(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

That’s it, just what seems — to me, anyway — to be a relatively simple request I’m putting out to the universe today, because it’s something that comes up almost constantly in work and discussions around sexuality, something where I’ve grown impatient waiting for change.

I’m asking what I’m asking as an advocate for survivors, as a survivor myself and as someone deeply invested in sex being something truly beneficial for people, and which we only define as something people willingly, wantedly, choose to do when they do choose it.

Please stop calling rape sex (especially if you are not talking about your own experiences with sexual abuse and assault, where those experiences are things you yourself choose to call sex). Please stop calling rape or other kinds of sexual violence things like “unwanted sex.”

Please stop saying someone engaged in sex when you know it was abuse or assault, suspect that it was, or just don’t know if everyone involved was consenting. Please stop asking why rape isn’t included in articles or studies about consensual sex (and perhaps missing that for many of us who are survivors, it is refreshing as hell to have studies and articles which recognize the difference, rather than conflating the two).

Please stop helping those who rape dictate what is or isn’t sex by defining sex in ways that include what, if it has even been that, was only sexual or about sex for one of the people participating. Please stop helping rapists and others to perpetuate and deny assault and abuse, and stop standing in the way of survivors to know what was done to them, heal, and have real ownership of their actual sexual lives by in any way continuing or enabling the harmful mythology that what is rape and what is sex are too murky to clearly differentiate between.

One of the things that tends to be very clear when you are a survivor of sexual abuse and assault and then experience consensual sex — sex you experience desire for, want and are a real part of, sex that couldn’t have been sex had you not been a real part of it — is how very, very different abuse or assault and sex are. While outsiders or non-survivors, survivors who have yet to experience consensual, and certainly some rapists (though they’d get it in a heartbeat were the shoe on the other foot), may not understand that rape and sex are vastly different things, those of us who have experienced both? We know. It’s not murky. It’s crystal.

Sex and rape are not different kinds of apples, or even apples and oranges. They’re apples and slugs: two things so different that the only thing they really have in common is that they can happen to the same person, in some of the same places on their body, just like apples can live in soil and in the same climate as slugs. But we’d never confuse one for the other, nor would we offer a salad with fresh slugs on it to anyone and expect them to be happy about it or ourselves accept slugs as a tasty stand-in for an apple with our lunch.

If we understand sex to be something, anything, that everyone involved freely chooses to do to tangibly and actively seek to express, explore or enact their sexuality, when someone calls something someone else engaged in sex, what they say is that everyone involved was and chose to be engaged in sex and that everyone involved was expressing and exploring their sexuality.

Around here, when we say sex, we’re talking about consensual sex, where anyone and everyone involved was freely consenting. When we know that was not happening, for anyone in a situation, we don’t call that situation sex anymore. Because when we know anyone was not freely consenting, and was not seeking to express their sexuality, we know it wasn’t sex for at least someone.

In fact, I posit that the only way someone can be engaging in sex all by themselves when someone else is when they are masturbating. So, when we’re talking about rape, a rapist isn’t having sex or participating in sex. They are raping; they are not perpetrating sex or part of sex. They are perpetrating and part of only abuse and assault.

I strongly feel that any time more than one person is involved in a situation or activity, if everyone isn’t truly involved in something they consider sexual and intend to be sexual — and that also means everyone is actively consenting — it’s not sex. When two people put on gloves and other protective gear, get in a ring, and agree to a fight as a sport, with a particular set of agreements (otherwise known as rules), we call it boxing.

When one person walks up to another person and starts punching them in the face, we don’t call it boxing. We don’t call it “unwanted boxing.” We call it assault.

It’s been suggested to me more than once that this notion, the idea that sex between or among people is only really sex when it’s sex for everyone, is radical, but I disagree. I acknowledge and understand it might seem radical, but I’d suggest that if it does, that’s only because our cultural or collective notion of what sex is is still so frequently retrograde, regressive and so deeply mired in sexual violence.

Read the rest from Heather at Scarleteen here.