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“Should she have reported it?”
– She will be able to figure all of that out with a sexologist. Or a therapist. Or a psychologist of some sort. This is obviously a person who is conflicted and confused about what happened to her. This is obviously a person who has a difficult relationship with her sex organs. I’m suggesting that she should take those organs to a doctor who specializes in them.
“Is this the sort of conduct that, if reported, the university authorities should have responded to?”
– Why are we discussing universities in this context at all? The article has words “It Happens To Almost Every Girl Out There” in the title, there are repeated suggestions that this is a general problem. What is a university doing in the story all of a sudden?
If the question here is whether a crime has been committed, the answer is, not legally, no. But somebody did something really fucked up to this woman a very long time ago and now she is living with the consequences. It would be great if, instead of the “this happens to almost everybody” chorus, we responded to such stories with an unequivocal, “You are not right. See a doctor, now.”
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What I do find bizarre is the suggestion that these were “really drunk” people. Maybe my understanding of “real drunkenness” differs, but I cannot imagine “really drunk” people being able to perform sexually. In my experience, people who are capable (and more willing than normal) to have sex, are slightly drunk. This is the kind of drunkenness that removes inhibitions. Heavier drunkenness and sex are extremely hard to imagine.
This reinforces my perception of this story as a cry for help of somebody who has a medical issue but is scared of discussing it and dresses it up in a fashionable costume of drunk frat boys and weird consent laws.
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Actually, I rather like what she wrote. Sex and emotions don’t have to be consistent.
There are lots of reasons for the sex act. You can have sex with someone you love, or think you love, or with who you are infatuated. You may have sex if you feel the need, even if you don’t particularly care for your partner. You may have sex if the other person has a reputation as a skilled lover just for the experience. If you’re submissive, you may do it to please the other.
This is different. This is sex motivated by a fear of hurting the other person (who may or may not have wanted it). Inertia sex. Sex as a default behavior because neither party is willing to say what they really feel. It’s consensual and meaningless.
In my humble opinion, I suspect this scenario is fairly common. I know it applies to men as well as to women. This scenario makes for a really mediocre experience.
Now, if the writer is expecting to shock anyone, that’s not happening. The writer is a bit of an exhibitionist, perhaps. That said, she is implicitly posing an interesting question.
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The only healthy reason to have sex is to experience an orgasm. Any other motivation is cause to seek a sexopathologist. Of course, I am well aware that this is not the culture where people are prepared to hear this.
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I have done this tons of times but in the context of relationships that I should have been actively exiting from because really, no, I did not want to be involved with that person sexually. In these situations I felt coerced emotionally to be in the relationship, for reasons not having to do with sex, and yes it meant I need therapy.
It does not sound to me as though this guy coerced her though, it sounds as though she did not know how to figure out what she wanted … ?
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She doesn’t value her own bodily integrity, doesn’t consider herself valuable, doesn’t see herself as a subject of sex, only an object, sees sex as anything but a means to experience pleasure, sees herself through a man’s eyes and not her own.
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…which is why this would not be remedied by “yes means yes” para-legislation.
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Exactly, exactly. There is no legislation in the world that can cure this, unfortunately.
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Hmm?
I’m not convinced at all.
I’d have thought being sexually submissive is a kink, and wanting to please others is a character trait. I’m not convinced the two are connected.
You could be sexually submissive and a selfish inconsiderate person. You could be dominant in bed to please your partner because that’s what they asked for.
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Do you read the article as a tale of submissive desire?
Here is my suspicion about the yes means yes campaign: at a private level it may convince some people that it is OK to say no when they are not enthusiastically in favor of having sex with the person in question. As a bureaucratic measure my bet is that it is just to make sure everyone wishy washy says yes or no and records this. So people’s ambivalent consent or passive consent or scared consent or whatever now gets recorded as enthusiastic consent … I think it will all get more confusing not less so.
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“Do you read the article as a tale of submissive desire?”
– If the article’s author said, “I’m sexually submissive and I had a total blast”, I would be super happy for her. But she very obviously did not enjoy the experience. I’m all for people’s kinks, as long as they are practiced with consenting adults, but this was a tale of laying there, staring at the ceiling and suffering. And it didn;t sound like good sexy suffering.
