A Cautionary Tale

Not much of a sex columnist, are you? I’m surprised at you. Refusing a bit of rough sex!”

Recently I nearly got attacked. Thankfully, no harm done, other than being a little freaked out. The other day, I mentioned this to someone. The above comment was the reaction I got. Odd, don’t you think? I did. It’s to my everlasting credit that violence didn’t ensue. It might have – but my father always told me not to hit girls.
I best warn you that I’m in full auto-rant mode this week because I’m angry. Furthermore my language may upset the more sensitive among you, so look away now, but… WHAT THE FUCK?
To say I was annoyed would be the understatement of the year. I was furious. You wouldn’t think you’d need to explain the difference between consensual sex – no matter how rough – and sexual assault to a grown woman, but there you go. Worse still, when I explained the how and the why, she blamed me for being careless. Sometimes you just can’t win.
Perhaps her attitude wasn’t that surprising. A poll conducted in January by the Irish Examiner and Red C found that about 25% of us think that a woman may be partly or completely to blame for sexual assault particularly if she’s a flirt, had too much to drink or if her skirt was an inch or two shorter than respectable.
In a situation where a lot of alcohol has been consumed it’s easy for messages to get mixed and signals to get crossed. What one person may regard as date rape, another may think was a drunken mistake. What’s the truth? When there is drink involved, the truth is that there may be grey areas.
When drunk, many of us have done things we regret – sometimes that includes having sex with someone we may not have chosen to get involved with sexually when sober (even if only because he’s your best friend’s boyfriend). That goes for both men and women.
That may amount to unwise behaviour, but assault doesn’t come into it. The big difference is that assault requires intention. Targeting a drunken person simply because you know they won’t have the willpower to refuse, messing with someone who has passed out, any kind of aggression, or spiking someone’s drink – that’s assault. Being so drunk that neither of you can remember exactly what happened – that’s not.
Having said that, no matter how much alcohol has been consumed, a lot of the time it’s easy enough to distinguish right from wrong. I have no problem with the idea that women need to take responsibility for their own safety – we do – but there’s a big difference between suggesting that someone was irresponsible and blaming them for being attacked. Here’s an example from my own life.
After my first year university exams I went out to celebrate. I got drunk. I can’t remember what I was wearing, but I had a thing for hot pants at the time so it’s likely I was working my short shorts. I started off the evening with four friends – all male – and I was flirting up a storm with two of them, unable to decide which one I preferred.
At some point in the evening, someone followed me into the loos. If it had been one of the lads, wondering what would happen if he got me alone, fair enough, they were drunk too. But it wasn’t. It was a stranger that had joined our table a few minutes earlier. And however drunk I was, he wasn’t taking any chances that the booze would do the trick – he had a knife.
I had a lucky escape. I managed to lock myself in the toilet stall before he grabbed me. A few minutes later two of the guys decided to investigate as they’d noticed yer man had gone to the toilet seconds after I had. It could have been awful, but thankfully he hadn’t managed to get a hand on me and backed down once the cavalry arrived.
My behaviour may have been reckless, but the men who’d the most right to call me a tease, were the ones that came to my aid. Either way, whatever I’d done, no matter how much I’d had to drink, I didn’t deserve threats at knifepoint from a stranger.
I’m older and wiser now so it’s a rare occasion that I get that drunk these days and for the most part I’m careful – probably a lot more careful than most of HP’s female readers. Having lived in South Africa – a country with some of the world’s highest rates of violence – being cautious is second nature to me.
But you don’t have to go looking for trouble – there are occasions when it’ll find you all by itself. It may be fair to say that some women who claim to have had their drinks spiked have had an alcohol-related blackout, but it does sometimes happen. I know. It happened to me. In a perfectly nice club in Dublin after flirting with what seemed to be a perfectly nice bloke.
I am a lightweight with alcohol, but I don’t start falling asleep after one drink. I realised something was up, but because I was scared I did something pretty stupid – I ran off without telling my friends as I didn’t want to ruin their evening. Luckily I got a taxi driver who didn’t kick me out of the cab, or worse, as I kept passing out on the backseat, but if I had been assaulted then the length of my skirt, the fact that I had been flirting and drinking would hardly have been to blame.
Some of the Irish Examiner/Red C poll’s findings really shocked me. According to it, a huge 38% of us think a woman who walks through a deserted area late at night is at fault. That’s terribly unfair. Again, this isn’t the smartest behaviour, but sometimes it can’t be helped. Ever struggled to find a taxi? I have. Ever had to catch the Nightlink alone? Yes. Mine drops me three blocks from my door; and at four in the morning, everywhere is deserted. You can avoid ‘risky behaviour’, but sometimes, even with the best of intentions, it’s not always possible.
The finding that shocked me most of all was this – one in ten Irish people think a woman is entirely at fault for being raped if she’s had a series of sexual partners. What kind of awful judgemental attitude is that? And who gets to decide what constitutes promiscuity anyway? Is it more than three partners? Or thirty? And whose business is it anyway, except your own?
This really pisses me off. I enjoy sex. Love it in fact. With a man of my choosing I’d plump for it over most activities. I don’t think I’m promiscuous, but of course, I’ve had a number of partners. And chances are, so have a lot of you. So what? I’ve never given anyone a disease or tricked a man into unexpected fatherhood, therefore, whatever I’ve done, or may do, my sex life doesn’t hurt anyone.
But by the standards of the poll I was to blame for what happened to me on a Sunday morning recently. Here’s the story. I’d spent the night at a friend’s place. Being a thoughtful – and hungry – houseguest, I decided to get the papers and croissants before she awoke.
Was my outfit appropriate for a Sunday morning? No. I was still in my glad rags from the night before. Presumably it looked like I was doing the old walk of shame and therefore, since this would suggest I was a sexually active female, I had no right to complain if anyone decided I was available to all and sundry.
Again, it was obviously my fault that a construction site could be found between the shop and my friend’s apartment. The building industry wasn’t hard at work early on the day of rest, so as it was empty I must have been looking for trouble.
As I was walking back, a stranger tried to grab me. Luckily, I’m pretty nippy on my feet and as he lunged, I ran. At that very moment the universe decided to provide me with an unlikely looking guardian angel – a strapping young lad in a boy racer – who witnessing the situation, put two and two together and stopped to be of assistance.
My hero told me to move along as he’d decided a little bit of assault and battery would make his day and was planning to beat my attacker up. Normally I don’t condone or encourage violence, but what the hell?
It was his own fault. He should have known better than to walk some place deserted. The idiot. He was asking for it.