In This Body: Laws of Consent
“just a feeling of not knowing what just happened to me”
"In This Body" is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
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Do you trust me. I answer yes. I don’t know why. Of course I didn’t trust him. Things about him that bled through after the breakup. How he hacked my email, but that’s not even what I’m talking about. It’s the way he used the things he read there. How he used his breach of my privacy, made me feel guilty about it. Somehow. It was the secrets, secrets told to him in confidence that he used. To try and convince me not to sleep with his best friend.
It didn’t work.
He thought I’d be scared away if I knew his friend’s fetish. Thought I wouldn’t do it if I knew one of my best friends was in love with him. I didn’t trust anything he told me and I didn’t care. Fetishes don’t frighten me and my friend was polyamorous, even in love.
He should’ve known better than to warn me off with a foot fetish. A new part of my body eroticized, I wanted it. I spent our whole relationship trying to convince my ex to explore, try new things in bed. Outside of bed. He had always said yes, he’d do this or that new thing with me. He rarely would. He was always saying yes to things he was not okay with.
To delay this end.
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I don’t know why I kept sleeping with him after the breakup. Something in it about obligation. An inability to take away what was his, my pussy. But I got something out of it, too. Something about confidence. He said I was the hottest woman he’d ever been with, I knew it was his truth. Except he didn’t say woman, he said girl.
That part is my truth.
After the breakup, in the ex sex phase. That was when he started trying new things. A grasp to keep me. But it still wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to try new things with him. He tried new things on me.
That’s how I end up in this shitty hog tie, my face in the pillows. Even I know it’s a shitty hogtie and I’d never seen that knot in person. And I can’t see. And my ears are muffled in bedding but I still hear him ask if I trust him.
I answer yes.
And there’s something going on in my organs. Something that wants to say no. The part that did not want to be hogtied in the first place. Not that night. Not in that bed. Not by him.
But I’d asked for this, so many times in the years we were together. New things. This was new. This is what I wanted, right?
No means no and yes means yes. These are the basic laws of consent. I said yes.
First it was hot wax. Then blades over my skin, not to draw blood. Surprises, things we’d yet to discuss. Sensationally, sexually, I loved these things. They set my pussy alight, got me messy wet. But that thing in my organs, a feeling like a hacked email account and secrets that are not his to tell.
Then there are two fingers. His fingers, big fingers. It could’ve been one, I couldn’t see and I didn’t ask. It felt like two. Stretched my asshole, a place untouched.
A place I didn’t want touched. The history, the words between us, that crumbled at that action of his fingers in that hole. This was a surprise like the knife, like the wax. But more. But worse. Because this was not an action we’d never discussed.
It kept coming up.
His lines, it’s not that I’m into anal, I just think you should try it. He said the same things each time. If you want to explore sexually, you really need to at some point. And I’d always said no, without saying no. Maybe someday as in no. The idea of shit just turns me off as in no. Excuses.
He said I could tell him to stop any time. I guess I just couldn’t tell him not to start. Despite it, I liked it. I wasn’t thinking about shit at all. So maybe he was right all along. I moan and it feels a lie I can’t help but tell.
And he goes faster, and it starts to hurt. And then that feeling, my organs, it spreads. To my skin. Every nerve ending. Turns to an ache of melancholy that covers all of me. In the pillow, my eyes make wet marks but not from the pain.
I tell him to stop.
He stops.
I don’t remember how the rest of the night went. He may have switched to my pussy, kept me tied up. Used his cock. But in my mind the sex ends there and I walk the few blocks home. The rest of my memory is just a feeling of not knowing what just happened to me.
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The problem is the laws of consent are fallible. No means no is dead, too simple to capture consent. Yes means yes is better, but still too small. The problem is we only look at rape as something violent that a man does to a woman.
The men and women I’ve known who do not know what just happened to them. Who don’t fit the bill of the victim. Who never said no. Who said yes but it was not consent. Who were not conscious or do not remember. Who were wet or hard. Who were not penetrated, or were not penetrated by a penis.
Even now, I look at that night. I think that I could have stopped it. I could have refused to be tied. I could have not lied about my trust for him. I could’ve not moaned. And he didn’t even use his cock. And I still can’t call it rape, most of the time.
All I can say is, whatever is was, it was fucked up.
That’s the best I can do.
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Read the previous installment of In This Body, "Trilogy" here.
Header image courtesy of Vanessa Moselle. To view a gallery of her photos, go here.