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“So people’s ambivalent consent or passive consent or scared consent or whatever now gets recorded as enthusiastic consent … I think it will all get more confusing not less so.”
– Sad but true.
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This was in response to Vic Crain’s comment. Who said; “if you’re submissive you may do it to please the other.”
Sorry, if it was unclear who I was replying to.
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As is the case with all American articles, she has a lot of ideological underpinning to her article. She may be suggesting that women like to cuddle and enjoy romance whereas men prefer sex. Most of the mainstream articles coming out of the US have an implicit ideological structure to them, which gives them a sense of coherency and aura of wisdom that they would not otherwise have. Since the mainstream probably already believes that women and men are different in this way, she is flattering her audience’s sense of its own wisdom without asking any new questions or even presenting an argument for her views.
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This is why I’m saying she needs professional help. This was written by somebody demolished by the asexual Christian model. She will have to work hard for a long time to reconstruct a healthy sexuality. For now, she has a list of very unhealthy mandates in place of sexuality.
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Ah, yes that makes a lot of sense. That could be the problem, although overall it just seems absurd.
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It seems excruciatingly absurd and confusing until you begin to understand the language. Then it becomes really absurd. 🙂
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I can never understand American texts even when they are explained to me. I can understand the technical side of the ideological underpinning, and I think I used to be able to understand a great deal more implicitly, when I used to be a Christian myself, but now I am too far removed.
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I had a similar experience to the one she describes with a French dude once, but I wasn’t traumatised by it, so much as well…interested.
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But nobody wants to see it as an article about sexuality. People are scared of the topic and immediately shift it into the arena of legislation, ideology, consent, authorities, etc.
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“She doesn’t value her own bodily integrity, doesn’t consider herself valuable, doesn’t see herself as a subject of sex, only an object, sees sex as anything but a means to experience pleasure, sees herself through a man’s eyes and not her own.”
Then in my case:
Did not value my own emotional/psychic integrity, did not consider myself valuable, did see myself as a subject in my own life, only an object, saw my being/life as anything but a space in which to develop as an individual or in service of an activity of my own choosing, saw myself through others’ eyes and not my own.
Not quite sure of all the rephrasing but this is a pretty good stab at it and is interesting. (And is why I never saw the shattering of the subject as liberating, and had visceral emotional reaction to some kinds of literary theory.)
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With the French guy, I just thought it was interesting. He invited me into the jacuzzi and then invited me over to his side, et voila, there was sudden penetration. But I just found that interesting. The shattering of the subjet is, in fact, penetration,. I mean this ought to be self-evident.
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Yes but my issue is psychic invasion, whence the visceral reaction to subject shattering.
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Then that is a non-liberatory, but binding, shattering.
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Non-liberatory *but binding* — very interesting! 🙂
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“After no fewer than 13 hours of drinking”
How is this even possible? Either she’s a hardcore alcoholic devoting her entire life to drinking, or she’s very mistaken (three beers over the course of 13 hours is not ’13 hours of drinking’).
“This was a guy with whom I’d had countless conversations about his inability to care about women, romantically.”
I didn’t quite laugh out loud here, but I came close. Who has countless conversations with someone about that someone’s sex life? Someone with an active, probably unhealthy, interest in said someone.
“Before I even had a chance to decide if he was right, we were making out”
It just happened! Like magic!
“occasionally flashing him the fake smile reserved for people you accidentally make eye contact with in the grocery store”
I feel very sorry for anyone in a sexual relationship with her.
“As we cuddled, I realized that what we had done was no different to him than the sex he’d had with anyone else”
Hadn’t she ever heard songs like “Johnny One Time”? or “Will you love me tomorrow” “Wings upon your horns”
“Sometimes you have to have lunch with girls you don’t want to have lunch with”
How much do you wanna bet this was aimed at the author?
“Talking about it makes it a big deal.”
Not to mention writing about it for the whole world to see. Part of me has the horrible suspicion that she perceives writing about it as making herself special “a big deal”.
