Women, Sex & Control

When you lose your sexual agency, sometimes the only way to cope is to try to control everything

I’m 19. I meet John at the movie theater. Our parents set us up. I’ve just had a miscarriage and left my abusive boyfriend. I don’t really want to date. But everyone wants me to move on.

We talk for a few minutes in the nearly deserted theater. He’s handsome, and seems nice, but there’s something…off.

The lights go down. He leans close to me.

Please don’t touch me, I chant in my head. Please, please don’t touch me.

He puts his hand on my thigh.

Please, no.

I’m afraid to remove it — I don’t know how he’ll respond. I just left a violent relationship with a man. I don’t want to put myself in physical danger again.

He slides his hand up my thigh and into my crotch and digs his fingers in.

I’m 25. Jay invites me to his house and then into his bedroom. I go willingly. I want to sleep with him. Badly.

We’re in a tangle of limbs when he begins pushing my head down.

No.

I’m straddling him and I want to rip my panties off and take him inside me. I want him to push into me as deeply as he can get and I want to fuck him until dawn.

But he pushes my head again, insistently.

I’m 29. I’m finally finishing my bachelor’s degree. It’s the last week of school and I’m putting my books away after study group.

Richard is waiting for me at the door. “I thought I’d walk you out to your car,” he says.

My instincts immediately tell me something is wrong.

“We should go out,” he says, as we walk across the parking lot.

My chest tightens. I barely know him. I’m not even sure I like him as a friend.

I’m afraid to say that to him. I’m afraid how he’ll react. We are alone. “Maybe,” I say.

“Give me your number,” he says. “I’ll call you and we can arrange something.”

I hedge, pulling my keys out. I just want to go home.

He puts a hand on my arm.

Please don’t touch me, I think. I don’t want you to touch me.

“Come on,” he says. “What’s the big deal? Just give me your number.”

I’m 37. Keith approaches me at work and starts asking me very specific questions about my personal life. We’ve barely talked before. I frown and ask him how he knows that information about me.

He smiles. “I read it on your blog.”

My instincts are screaming. I try to calm them down. My blog is public. Is it so bad that he looked me up? He’s cute. He seems nice enough.

The next week, he says, “Let’s go across the street and grab a drink after work. Come on, you know you want to.”

“Thank you,” I say, “but I’m tired and my dog is waiting to be fed. Maybe another time?” His persistence is putting me off.

Two nights later, I leave the building alone. It’s dark outside. Almost everyone has gone home. The parking lot is deserted except for a large SUV that is parked in front of my car, blocking my exit.

Keith leans out of the driver’s side window and waves at me.

“I’m not moving my car until you agree to have a drink with me,” he cheerily announces. “I figured you just needed a little persuasion.”

I was 12 when I realized I had no control over what happened to me or my body. Worse, what happened to me was continually defined by other people. I wasn’t allowed to have my own feelings about it, my own perspective. I wasn’t allowed to say: No, it’s not okay to have this happen to me or my body.

I was told I was overreacting. I was told I shouldn’t be upset. I was told it wasn’t a big deal. I was told no one had done anything wrong to me.

That, perhaps, was the worst of it. It made me question whether or not I was behaving in a reasonable manner. It made me question my judgment. It made me believe that I shouldn’t trust my own perspective over a man’s. And it made me stop believing in my intuition.

I know many women who have experienced something similar. And it changed us.

For me, and for many of the women I know, it forced us to develop very deep issues around control and sexuality — our own, and men’s. There’s no end to how this can manifest. It can develop as suspicion or judgment around a male partner’s consumption of porn or other erotic material. It can manifest as a seemingly illogical, ever-shifting set of implacable rules about sexual conduct. It might be a dance she performs, taking two steps toward her partner, then five back. Maybe it’s a last-minute change of heart, or her anger over her partner’s close relationship with a female colleague.

Underneath this, in some cases, is a woman desperately trying to reclaim her sexual agency and regain the control over her own body that was once stripped from her.

It made me believe that I shouldn’t trust my own perspective over a man’s.

