consent

The Space In Between

  • Reading time:5 mins read

My experience and emotional association with sex is of the most profound violation of my sense of self. It has been too big, too strong for me to bear without melting down. And until now I didn’t have the tools to start to understand. It was just screaming.

The thing about sex is, it’s a powerful kind of communication. It serves to connect the mind and body of each participant more viscerally than nearly anything, then to align those wholes to a united sense of being amongst the parties. There’s this intense oneness and recognition.

That is, if it goes well. The problem is, in being so very intimate it tends to entail putting people at their most vulnerable. The level of trust and acceptance has to be close to absolute, or some of that circuitry is going to fire off all wrong. Possibly to horrific result.

When people aren’t on the same page, have different apprehensions of what’s happening and expectations for how things will play out, that can quickly create massive problems. When the terms are non-negotiable and compulsory, then the violence to one’s personhood is indescribable.

Consent is a difficult topic, as it gives the impression that it is so simple. The basic outline feels self-evident, right. It’s easy to explain, makes for good slogans and mantras. But practice is way weirder, because it involves human beings and each of us houses our own world.

It’s difficult to have informed consent unless everyone understands what they’re agreeing to the same way, fully accepts the other, and is willing to reassess at every step of the process. If you’re working cross-purposes, you can inflict some life-changing damage on someone.

In my case there have been a couple of severe bottlenecks. The obvious one is the point between me and the other, where there has always been this presumption and a total lack of willingness to clarify or explain or listen or negotiate. If they have to tell me anything, I fail.

The less obvious bottleneck is within me, between my mind and my body. There has been this basic dissociation my whole life. The wires just haven’t been connected, and the practical elements of my presentation and my physiology and assumed behavior horrified my basic inner self. Like, I wasn’t on the same page as myself, never mind on the same page as them. And even if I were a whole functioning person, I’d still be faced with a near total refusal from my partner to communicate or compromise on the most basic of wants. I still had to know everything.

I’m a girl of course. Never haven’t been. I’m very much a bottom, to the core of my understanding of life. I am autistic, and need assumptions spelled out to me. I am aroace, so though I am able to fuck and to feel enough affection for another as to open that possibility, I don’t myself experience those attractions in the way an allo would (I presume). So if you go in expecting a very different situation from me, refuse to tell me your terms and assumptions, refuse to adapt in any way, and punish me if I fail to adequately perform your gauntlet? It’s not going to go well. And every step of trying to coerce me into your anticipated roles, every moment of refusing to work with or listen to or respect me for who I am, it only forces that wedge in my sense of being all the deeper, increases my basic horror toward everything.

Being told and shown how disgusting and awful and broken and wrong I am, at my most absolutely vulnerable? Making out that brokenness and wrongness as being so foul as to be the offending party, like I’ve done something wicked to you through the failure of my very existence?

I have had anxiety attacks. Full-blown panic attacks where I’ve felt like I was actually dying. I’ve run and cried and cowered and hid. And I was never not in the wrong for showing any of that. How dare I. When I’ve held together, I’ve mostly faked orgasm and gotten out quickly. Not because of any lack of affection for them, or lack of arousal, or lack of sensitivity to whatever needs I was failing to meet. But because I was in that much pain. And I had no terms to begin to address it. And they didn’t care. My pain was itself disgusting to them.

I don’t know what to call this situation. I don’t have a model for it. I’ve never heard anyone talk about this dynamic. But, there’s something about all of this, and the basic premise of the surrounding relationships, that creates for me deep questions of consent. It feels wrong.

The amount of disgust and inhumanity I’ve absorbed to the core of my being from all this, the amount of terror I have learned to associate with sex, I don’t know if I’ll ever fully come to terms with it. I carry it around every day. I just start crying and shaking for no reason.

Part of that is their disregard. Part of that has been my lack of a working relationship with myself and understanding of myself as a whole person. And part is just the sheer power of the kind of connection that sex represents. Which can be remarkable, nurturing. Affirming.