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I had this one experience, in my youth, where I went to a French guy’s house for lunch. I’d met him on a nude beach. And he cooked lunch for me. It was very good. And gave me very good champagne. And then invited me into his jacuzzi (nude of course) whilst promising that we would each keep to our sides. And then he said, “Come here for a second.” And suddenly there was full penetration, which of course took me by surprise. Obviously, I was a bit naive.
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This sounds horrible. I’m very sorry this happened to you.
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It wasn’t horrible at all, just unexpected. Quite an interesting experience in my life in fact.
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I’m glad you enjoyed the experience but the way you described it sounds very disturbing. Maybe you do that on purpose, I don’t know.
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Haha. Maybe I am just very disturbed. I don’t know. But this was one of the least disturbing experiences I have had, compared to many others. I think my dry, ironic tone can be hard to detect.
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To clarify my point. The most disturbing things that have happened to me have been related to migration and workplace bullying. I haven’t had a disturbing sexual encounter as such. I’m pretty robust in that regard, in the sense that sex always has seemed to me a form of compensation that I get for extremely painful menstrual periods. I mean that is the most violating thing really. And then I get the compensation. 🙂
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Saying that this is not as bad as a civil war doesn’t sound too reassuring.
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Oh, well, I can’t go around reassuring everybody.
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Sympathy does seem to be the default reaction for a woman recounting a sexual encounter that’s ….. ambiguous in any way (and iME is certainly not the reaction for mens’ stories of ambiguous or regretted sexual activity).
What’s the source of this?
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I’m the last person to care about the gender of the people involved. But the story musteryou chose to tell , in the way she chose to tell it is extremely disturbing. It would be just as disturbing if both participants are men.
But musteryou often tells stories just to provoke. With this one she’s been successful because bodily integrity is an issue I care about deeply.
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I don’t understand the expression “an ambiguous sexual encounter” either.
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Americans are not French?
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“this was one of the least disturbing experiences I have had, compared to many others. I think my dry, ironic tone can be hard to detect”
I definitely thought your reporting was more phenomenological (this weird thing happened… go figure) rather than confessional (shame is the punishment for my shamelessness!) or explanatory (and that’s why I’m triggered by Perrier above room temperature!).
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“The least disturbing compared to others” isn’t very reassuring either. “That’s so not the worst thing that happened to me”. Yes, what a huge relief.
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“I don’t understand the expression “an ambiguous sexual encounter” either.”
I mean a sexual encounter that leaves a person with mixed or unresolved feelings.
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A sexual encounter that leaves one with anything but an orgasm is by definition unhealthy. And it is by definition an invitation to see a doctor.
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Clarissa what if you had an orgasm *yet* the whole thing was *also* coerced or otherwise unpleasant? This combination is possible.
Musteryou this story is a parody, right?
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Very possible. I know somebody who could only have an orgasm when her husband would attack her violently. It took a very good lover and a sexopathologist to work that through. But it did work and now she is very happy
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I actually had that particular experience with that French guy. This was about 20 years ago. He was actually quite skilled so I forgave him a lot.
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Yeah, she seems to want to turn something of personal choice fit into a political agenda…
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That story in the link… I have the hunch the OP regularly gets “really drunk” so she can avoid saying “I planned to make out/have sex” and instead say, “It just happened” in the same way some women don’t carry condoms. And of course, alcohol inhibits your physical ability to orgasm. Getting “really drunk” is pretext for doing things you wouldn’t do when you are sober.
Of course this is from a site dedicated to sororities, those bastions of female empowerment.
I remember two people in my Political Science class would only hook up when they were “really drunk”. I just found it bizarre. My best friend had this on again off again relationship with a guy who’d only hook up with her when he was “really drunk” and he had a girlfriend the entire time.
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Exactly. This is absolutely spot on. People get drunk because alcohol lowers inhibitions and allows them to do what they always wanted but were afraid of doing. But alcohol also cripples the capacity to carry through with the sex act which relieves the guilt of having sex in the first place.
This is why I keep saying, “Sexologist, sexologist!” like an obsessive parrot. This can all be corrected quite easily if one seeks professional help.
