First of all, I was never molested, raped, or sexually assaulted. I just want to make that clear. All of my life up until I’ve been living in Bolivia, I have had, for the most part, very positive and healthy sexual interactions, all of which began as a young adult–a healthy time for those things to begin. I am frankly pretty upset that you were lead to believe that something terrible had happened to me just because I didn’t want to have sex with you, and that when you pushed me too far, I became emotionally shut down and started to cry. I would say that is a very healthy response to being pushed beyond comfortable sexual limits.
I am led to believe from your assumptions and worries that no woman has ever said no to you before. I am hoping with all of my heart, that the reason would be that whichever women you have been physically intimate fully wanted to be so with you. However, I fear that may not be the case, because you don’t seem to listen to physical and verbal cues to stop, even when someone is to the point of tears.
I want to tell you a few stories to help you understand what I believe to be healthy sexual intimacy.
The first story: my first love. I was 20 years old and mutually head-over-heals with a young man of 19. We were together for 8 months, and it was the most passionately crazy in love I have ever felt in my life, and likely the most passionately and crazy in love I will ever feel. I still remember what kissing him felt like. Fireworks would be putting it lightly. My chest would pound when I was near him, and even the smallest touch, the softest little kiss, would send my head spinning in circles and leave me gasping for air. It was clear that he felt the same way.
But it wasn’t just physical contact that made me crazy for this boy. It was his attentiveness. We lived 45 minutes apart from each other and attended different universities, but every night when I got home from my classes, I would have love letters waiting for me in my inbox. (I also I wrote as much as I received.) And every single night, he called me, without fail, and we talked for hours. We talked about our lives, about our values, about our experiences, about our dreams, about the way we felt about each other; we talked about everything! There was never a time when we didn’t have something to talk about. And between all those phone calls and emails, we would visit one another every chance we could, weather it was for a weekend or for a few hours. In those visits we would talk, of course, but we would also spend time just being with one another in loving companionship.
Whenever I was in the presence of this incredible person, I felt so loved. Cared for, paid attention to, thought of and given consideration. I felt respected and understood, I felt like he really SAW me. But what made me know that he really loved me was that I knew I was still in his heart in the time between the meetings. I didn’t need to wonder–his actions made it obvious.
The one summer that we were together, he came to visit me in Oregon during our university vacation. A few of our nights (at my parents house) ended with us making out pretty hot and heavy on the living room couch after my parents had gone to sleep. And at this point in my life, I was still a virgin, and had no desire to be otherwise. One morning after a night like this, my mother approached me and apologized, saying she had accidentally seen us making out, and just wanted to be sure that I was safe and taking it slow. I told her I was and not to worry about it. Kevin and I were loving of one another and nothing was happening that needed to cause any concern–we had never even seen one another half naked!
The following night, when we were making out again, at some point he asked me if I could take my shirt off. This was something I was absolutely ready for and wanted to do, but I said no, because I was afraid that my mother might spy on us again! However, I didn’t tell him about my mom, I just said “not tonight,” because I didn’t want to embarrass him that she had seen us the night before. He immediately apologized, and continued to kiss me, but then stopped and just held me, and eventually sat up, clearly distressed. I sat up beside him and asked what was wrong. He was silent for a long while and then said, “I just can’t believe I pushed you. I never want to make you feel uncomfortable and I never want you to do something you aren’t ready to do.” He was really upset. I hugged him and kissed him and my heart overflowed with love and gratitude for his deep care and consideration for me. I told him that he hadn’t done anything wrong–he hadn’t pushed me at all; he had asked my permission, and then listened to me when I said no. He didn’t need to feel bad, and we could move on. I told him that as long as we were communicating well like this, he should never feel guilt or any bad feelings around our physical relationship.
I dated Kevin for another 3 months or so, and things eventually ended for reasons I don’t need to explain here–that’s not the point. In the whole 8 months we were together, we never had sex. He never saw me more than half naked. He never touched me below the belt beneath my clothes. Why? Not because sex isn’t awesome and beautiful and magic–it completely is! The reason we never had sex was because I wasn’t ready, and because he LOVED me and RESPECTED me and would NEVER have pushed me past my comfort zone. That is a basic part of truly caring about another person.
The other stories I could share with you to make my points clear are too many to count. I willingly lost my virginity at the age of 22 with a different man, and since then have had a number of sexual partners and many types of love in my life. I know that how many people I have been with is above average for a woman my age. I feel liberated about that. I feel good and happy and I love having sex! It is such an adventure, every time. But there are reasons I am able to feel the way that I do about sex. In the 8 years that I have been sexually active, I have never been with someone who pushed me. I have been with people who have opened my mind and heart through the magic of sex, who have helped me to find my sexual freedom and independence, and people who have made my body feel like a sacred temple. I have been with people that I have felt fire coming alive in their eyes through our sexual union, and whose souls have been exposed to me, raw, and real. I have learned how incredible it is to share every part of yourself with someone else, and to know what makes them feel aroused, but also what makes them feel appreciated, cared for, and attended to. I have slept with lovers that I stayed with for months or years at a time, changing and growing together, and finding new ways to make “stars and moons spill out of one another,” as the poet Hafiz once said. I have been with a few lovers that I only slept with once, in crazy, spark filled, one-time-only encounters. I have never, up to now, been with someone who didn’t know that I, just like every woman, every human, every creature, am a sacred being. I have never had someone react to my not being ready with frustration and coldness, as you have. You, my dear, are the first one. That is why I cried.