Or, it can be that.

It’s something like seven years since the final time I had sex, and the nightmare has never gotten better. But I may have a few tools now to start to understand it a little. Slowly. Some of those tools are less than weeks old. So this is super shaky. But, I think I may have a beginning.

Gorgonzola

  • Reading time:4 mins read

You know when you, say, bang your shin and you freeze and cradle the affected area, and do nothing until the drowning, blinding pain subsides and you feel like you can move again? There has to be a word for the emotional equivalent of banging your shin, and that response. Seems all I do all day is blunder around, banging my mind’s shin on all the misplaced furniture, sucking in my breath, curling up, and clutching until it washes away. I swear I even see stars the exact same way.

Went out for groceries today. Finally crossed off a bunch of things I’d been waiting to get because I actually wanted them rather than strictly needed them. Got to the register; found I’d forgotten my wallet. On the chagrin march home, got mildly hit on again. So. Generally, fuck.

You see, I’d moved my wallet from where I normally keep it, because of those building inspectors yesterday, and—I. Just. I haven’t done this kind of thing in a long while, because I have my systems to work around my limitations, right. Things are where they need to be. Mess with the systems, and everything goes nuts. First thing in the door, I put my wallet back where it’s supposed to be.

Then I put on a comfortable robe and just ate a fucking block of cheese.

Not pictured: the cheese.

My mother is the kind of person who ruins it for everyone. Like, she’ll carry around this L.L.Bean Boat & Tote the size of an actual boat, and anything complementary she runs across, she’ll dump the whole thing in there until the people just stop making concessions for anyone. Both my parents have severe boundary issues, to a level of pathology where no matter how you explain it, no matter how often, they just keep doing their shit, all the while mocking and badmouthing you for suggesting maybe they could think about someone else’s needs and feelings.

I think a reason I have such touch and personal space issues, when I pick at it—yeah, autistic sensitivity, sure, that. ADHD issues. But also, just. Stop touching me. Back off. I said no. How can I make you understand, stop.

I stopped communicating with her for like a decade because anything I sent her she forwarded to every person in her address book, for commentary that she would then forward back to me. My ex-spouse forced me to resume contact. I cut it off again pointedly within a year. Both people I relied on the first half of my life, so fucking needy, and they just took what they wanted. It wasn’t just me. They were this way to each other, and to anyone else unfortunate enough to interact with them. At least when they were screaming at each other I knew where they were and could be somewhere else.

What I’m saying is, I have never known full, meaningful, practical consent from people with power over my life. Emotional, physical, systemic. The only thing that matters is what they want, and if you aren’t aligned then they’re gonna find a way to take it or make you the villain. The loudest and most indignant person controls the narrative.

So I just, like. You could say I have trust issues. To the point of my brain exploding when someone touches my arm or tries to hug me. I get so confused when I interact with people and, like, they listen to me. Remember basic things about me. Don’t launch off on a tirade at every blunder. Don’t keep score. Ask permission. Ask me how I’m feeling. I’m like. What are you doing? What planet are you from? It makes me so wary. Where are we going with this? What do you want?

I don’t want to be that way. I want to be able to trust people. I want to be able to build a life that I want to live, and populate it with cool people who are earnest and care about each other and have interesting perspective and meaningful principles and ideals. Other people can do this. I shouldn’t have to be exempt.

…

Though yeah, random street dudes can absolutely just fucking stop.

Off the Board

  • Reading time:5 mins read

God, even on a relatively good day it’s all up and down with me, sometimes from minute to minute. When the tears start coming, I just curl up and start muttering over and over, “You’re not my best friend, you’re not my best friend.” I don’t even hear it until it’s been happening.

I don’t need that garbage. I’ve got myself now. I’m finally building the relationship that matters the most. But the pain, it never really goes away. I just sometimes manage to forget. For a while.

