Abstract
Interviews with race- and class-privileged college students reveal a web of double-binds and compromises–and a whole lot of unwanted sex.
Over pizza—which I purchased in an attempt to ease a group of college women talking about sensitive stories—Laura shared an account of heterosexual sex. Her close friend Anna had, for the first time, given a man oral sex. Her inexperience, Laura said, meant that the sexual act “didn’t go well.” Sometime later, the man divulged the details of the encounter to his friends. Word slowly spread through the college grapevine, eventually reaching Anna, who, unsurprisingly, was extremely embarrassed. The group responded with sympathy for Anna and reasoned that Anna had probably felt pressure to offer oral sex. Per Laura, “If she had said no, he would have still talked about it, like, ‘Oh, she’s a prude.’”
Many women’s worries about sex and their personal reputations, sex and boundaries, and what they “agree to” during sexual encounters begin well before and linger far after any actual physical contact.
Carmen Lucas, Flickr CC
Many women’s worries about sex and their personal reputations, sex and boundaries, and what they “agree to” during sexual encounters begin well before and linger far after any actual physical contact. Necessarily, these worries also materialize during the sexual moment. In all the instances discussed that day over pizza, heterosexual sex was constantly constrained by a range of tensions, laced with double-binds.
A brief background
These heterosexual predicaments are not new. Researchers delving into heterosexuality, from the 1980s to the present day, have lifted the lid on its inner workings. Studies reveal how heterosexual discourses dictate appropriate ways of being feminine (being accommodating and passive) and internalized notions of the “male sexual drive” (the idea that heterosexual men, once sexually aroused must be satiated). However, heterosexuality is not monolithic; it differs across cultures, societies, and geographies. It also differs by class—negotiating working-class femininity through a politics of respectability—and race, as Black women contend with the stereotype and stigma of hyper-sexuality. Women are thus forced to manage messages of sexuality that are inflected by crisscrossing categories and concerns. In recent years, this body of work has uncovered hook-up culture on college campuses, analyzing how students navigate non-committal, causal sex. In the United States, institutional responses to sexual violence on campus have been scrutinized, with controversies associated with Title IX investigations (like the notorious UNC Chapel Hill case) reaching national prominence.
Unwanted sex
The women I spoke with echoed these themes of heterosexuality, hook-up culture on campus, the Title IX process as a consequence of reporting sexual violence, and the pressures associated with pleasing male sexual partners. It must be borne in mind, before delving into these stories, that the reflections of unwanted sex which I uncover belong to a privileged group of White, middle-class women. For reason, these experiences cannot be generalized to reflect the heterosexual lives of all women in college.
With this being said, what struck me as particularly pertinent in my conversations was how consistently young women reflected on sexual encounters that felt either ambiguously consensual or somehow obligatory. Over time, I came to refer this as unwanted sex, a type of interaction that occurs in casual settings rather than in ongoing, committed dating relationships. Certainly, unwanted sex can and does happen in relationship settings, but for the women with whom I spoke, it existed more often as part of casual scenarios in the context of hook-up culture on campus. Unwanted sex was endured, normalized, and commonplace, but the women I met never considered it sexual assault or rape. Instead, it existed for them in a blurry, in-between, or liminal place that was unpleasant and awkward—something they vowed would never happen again.
Women in this study strategized to avoid having their sexual refusals ignored or challenged, and they prepared techniques to spot and curb potential aggressiveness.
Mayastar Lavi, Flickr CC
With sex that is unwanted but not assaultive, an individual chooses to have sex but perceives that they could have stopped it. I agree with this definition of unwanted sex, which Jessie Ford offers. Ford contrasts the idea with sexual assault or rape, where sex is both unwanted and we perceive that we could not have stopped it. However, stopping sex is difficult and has consequences. As Ford asks, is unwanted sex really a choice if the consequences of refusal involve violence? How, too, do we understand the decisions of women who say yes to sex from fear of men’s anger?
As a result of my conversations with American college women, I see patterns similar to those uncovered in past sociological research (see Ford’s work with heterosexual and queer college students), namely that unwanted sex stems from two main factors: 1) fear of men’s anger; and 2) a desire among women to avoid damage to their social reputations while adhering to gendered, heterosexual norms about sex. Importantly, what takes this further is that the same conversations revealed that both factors require women to engage in a mode of emotion work so that they can “properly” navigate the sexual situation.
