heterosexist coercion

After reading Gavey's article I had to really stop and think. When I reflect on what she wrote and what my own experience has been I realized how incredibly much how the "technologies of heterosexual coercion" have been used on me.

It took my a lot of years to realize my first sexual experience was date rape. I was eighteeen years old. I didn't fight, kick, scream, or yell at him to stop. I thought that those things were part of defining rape. But in this case, he was my boyfriend and he'd been pressuring me for four months to have sex. Eventually he wore me down and I didn't want the relationship to end and thought this was what I had to do - after all we'd been together a year and a half and he was quite a bit older (26). I asked him, politely (all very lady-like you see) to stop - but he says he didn't hear me. We were at a campground about an hour from home. I had no way out. No way home. My entire person fell apart after this. I kept seeing him. I tried to talk about it - he called me a lunatic and said my reaction was ridiculous: that I'd agreed to the sex. I stuffed the experience deep inside and became basically asexual after this. I married him. I hated sex and luckily it only came up once every couple of years. I managed a sex:pregnancy ration of about 2.5:1 because despite the infrequency of sex I was incredibly fertile and managed to conceive every three years - every other sexual encounter. I always thought that agreeing to the sex or having sex would improve our relationship. I saw it as a tool to make him love me, 'something men need'. I never considered my own sexual feelings because I thought I had none. I certainly never felt any pleasure.

After the the marriage ended (during the third pregnancy) I found counselling to cope with my world crumbling. Several years after this I was finally ready to begin dating again. Now as an adult I realized I had to explore my sexual history because likely the people I would date would sooner or later want to have sex. I didn't begin looking at it in order to discover sensual pleasure for myself: like a textbook Gavey case I was looking to find a way to deal with this aspect of what a man would want from me. How could I find companionship if I wasn't willing to let someone ever touch me? I didn't think it was normal for me to not want sex ever. I'm fairly certain that I would have been happy ever after without ever experiencing orgasm or doing any of the things that occur in a healthy sexual relationship between adults.

Digging into my feelings I realized that being unprepared for menstruation and my first sexual experience and being date raped and further emotionally and mentally abused in my marriage had caused me great harm. It's been difficult to overcome but now I am involved in a very healthy relationship where I am not forced into sex I do not want. It has been enlightening to finally learn at 32 what others have learned much earlier: that I have a choice.