If we get out of bed and our legs refuse to walk every other time, we would absolutely seek medical help. When the same happens with our genitals, we see this as completely normal and don’t do anything about it. This is all too bizarre.
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But I would say, in the US at least, it would have to be a specialist and a very good one. The cant here, especially for women, is that one should not expect all things to go well enough all the time. It is very hard to get most people to see that good sex matters (or to know what it is, perhaps).
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Very true. However, there is now a great opportunity to receive counseling through Skype from anywhere in the world.
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Skype, but the person in question would have to know they were looking for a sexologist that took a different line, a very different line, from what the books, magazines, therapists, friends, and pastors all tend to say here.
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Florence King was on this years ago, since for southern women in the bad old days (in her telling) if a woman was drunk when she had sex she could convince herself that it didn’t count and was still a virgin(!)
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More. In class.
Student A: They did not have a good sexual relationship, so the marriage did not work out.
Student B: No. It was because the marriage was not working out that the sexual relationship was not.
*Please* comment. I agree with student A but I realize student B is saying what would be considered more accurate in US.
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My answer would be that both are correct, the two types of incompatability (general and sexual) work together into a bad feedback loop of failure.
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That is also true but what I notice is that in US one learns that sexual attraction and compatibility grow out of liking someone very much and can be “worked on” or almost willed into existence if that person is otherwise compatible and a good marriage prospect. The idea that animal magnetism or whatever you want to call it could be primary is considered “mere lust” and attraction at that level is assumed to be transitory.
Similarly, sex is supposed to be improved by learning some tricks. Not that all knowledge is not useful, it is, but no number of tricks will make up for an insufficient degree of attraction/compatibility. Or so say I, at least.
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This is a very very VERY tragic worldview. I’m very sad that people are brainwashed into all this. The personal and sexual compatibility are not interdependent. The good news is that a strong sexual attraction sweeps away all these personal incompatibilities.
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I think some of this has to do with youth. If you are full of desire and also curiosity, and you are with someone who also is, and you like them and they are “appropriate,” sex can actually seem to work well for a few years. Until you discover that no, it was not that kind of attraction. And you fall out of love but do not understand why, or get madly attracted to someone else and betray your spouse, or you decide it was “just lust, not love,” or you decide that the charm of sex fades but the value of an otherwise strong partnership outweighs it.
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Sexuality that is so dependent on things external to it is not a healthy sexuality. So the student A is right. Sex is a basic human necessity while marriage isn’t. A basic need can’t be subservient to a social construct. How would we feel if I said that my digestive processes were fully dependent on my marriage? Or that I couldn’t walk whenever my marriage wasn’t perfect?
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Also. About the sexologist. People should pay attention to what they do to make sex work, or fail to do when they fail to make it work, and apply it to other areas of life, and vice versa. I do not think this is understood well in US. (I mean, I can hear the jokes already, that would focus on questions of “technique.”)
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Do you have examples? This sounds interesting but I’m not sure I fully get it.
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Oh, I could give many but really should be grading. For me at least it is quite easy to see when I have had more and less healthy sex. Healthy = choosing who you do want not who you should want, doing what you do want, etc. One would think this is easy but there is a trick to it since it means paying attention to how you actually feel and acting on that, and we are *not* trained to do this and sex is particularly shrouded with shoulds, it seems. Yet it is genuineness and some form of assertiveness that work.
In life in general, for instance, I am trained not to insist on what I really want, not to take control of any situation by saying directly (even just to myself) what I would actually like, to consider basic needs to be luxuries, etc. It is possible, in life in general, to have a decent day doing this, even if you are not fully happy. But if you run sex that way, it fails pretty obviously.
So one set of observations I have on myself is that when sex does not go well it is because I am not honoring my own [subjectivity] enough or being [assertive] enough about how I would like it to go or not. Yet I can see this difference and should take it even better into account than I now do. The exact same attitude can improve life in general, although the negotiations of life in general are so much more complex (or so it seems to me).
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This is the best comment ever. Thank you for interrupting grading to make it. This is a priceless insight. Brilliant.
