In honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month this April, this piece examines the inherent gender inequalities of the college hook-up culture as well as challenges us to question power dynamics that we often take for granted. Here’s to safe, consensual and shameless sex.
My name is Alissa, and there’s a guy in my psychology class named Junior whom I was interested in hooking up with. I began my pursuit by getting his number from a friend and showering him with a sophisticated array of my more dependable pick-up lines, including, but not limited to, “Yo, what you on tonight?” and “Tryna chill?” But even when I offered to smoke him out so that he’d feel obliged to reciprocate with sexual favors, his responses were always ambiguous and non-committal.
Clearly, it was time for me to turn things up a notch.
So at parties, I began making comments about how great his butt looked in those jeans, and I even got a few grabs in during the rare times it came within reach. I wasn’t discouraged by his continued unfavorable responses, and sure enough, it paid off.
The next weekend, he was drunker than usual, so I followed him to the upstairs of a house party and told him we should check out the bedroom together. He didn’t really want to, but it only took a few minutes of verbal coercion to change his mind, and before I knew it, he had consented! The sex wasn’t as good as I thought it would be, though, so suffice it to say, I’m on to the next one.
As you may have guessed, this is not a real story, and if it was, I’d likely be deemed a psychopath — or worse, “thirsty.” But what’s even crazier about this story, besides the fact that it’s crazy, is that if you reverse the roles, this is a scenario that young women experience literally all of the time.
Now, as admittedly inappropriate as the above situation is, Junior did verbally consent, and although his intoxication certainly blurs the lines, one could argue that it was not rape. However, the problem with confining our discussion of sexual misconduct to the achievement of consent is that it makes it too easy for guys to develop “consent loopholes.” They’ve already tapped into an effective one: if you badger us nonstop for weeks, prey on our vulnerabilities, and refuse to leave us alone until we give you our consent, eventually we will probably consent. This seems like a ridiculous concept, but I know plenty of girls who have had sex with guys just to get them to stop trying to have sex with them.
If you are a guy whose female pursuits generally resemble my earlier parable, I encourage you to consider the following disparity. When you wake up following another successful conquest, you usually go home and play 2K, never bothering to give the evening a second thought. On the other hand, when we wake up the next morning, we usually feel bad about ourselves. And not because we had sex with you — I have no interest in debating the morality of having lots of sex or sex with strangers because it’s so irrelevant. Instead, we feel bad because we did something we know we didn’t want to do. As a result, we begin to doubt our self-worth, we begin to doubt our self-discipline, and we begin to doubt the value we place on acting in a way that is consistent with our attitudes.
Now, some might respond, “If having unwanted sex is really that damaging to our psyche, why don’t we give more forceful no’s?” We know that we could yell at the top of our lungs, kick you and run, or call the police — we may have even done that. While I concede that these tactics may be effective (I said may), I ask that you not reduce us to shrieking, violent snitches just so that we may retain our sexual freedom. If we say “no” at the beginning, if we say “no” at the end, if we say “no” at any point, do your part in preventing us from hating ourselves, and please just stop. The only time you should proceed is if we give enthusiastic consent.
I’m not expecting to see results over night; after all, systematic behaviors are incredibly difficult to change. But reactions to behaviors can be much easier to restructure, and they have a surprising potential for laying the necessary groundwork for future evolution.
So I will leave you all with one final request: if you see a guy following a visibly uninterested girl around a party, if you know of a guy who keeps harassing an uninterested girl (via text, social media, conversation or any other way), if you witness an ass grab that is met with an uncomfortable stare, point directly at the dude and yell, “WOULD YOU TAKE A LOOK AT THIS THIRSTY DUDE OVER HERE?!” Say it meanly and loudly and embarrassingly, turn and high-five all of your friends, and make sure said thirstiness ceases to go unnoticed. Equality may be a ways down the road, but it is within reach.