Thank you to everyone for sharing and continuing to share. The onus shouldn’t be on you to educate and illuminate but I’ll be forever grateful for the courage and grace you’ve shown.
I wanted to include a few words from Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation as she wrote it better than I ever could. For those who can’t relate or understand these sentiments, then you should be appreciative rather than argumentative. It’s been a reality for far too many of us, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“He kept touching me and eventually I did what I had to do to stop him from wanting to have sex with me, which was to have sex with him.
I thought, not for the first time, that wheedling of the sort he had employed should be forbidden in men. It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.
Once you’ve said no, a man wheedling feels unbearable. Even if he does it politely, or gently, it overrides the clearly expressed intention. It says: Your choice does not really matter. What I desire matters, and I don’t want to feel bad for forcing you into it. So perhaps you ought to reconsider? Wheedling is cowardly, and violent. When you change someone’s no to yes by wheedling, you have stolen from them what does not belong to you. It was the last thing I wanted to do, and I did it.”