Reflections on the ways I was deprived of sexual agency as a teen
I still remember with crystal clarity the first time a boy put his hands in my pants. I was 15 years old, 7 years ago now. I’m pretty sure it was June 13th, an odd detail lodged in my mind in a way I can’t quite explain. He was my second boyfriend. He’d was younger than me but he’d had a few sexual partners, something I was acutely aware of.
We were kissing when it happened, awkwardly huddled on the sofa in his room. His parents were home, and I was acutely self-conscious of any noise I made. He didn’t ask. I don’t think I would have said yes, but I didn’t have the conviction to say no. The feeling was so intense, good and also painful, but the most potent part of the memory is an extreme lack of control. My mind and body caught up in sensation and confusion. I didn’t know what I wanted but I knew what I was supposed to want. I was both within and outside of my body. I’m grateful he didn’t try to go further. I don’t know if I would have had the presence to stop him.
I was sore afterwards, a lingering pain of groping teenage boy fingers in places that weren’t used to being touched. I was confused and scared by the whole incident. I told no one. In fact, to this day I’m not sure I’ve told anyone. Later, when I was in a much healthier and more communicative relationship with someone else, I pretended that I’d never done any of those things before. It was an uncomfortable memory that I just avoided. If I ignored it, it would go away…. and yet I remember it with more potency than many of my more enjoyable firsts.
I remember going on a long trail run that afternoon, shaken, not sure if I was excited or upset. I remember sitting in the curve of a tree trunk, cautiously feeling my soreness. Was I hurt? I was shaking, breathing hard with more than a hard run uphill. I was confused, confused, confused. I couldn’t shake the powerlessness of having something happen to you instead of being an active participant in it.
The next time that boy and I got that far he asked permission. I managed a soft ‘not right now.’ I wasn’t ready. He didn’t violate my wishes. We broke up eventually, when I realized that we’d reached the point where I had to let him fuck me or end it. At that point, I had built up the conviction that I didn’t want to have sex with him. He’s now an objectively terrible person, but I know he never wanted to hurt me. Still, I was an object. An object that wasn’t quite willing to give him what he wanted.
In the end, it all comes down to power and powerlessness. As girls, the power of our sexuality is taken from us over and over. Boys and men take it from us by treating sexual acts as things they do to us. They take our agency and leave us unsure of what we want. Society, often through our parents, takes our power by telling us to be careful. Telling us men will try to do things to us. Telling us to protect ourselves, to be cautious. They’ll never tell us that sex is for us. The feeling of powerlessness is the worst thing about that memory. It was something I experienced without a shred of choice or control. No physical force, not even explicit emotional manipulation. I was there and it was happening and I could have stopped it, could have said “no” or even said “yes” just to claim my own agency. But I didn’t.
I’ve been lucky. In terms of sexual trauma, I’ve come off much easier than many of my friends. My first serious sexual relationship was loving, occasionally fraught and misguided but more openly well-intentioned than most. I’m cautious in ways that I don’t want to be; I don’t want to believe that this has kept me safe but I do in spite of myself. Despite my luck and my own desire for sexual pleasure, I carry fear of sex and intimacy. What woman doesn’t? For me, it’s rooted in my mother’s unconsciously puritanical teachings on the subject. Rooted in the narratives of sexual abuse that surround my life. I’m lucky to carry fear more rooted in the experiences of others than in my own. How fucked up is our world that I can consider this luck?
I’m working, slowly, on agency. On claiming a sexuality that belongs to me and perhaps to those I choose to share it with. It’s small, but I believe it to be the best small resistance I can muster.