Men’s anger
The women I spoke to recognized that unwanted sexual encounters could turn violent, so to protect themselves, they felt a responsibility to manage men’s—and their own—emotions. Nicole first spoke about the possibility of sexual encounters taking an unwelcome turn, implying that unwanted sex happened to avoid danger. She was familiar with women being in sexual situations where men suddenly became “scary” and acknowledged the difficulties she and her friends faced in situations where a man could physically overpower them.
“When you are in that situation,” Nicole explained, “it just comes to your mind, like, ‘What if I say no to him, and he gets really mad? What if I say no to him now, and he does something awful?’” Understandably, these very real fears made it hard for them put a stop to sex—and undermined the possibility of enthusiastic, informed, and ongoing consent.
Beth, in a separate discussion group, described how she had “always been scared of what to say” in such moments. Beth’s inability to “just say no” was similarly traced to her fear of a man becoming suddenly angry and “lashing out” at her—after all, she shared, it had happened before. Another woman, Jess, added that when she attempted to say no to sex, some men responded by not allowing her to leave, physically blocking her access to an exit (sometimes the ability to move).
The feeling of acquiescing to sex because of men’s anger or force was shared in my research. Women frequently spoke of their use of certain strategies to avoid scenarios in which their sexual refusals would be ignored or challenged, and they prepared techniques to spot and curb potential aggressiveness. Sarah, for example, had endured unwanted touching while on a date with a man, biding her time and hoping her “tolerance” would defuse the moment: “I felt like, ‘Ok, this isn’t terrible,’ and ‘you just wait like a minute and push them away, instead of immediately saying no.’ Maybe I wait a couple minutes, I am watching the clock and I am like, ‘Ok, this is long enough.’”
Sarah’s story resonated with Terri, who said she tries to “always [be] one step ahead of the guy” by being aware of when it is appropriate, and safest, to end a sexual encounter. She also admitted that she was unable to relax during sex because of these calculations: “I am thinking: ‘Ok, if I say ok to this, what do I have to say? Where is this going to go? And at what point am I saying no?’ I gotta be like, ‘Ok, well if he does this, then I gotta be prepared for the next step, and is that where I wanna say no—or do I wanna say no after that?’”
Knowing that rejecting a man sexually was risky, potentially dangerous, could make unwanted sex feel like the lesser of two evils. But reading, dodging, and responding to potentially perilous situations in the moment takes gendered emotion work, to build on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s influential idea of emotional labor. Women reported coping with unwanted sex by working on themselves and suppressing their feelings. They asked themselves, “What is it that I will put up with? What am I willing to tolerate sexually?” This required drawing lines between what was enjoyable, bearable, and abhorrent. It also made women feel responsible for taking care of men’s emotions. They soothed tempers so as not to render themselves vulnerable to violence.
Even young women who had not experienced men’s anger were acutely aware of its possibility. The potential for violence thrust women toward unwanted sex, yet these instances remained outside the realm of “sexual assault” in the minds of the women I interviewed and hosted in discussion groups.
Reputations and norms
The second layer of fear factoring into women’s consent calculations was just as understandable: they feared harmful sexual shaming and reputational damage whether or not they refused sex. Sometimes, they reported having unwanted sex to avoid personal disparagement.
This is to say, women experienced an age-old, sexual double standard with an unavoidable inflection: they knew they might be judged harshly for having casual, hook-up sex (in ways men were not), but they also knew saying no could leave them labeled bitchy, rude, or frigid. Women told me they’d been shamed for their “number” (how many people they’d had sex with in the past) and felt a need to distance themselves from derogatory labels, such as being “the easy girl,” and sanctioning terms like slut and whore. It was all too likely should they act outside prescribed norms of respectable, heterofeminine behavior. Piper spoke about girls being seen as too promiscuous and finding themselves shunned by men: “To them [men], there’s gotta be something wrong with a girl if she has a lot of sex, ‘Why does a girl have to have that much sex?’”
