(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

I’m an 18 year old virgin. A few months back, I was out clubbing with a friend, and she wanted me to make-out with a guy, because she does it all the time when we go clubbing. I started dancing with a guy, and we started kissing, which I DID want to do. But then he started putting his hand up my skirt, and then in my underwear. I kept pushing his hand away and telling him to stop and he kept putting it back. I managed to escape and didn’t see him again, but I feel kind of violated, as he was touching me sexually. Is this my fault? I did want to kiss him, but I said not when he put his hand down my pants. Was this wrong, or was I asking for it, and is it just something that happens?

Robin L. replies:

You did nothing wrong. The idea someone “asks for” something they don’t want, something that they experience as a violation, is a trope that I wish would go the way of the dodo bird.

Understand, I’m not upset with you for saying that; I’m upset with the culture that sends messages that make you worry that that’s what you did.

The only message that dancing with and kissing someone sends is “Hey, I like dancing with and kissing you right now.”

It is not a free invitation to anyone to touch us in ways we didn’t agree on or clearly and expressly ask for — as in, “I’d love it if you put your hands in my pants,” — and it most certainly is not an invitation to someone to touch us in those ways, especially after we’ve explicitly told them not to.

I am sorry you had to encounter someone who so clearly didn’t respect you as a human being.

Often people tend to view sexual activities as having an ascending order of importance, with lesser activities leading to greater ones. Sexual activities aren’t so clearly ranked though, and really can only be seen as individual acts—acts that never supercede words. So, if you said that you didn’t want that guy to put his hand in your underwear, that’s what he needed to listen to, not his idea that a kiss automatically leads to more.

A kiss is just a kiss; it might be the most fabulous kiss in the world, but it’s only a kiss, and only an invitation for more kissing (and not necessarily even that).

Respecting people’s stated wishes around their bodies doesn’t just go for touching genitals. Had either of you wanted to stop kissing at any time, and had pulled away, it wouldn’t have been a consensual thing for either of you to insist on kissing more.

In any kind of sexual or potentially sexual interaction (in any kind of interpersonal interaction at all, actually) the person who doesn’t want to do something, wants to do less of it, or wants to change how it’s done is always the person who gets to decide what the people will do together, whether they’ve known each other for five seconds, five minutes, or twenty-five years. In a word, someone’s no to something sexual should always trump someone else’s yes.

It’s not acceptable for someone to do something to our bodies or expect us to continue doing something with our bodies just because they want to. Somehow, while this seems to be culturally comprehensible when it comes to physical things like hitting or kicking: no one would give me carte blanche to kick someone who didn’t want to be kicked because I said it felt good for me to kick them. Yet, some people think the rules are different when it’s something sexual. They’re not.

If and when someone wants to have the sexual freedom to do whatever they want to a body, based only on their wants, we’ve all always got the opportunity to do that: masturbation, sex all by ourselves, affords us exactly that opportunity. It’s also the only kind of sex where that’s okay.

I think it can be helpful, when we’ve experienced something nonconsensual, to remember what consent really looks like and what we can and do have the right to expect in terms of consent from anyone who wants to be sexual with us…

Read the rest at Scarleteen here.