Anyway, I’m actually feeling emotions these days, so that’s something. They are what they are. They’re neutral. It makes sense that I would feel them. Better than I not. They don’t apply to my current reality. There is no danger attached to them. They’re just normal grief.

One has to grieve, and grief isn’t linear. Change doesn’t work like that, when you’re human. I broke my wrist when I was fourteen. Dumb bike accident. There’s no visible scar, but it still aches sometimes. Even when it doesn’t, it feels odd. Some alien sensation I still can’t name.

I don’t want an unkind person to make me bitter, make me lose trust and hope. They’re just them. They act this way to everyone. I had no reason to think I was exempt. It has nothing to do with me, or with anyone else. I was never responsible for a cruel person’s behavior.

You’re never responsible for another person’s behavior, no matter the relationship, no matter what they say to you.

I want to think most people are earnest. Dumb, self-centered, and oblivious to anything outside their experience, maybe. Misguided. But well-intentioned at least. There are predators, and I guess I am getting better at spotting them, but it can’t be that many.

I don’t subscribe to the reality they insist we live in. I can’t accept such a broken, wrong view of the world. The only monsters are the people who think everyone is a monster but them.

…

The thing is, both romance and sex-based attraction are fundamentally about reducing the other—and often one’s self—to a function. It’s this act of objectification, encouraged by the structure of the culture that we live in. It all confuses me, and strikes me as so upsetting. I don’t want someone to treat me like that, and I don’t want to objectify anyone else. I just want to appreciate and be appreciated by virtue of who one is as a person. Like. I don’t want to be a thing to anyone, and I can’t view others as things to me. It doesn’t really register.

There’s a distinction here. I can understand the role of sex as communication in an existing relationship. It’s not for me, but I get it. A physical language, based in consent and affection and mutual appreciation? Why not. (If one can tolerate it personally.) But sexual attraction as such? The viewing of another in terms of personal arousal? Basing one’s interest in another person on that premise? It’s a big yikes here. It heebs my jeebies right out of my bones.

It does well to stress that I don’t intend this as judgment; more as an attempt to clarify a cultural disjunct that causes me personal distress. There’s a boundary issue in all of this that I have real trouble navigating, and it has resulted in… problems, at times.

In the abstract I see sex as this hilarious folly. Like, what are you even doing, you silly dummies. Its appeal lies in its absurd bathos. There’s a sincere place for that kind of whimsy. I am unsure if the place I’d choose is where most people would expect.

For other people, there’s this transactional nature to certain things that I just… can’t resolve. It doesn’t work with my brain, and it scares me a little because I don’t easily see it except in hindsight.

That understanding of a transaction causes so many people feel Owed, and it, like—this is my body. This is my person. I’m not here for you. I can be with you, if you’re cool. We can do neat stuff together. No one owes anyone anything except recognition of their mutual humanity.

I just don’t get power dynamics. Other people can play these roles and navigate these rules and have fun doing it like it’s all a game, and fine. So long as they’re all consenting and respecting each other, so what. Go nuts. But, like. I can’t.

Yet there is this underlying unspoken presumption: of course I can. I must, and I will, and if I say I don’t, I’m lying or there’s something wrong with me that needs to be fixed. Everyone’s playing the same game, people seem to think, and there’s no way to opt out. And, that can be fucking dangerous.

There are levels to this. There’s the… like, the reaction I’m starting to get from randos when I walk to the grocery store, right. The overt angle. More insidiously… I am getting better at spotting and understanding coercion, at a pace. Not so much when it’s in my face. Like. I don’t know how to clearly signal that I am not playing. You’re not getting anything from me. I don’t want anything from you. I’m just a person here. Can’t we be cool?

I’m just saying, living in a system where this is the norm causes me distress, and I can’t get with it. Don’t want to subscribe. It’s not a moral issue; more a philosophical one based on how my brain fucking works and how I navigate the world. And, like. There are consequences to that disconnect.

The dynamics of consent are complicated, and I expect I will be picking through my history for the rest of my life.