Unwanted sex was endured, normalized, and commonplace, but the women I met never considered it sexual assault or rape.
Echoing past sociological research (see Elizabeth Armstrong’s scholarship), the women in my study described trying to toe a fine line between being a slut or a bitch. The specter of these onerous labels made having or rejecting sex a no-win, and it added to the mental gymnastics they performed as they went out with a man, went home with him, made out with him, or touched him. At each stage, it felt more difficult to avoid sexual intercourse.
Matter-of-factly, Eva described the progression of an instance of unwanted sex: “I didn’t really wanna go home with him, but [then] I was like, ‘Oh, I am already here,’ and I didn’t wanna seem rude. I didn’t wanna cause issues and make him upset that I was there already, and we were already making out, so I was like, ‘Whatever.’”
By bringing ethics into the consent conversation, scholars suggest, we might better attend to both pleasure and danger, consider the language of respect and desire, and focus on the possibilities as opposed to the limitations or risks of sex.
Courtney Carmody, Flickr CC
Eva didn’t want to “lead her partner on,” so she had sex. Eva wanted to be nice, not rude, so she had sex. Eva wanted to avoid causing her partner hurt, so she had sex. Eva knew that saying yes was easier than saying no, so she had sex. Eva knew simply spending time with a man, or being in his apartment, might mean she’d already secured an “easy” reputation, so she had sex.
The trade-offs women described are a consequence of the binary, on/off discourses of sexual consent.
Easy but bitchy, a prudish tease—women like Eva also endured unwanted sex in the shadow of layered labels and their gendered consequences.
Complex consent
Unwanted sex was normalized and expected in the lives of the women in my study. It happened as a trade-off made to preserve women’s physical safety and their social standing. In the context of sex on campus, the complex burden of men’s anger, the gendered reputational costs, and the weight of what it means to act as an appropriate heterosexual woman lay the foundations for unwanted sex.
These experiences are a consequence of the binary, on/off discourses of sexual consent. We are told that we ought to “just say no” to unwanted sex, but my research shows that this is not always possible. More often still we are told that consent should be enthusiastic, affirmative, and even sometimes sexy—that a freely and easily given “yes” is the gold standard of a heterosexual encounter. And yet, heterosexual lives are complex. An enthusiastic yes to sex might not be viable or necessary to constitute good sex. In fact, when describing the enjoyable, fulfilling sex they had, the young women in my research did not even once imply the sex was good because they had said “yes” and consented.
In thinking through the ways women spoke candidly about pleasurable sex, I am reminded of Catharine MacKinnon’s declaration: “the sex women want is never described by them as consensual, no one says: ‘we had a great hot night, she (or I, or we), consented.’” Instead, sex that was good was described as jointly instigated and focused on reciprocal pleasure. These encounters were ones that entered, as Tanya Palmer calls it, a state beyond consent, of active involvement as opposed to reaction or submission.
If our conversations about sex with and to young people are to be relevant to them, they must reflect the full and complex reality of their lives. On college campuses, an over-reliance on sexual consent as the standard for good, positive sex fails to reflect the reality of how heterosex is experienced. It conceals experiences of unwanted sex. To challenge this, we ought to transcend sexual consent as the benchmark for socially acceptable and desirable sex. Reframing our conversations in line with the ethicality of sexual encounters might be a more effective place to start. In doing this, we might create an erotic culture on campus, which, as Brenda Cossman writes, pays attention to both pleasure and danger, considers the language of respect and desire and, crucially, focuses on the possibilities as opposed to the limitations or risks of sex.
While I see Laura and the 20 or so other women who spoke to me as adding to the conversation about heterosexuality, it is important to reiterate that the women in my research were majority White and middle-class. This group of relatively privileged women still felt and feared the binds of heterosexuality. It becomes essential then to ask how a more diverse cohort of heterosexual women might reflect on their experiences. Their lives would almost certainly have even more layers and contours of inequality, overlapping and intersecting sexual constraints. Moving forward, we must commit to understanding how heterosexuality is experienced for women of diverse ages, races, and class backgrounds so that we can build a richer tapestry of heterosexuality as it is experienced in college and beyond.