Fugitivus Discussion Forum

I had an ex who was manipulative. In the particular instance I'm remembering, he coaxed/cajoled/coerced me into performing oral sex, by asking over and over again until I stopped saying "no" and finally said "okay." I never felt good about that experience. I was terrified that his roommate would walk into the room, or that someone would somehow see through the window and blinds. I didn't really want to do it, but I couldn't come up with any good reason *not* to, other than reasons that I thought just meant I was a scaredy-cat/prude.

I was kicked out of my house in high school,my boyfriend had left for college, and I had no car. He invited me over. I thought he liked me as a person. He just wanted to have sex with me. I cried and said no. So, he waited, pretended to listen to my problems, and busted a move again about 15 minutes later. I cried and said no. He waited again, and the next time he busted a move I finally gave in. Now that I look back, it was not consent. But, I stopped saying no.

If I consent to sex when you're looming over me in a position that keeps me cornered, claustrophobic and compromised, it's still rape. Threats don't have to be verbal.
If I consent to sex after being insulted, degraded, harassed etc in private or public for repeatedly saying no, it's still rape.
If I consent to sex because "you'll say yes if you really love me, and maybe we should just break up if you won't" gets thrown in my face in response to a minute/hour/week/month/year of me saying "no", it's still rape.

When I was with my abuser, I abandoned my feminist philosophy and started reading websites like Humbled Females (note: if you visit the site, it's very tamed down compared to what it was before. Now it's basically just another BDSM female sub site. Back when I was a regular, it was all stuff like this - I know this is already under a spoiler, but I'll trigger warn that anyway. There were also discussions on what a woman should do with her vote, or whether she should vote at all. There were discussions on how to effectively punish a woman who committed adultery - one of the suggestions was chaining her to a wall in public and having men use her as a urinal.) I became the perfect submissive woman. I bought fully into the Natural Order philosophy, that Men were Men who needed to keep and master us lowly silly females, whose lot in life was to submit.

Under my new philosophy, I was physically available to him whenever he wanted me. I let him do a lot of stuff I otherwise would never, ever have consented to. I initiated sex a lot when I didn't want it, because I wanted him to think he was the most desirable Master on the planet. At the time, did I think it was consensual? Sure. Did I think I was freely participating? Sure. But when taken in the lens of me completely subverting my desires for him, in the lens of me molding myself into his model woman to keep him from screaming at me all the time, was I freely consenting? I don't think so. Even the supposedly consensual sex becomes suspect, non-consensual, rape. And, on top of that, this is the man who committed acts that I even considered sexual assault at the time, when I was trying to make myself fully available to him. Would you really tell me, after hearing all this, that you don't believe I was raped? That I should just forget the sullied, dirty, violated feeling I have about our supposedly consensual sex? Because I sure the fuck wouldn't. I'd say that every single time he touched me, he raped me.