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🙂 It is my mathematical training which enables me to have this kind of insight. You have to keep looking for the precise relationships existing among the diverse elements in your system! 🙂
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Also look at this comment poached from the Nagoski site.
“First of all, I tend not to perceive a person as attractive until I sense that they are someone who I can trust, and someone who I can be myself around. Then, if I am with a partner who is attractive to me, and with whom I feel relaxed and comfortable… I often feel spontaneous desire, but usually not specifically for sex… more like I want to be close to this person and feel the warmth of their body. After experiencing that for a while, hugging, or spooning, or giving or receiving back massages… that can turn into a desire for kissing or more explicitly sexual forms of touch… and that can turn into desire for other things…”
A couple of things. One, they have to be relaxed to feel desire in a specific situation. But isn’t this just like, no I am not feeling very sexy right now because I am so tense from work, I must vent and unwind before I go on to do anything else?
Two and more important: note not being able to perceive someone as attractive until they are first perceived as trustworthy. And then, having sexual desire grow from affection. So you get trust, then affection, then desire according to this person. I would say desire comes first. How you act on it or not depends on how much trust and/or affection and/or other things you need. But very few Americans would say desire comes first.
Finally, and then I really will go grade: I realized just now I once flew to Brazil to have this discussion. In the 80s. I was with someone I was unhappy with for various compatibility reasons and so on, although he is a good person to be friends with. There was a deeply discounted ticket to Brazil so I went down there to talk to a friend about this problem. I knew she would have the answer but thought it would take 2 weeks of discussion. She listened to me give a brief synopsis of the situation and said: “The reasons you are with him are not the reasons to be with a man.” I understood instantly but would *not* have been able to generate this answer myself, would *not* have, even though I had before this been in a long relationship that had been satisfying sexually.
Also note on that other relationship, though, and then I really will go: it was satisfying sexually because we were at the age of raging hormones, because we shared certain attitudes and tastes, etc. — but as far as sex went it was extreme compatibility with other forms of good will added, and that’s nice but is not the kind of yet deeper attraction we are talking about here.
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P.S. and by deeper I mean more basic. Chemistry, you know?
Also that last comment was too long. I am interested in people’s reaction to the comment poached from Nagoski and to my comments one and two, at the beginning here. (With the last two paragraphs I am just trying to illustrate and I think they take away from the more succinct points, that I started out with.)
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First of all, on the subject of raging hormones. For men, this is the age of 13-30, more or less. For women, it’s 45 – 65, or possibly longer. I’m hearing that female 65 is the equivalent of male 15 hormonally.
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Citation for 45-65+?
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This is obviously not something this culture has managed to voice because, oooh, a huge taboo. But have you got any female friends over the age of 60? Ask them, they will confirm. 🙂 🙂
Which means that you and I have a lot to look forward to yet. 🙂
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That is good news for modern woman.
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Good then, I am waiting. My massive hormone era seems to have been about 28-40. Maybe it will return…
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“Two and more important: note not being able to perceive someone as attractive until they are first perceived as trustworthy. And then, having sexual desire grow from affection. So you get trust, then affection, then desire according to this person. ”
– This is already a huge warning sign that a person is using her sexuality to relate to people and not for its actual purpose. This is very very problematic. I had the same problem when I couldn’t eat in front of people until I trusted them. We can all agree, I’m sure, that this was an eating disorder. Sadly, it’s more difficult to get people to agree that the same issue with sexuality is as problematic.
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Totally agree she should see a sexologist or regular therapist.
Unfortunately, women in my age group 19 – 25 are sharing this article like crazy on facebook and twitter and saying ‘this has happened to me too’. I’ve had a similar experience as well and therapy greatly helped me. So, in a sense she’s right saying ‘we need a word to discuss it’ because it’s such a common phenomena for young american women to feel they’ve had sex when they didn’t actually want to.
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Not just American women, of course. The idea that your body should serve somebody else’s purpose is one of the saddest legacies of patriarchy. It’s really important that women like you and me are working to change this. Then we can communicate our knowledge of this to other people, and so on.
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I was discussing this with a friend in 20s just the other day. She says sex is so much expected nowadays that many have this experience and think that is what sex is.
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