“Choking is mainstream now.” That bleak little nugget came from a confident, thoughtful 20-year-old friend, in a conversation about consent. She added, “And hitting. And spanking.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, rueful. This is the reality of sex for a lot of young people now. Where is the tenderness, I wondered, the beauty, the joy; and my heart sank for her. For all of them.
I was talking to a group of privately educated young women, uni students now. Her friend chimed in. Told me about sex with a guy where a belt was put around her neck. Tightened. Tightened some more. The young woman hated it. “OK,” she thought, “am I meant to go along with this because he wants to do it? It’ll stop soon. Surely. I just have to wait. I’ll be quiet until he stops.”
Afterwards the two of them talked. And surprise, surprise, her partner didn’t like doing it either – but he thought it was what she wanted. You see, they’d never actually had a discussion about what they both expected from sex, and he hadn’t a clue what she might like – and crucially, he thought he was meant to take the lead.
Porn had taught him this. It had taught this bewildered young man to do something to his partner that she didn’t actually like, at all, and neither did he. Both had consumed cheap porn, because that’s the type more readily available. It wasn’t porn made by a female, about female pleasure. They had both been taught through porn that sex is not a scenario where the female is equal; her needs for pleasure and compassion and tenderness were ignored. They were both consuming porn that was violent and degrading and humiliating for women, and thinking this is what heterosexual sex is all about.
All this is utterly dispiriting. We have come so far in so many ways – to get to this. How to convey to our young people that this is not normal, consensual, transcendent sex? The young women I spoke to said their cohort needed to have more conversations. With boys, but also with each other. They said that their male peers often didn’t know what girls wanted during sex – and that often young women couldn’t articulate what they desired. Because they mightn’t know their bodies well enough.
These young women wanted to talk, to stop others making the same mistakes. To inform and empower their peers. They told me of their heads being pushed down to give blow jobs, with no talk of reciprocity. Of condoms being removed mid-sex. Of “blue balls” used as an excuse to force sex on them.
US singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, 19, said recently that her entire cohort had suffered “sexual misbehaviour”. “You might think, ‘It’s because she’s in the music industry’, no dude,” she explained. “It’s everywhere. I don’t know one girl or woman who hasn’t had a weird experience or a really bad experience… It doesn’t matter who you are, what your life is, your situation, who you surround yourself with, how strong you are, how smart you are. You can always be taken advantage of.”
Consent is allowing someone to do something to you that you really want them to do. It requires an enthusiastic, voiced yes. It should be about pleasure, equal pleasure, for both parties. One young woman said to me, “The first thing missing from the education I received was the idea of pleasure during sex. Literally no one tells you, ‘Sex should feel great and fun, and if you’re having sex, it should be because your body/mind really wants to.’” It’s about a respectful relationship. It’s about, simply, being human. A kind, thoughtful, generous, listening human.
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