Tuesday 21 August 2012

It's really FUCKING simple...

The next post on this blog was going to be a nice bouncy one about how I'm off to White Mischief in a couple of days with a whole load of new badges and stuff. But the news is all full of screaming arseholes again, so I felt like addressing them.

And yes, OK, sorry, got to be done, TRIGGER WARNING.

If you are doing any kind of sex with any other person, it's not just a matter of behaving as if they won't mind if they don't notice. Or if no one else notices that you did or are doing it to someone who is not screaming and shouting in protest.

If you are doing sex with someone that person should be expressing appreciation and participating with equal enthusiasm. That's the bare minimum of civilised sexual interaction. If you are in a state where you are incapable of noticing whether or not the other person is enthusiastic about what's going on, you're not fit to be having any kind of physical contact with human beings (or with livestock, before anyone starts...)

But, but, but, waa, waa, waa... Here are some of the things that people who are well-intentioned but not all that smart sometimes say.

'I don't mind when my partner touches me up if I'm asleep/we grope each other in our sleep and we've been doing it for years. Should one/both of us go to jaaaaaaaiiiiiiiil if those nasty feminists say so?'

If you are in a happy relationship and both of you have agreed that half-asleep sex is romantic and lovely, that's fine. If your relationship is a healthy one, both (or however many there are) of you will also know at a very deep level that if the initiating touch is greeted with a sleepy grumble or a moving away, the toucher STOPS touching.

'We are into BDSM/roleplay and it turns us on for one person to be doing all the doing and the other one to be either lying still or tied up and gagged.'

You've negotiated it beforehand. (If you haven't, then the active one is either a predator or a fucking idiot.) You've agreed a method of checking that it's all OK, at intervals, which doesn't break the fantasy. (If you haven't, then you are both idiots, even if the active one has no wish to abuse the other. People who are enthusiastic and willing about all sorts of out-there sex can still get asthma attacks/cramp/sudden remembrance that they left the gas on and need to STOP the sex and deal with the problem).

'S/he is a person with disabilities which mean that s/he can't actively participate/speak his/her appreciation.'

Yes, that's on the edge of likelihood but hey, people with disabilities are not necessarily asexual. However, if a person has *no means whatsoever* of communicating pleasure or displeasure then this is not a person you should be engaging in sexual activity with. If you are contemplating sexual interaction with someone whose methods of communication are limited for physical reasons, you need to be very careful in establishing a method that works quickly.

Oh, and the old grey areas of confusion (50-shades-of-grey areas of confusion is a whole other blog post. Which I might get round to fairly soon). There's a difference between confusion and sexual assault, and the difference is that the confused-but-harmless person WILL STOP at the first objection. I had an encounter with a harmless idiot once. We met at a party in a house he lived in. We chatted, in the course of the evening, about kinky sex. We had a lot to drink and we went to bed together. I woke up while he was in the process of tying me to the bed, very incompetently.

So I yanked my hand free and whacked him with it, and read him a righteous lecture on how lucky we both were - him, that I wasn't about to press charges and me, that he was a fuckwit and not seriously dangerous. His justification was that his last girlfriend had found it erotic. I explained to him that different people like different things, that it's unwise to assume anything and finally, you total bellend, you hadn't listened to a word I said, had you? I'm a TOP! I'm the one who does the tying up!

He was very sorry. To this day I think he was a wally rather than a sexual predator. Because he stopped, straight away. This is why I believe women who say they have been assaulted and/or raped, even if they were drunk, even if they were wearing short skirts, even if they had snogged the face off the rapist earlier. We know the difference between an idiot and a rapist. We know the difference between crappy, clumsy, drunken sex that we rather regret, and a sexual assault.

Anyway, if you've nothing to do on Thursday night, come and buy some badges. I'm still working on slogans that sum up the above...

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