I often wonder what would have happened to me if we lived in a culture that treated all humans as equal, instead of only paying that idea lip service. What if I had never experienced what I experienced at 12? What if I had never lost control of my sexual agency, if I had never felt threatened but empowered?

I passed up sexual experiences out of fear that my body would not be respected. I accepted sexual encounters I didn’t want out of fear that I’d be scolded, blamed, or threatened. I said maybe when I meant no out of fear of emotional or physical violence. I hid away parts of myself that I thought might threaten romantic or platonic relationships with men.

So much of my interactions with men have been characterized by caution, vigilance, and uncertainty. Could I trust this person with my feelings? My body? Could I trust my own perspectives, my own feelings, my instincts?

I noticed how much I was struggling with this in my early thirties, when I began my last long-term relationship. As much as our relationship faltered in light of his commitment phobia, so too was it challenged by my terror of losing control of my body and my experience. I suspect this is one of the reasons why we waited so long to have penetrative sex and why it was so hard for me to definitively recognize his inability to maintain the kind of relationship I wanted and to make the decision to move on.

After our relationship ended, I considered it part of my healing journey to address the issues I was experiencing around control, sex, and men. There was nothing wrong with what I wanted — to be in control of my body and to have the authority with which to define my experiences — but I knew that responding out of fear was never going to address the deeper issue.

My greatest tool in this period of growth has simply been honesty.

When I arranged to go on a date with a man I really liked a few years ago and he told me he got fired for consistently showing up to work when he was high, I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to have that date. (I’m not interested in a 42-year-old man who can’t keep his shit together, thank you.) Admittedly, I told him over the phone, but still…I’ll count that as a win.

When a male acquaintance put his hand high on my thigh, I said “No. I don’t want that.” It was terrifying. I wish I had said more — definitively called him out for inappropriately touching me, for instance — but to this day, I find that challenging. (That’s how deep the brainwashing goes.)

There was nothing wrong with what I wanted — to be in control of my body and to have the authority with which to define my experiences — but I knew that responding out of fear was never going to address the deeper issue.

And now, I’m exploring all new routes of expressing myself while still maintaining my boundaries. I recently told my friend Frank about this column. Most of my friends and family know that I blog about sex, but I have never told my male friends until now.

Of course, Frank wanted to read some of my work, and despite my hesitation, I decided to send him the link to my Medium profile. Of course, he read my kinkiest articles first and sent me several text messages that night, one of which said, “You are so brave to write so honestly about this stuff.”

He said he wanted to talk more about it — about sex, specifically, and I could feel myself stiffen as soon as I read that message. It’s such a familiar feeling to me. Am I about to lose control? I wondered. Is he going to express a desire to be with me? Did I just open a door I didn’t want to open? Is this going to destroy our friendship?

I want to trust him, though. We’ve been very close friends for four years now. He is one of only a handful of people who knows my darkest secrets and he has been there for me through some very difficult times.

So I texted back a simple, “Okay. Let’s get together next week and chat.”

As is typical, he already knew where my mind was going and he texted back, “Please don’t worry. I won’t do anything inappropriate. I’m grateful you trusted me with this and I love you. I would never do anything to threaten our friendship.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

Am I about to lose control? I wondered. Is he going to express a desire to be with me? Did I just open a door I didn’t want to open?

It’s still so damn hard for me, all these years later. We still live in a culture that doesn’t respect women’s choices, boundaries, and definitely not their sexuality. And this is how we deal with it. Some of us are afraid and just doing the best we can to navigate that, grabbing onto control whenever and wherever we can find it.

But as the sex-positive community grows, as feminism empowers more and more people (including men), I hope to see women not just getting their sexual authority back, but demanding it back.

I hope to see cisgender, hetero-leaning men understand with more depth the kind of power imbalance women have been enduring — in and out of the bedroom.

And I hope, more than anything, that we women take back the power to define our own experiences and learn how to trust our instincts and intuition once more.

This article was written for Howl by Yael Wolfe, a weekly column. © Yael Wolfe 2019

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