Before I ever slept with anyone, I had many encounters making out with boys at parties, especially when dancing was involved. I loooooved kissing people, and still do. It was always so flirtatious and fun, such a window into a whole other unknown world with someone. But when things started to get heavy, and I would stop it with my body language–I almost never even had to use words–the other person could see that I wasn’t ready, and nothing more happened. There were a few times that I even outright told someone I was a virgin, and didn’t want to have sex yet. Usually the response I got was celebratory! Some things men said to me during this time included,”How wonderful!” “It’s going to be great when you decide it’s time, but wait until you are ready,” and “I love the way that you love and respect yourself.” So when you say that there is something wrong with me, when you assume that my unwillingness to sleep with you is based on some sexual violence in my past, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is based on me knowing what respect, love, and care looks like, and me knowing that those things are not things you have yet learned how to give.
I cried because I am so deeply sad, in my heart of hearts, that so many women here in Latin America have to live with that. They have to live with men who do not respect them or their bodies. They have to be with men who think they are entitled to sex and whatever else they want with the woman they are dating, because in a sense, she belongs to them. The culture here is dominated by men and their will–there is no room for the voice of women. There is no room for mutual respect and understanding. So many women here don’t know that they are beautiful, independent, strong, intelligent, sacred creatures, and that they can do whatever they want to do with their bodies, when they want to, and they don’t have to do anything with their bodies until they are ready to. I cried for my 15 little sisters at Nuestra Casa Hogar who have been sexually abused and raped, and have had to begin their lives with such a warped understanding of what sexual relationships are. I cried because I don’t know if they will ever understand, as I do, how beautiful and wonderful sex can be. I cried for the women I know in jail and at Manos con Libertad who have partners and ex-partners who have abused them, devalued them, abandoned them, and made them believe they are not worth more.
And, I cried because I am angry at myself. I have felt, since I met you, like a bad feminist. Like by going along with all of the things that you have done to hurt me, I have communicated to you and the world of Latin men that this low standard of expectations is okay. That you can get away with it. It is not okay. I want to demand better. I want to demand what I have always known to be true–that each one of us, including you, including me, deserves respect, love, kindness and consideration. We do not deserve to be objectified, ignored, made to question our own worth, and reduced to carnal beings that only act on our impulses instead of acting intentionally and out of love. I do believe you are capable of that, but I don’t believe that is something you have shown me in the time I have known you.
In the time I have known you, I have felt ignored, manipulated, objectified and hurt. I want to explain this because it is so important for you to understand. I think that you have the heart inside of you to be a good man. I think that all of us have the potential to BE love. I think that I have seen glimpses of that, and that is why I continue to give you chance after chance. I think that you are working against an entire culture that does not respect women and that does not respect sex. I think that is a very difficult thing to overcome. I want to tell you that when a person cries related to a sexual act and you respond with anything other than gentleness and caring, questions and attentiveness, you are making the problem bigger. I am really having a hard time with the fact that after the last time I saw you, the way things went, you have made close to no effort to reach out to me and find out what that was about. It’s so cold. It’s so uncaring. It’s so obvious that you have no idea how big a deal it was what happened.
I suppose I should not be that surprised, because in the time I have known you, you have hardly ever reached out to me, period. You have never been on time, you have never called me to ask me out for a date, you have never made any gesture to show that you care about me beyond kissing me when you feel a surge of attraction when we happen to run into each other in a public place.
You need to understand that what happened the last time you saw me was bordering on sexual assault. I made it clear to you that I did not want to have sex, and without my permission or my knowledge, you got naked behind me and came very close to initiating sex without my permission. If you had started sex with me at that point, without asking my permission, to be clear, it would have been rape. And when I was quite reasonably upset, you told me I was acting like a 15 year old. You did not listen to me, and made me feel worse, and so I began to leave. You then demanded for me to close the door and sit down. You did not ask me, you told me. You did not apologize, you instead started to talk about how this must be something that is wrong with me. That process that you went through is actually a type of emotional manipulation and abuse, called “gas-lighting.”
“Gas-lighting is a form of mental abuse in which information is twisted or spun, selectively omitted to favor the abuser, or false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception, and sanity.”
I realized that was what was happening but I didn’t know what to do about it. I don’t really understand why I stayed. I know that there is a part of me that really struggles with upsetting others. Even when I know that I am the one being hurt, I end up thinking about the other person’s feelings. It is probably why I stayed there. Research shows that people with the desire to please everyone, people who need to communicate their feelings, and people who have difficulty accepting it when someone is not listening to them (all qualities I have) are more susceptible to gas-lighting than others. I am lucky that I have not encountered this in my life up to now, and it’s not something I ever want to deal with again.
I don’t know if you’re going to be able to hear any of what I have said here. I hope that you can. I hope that you are able to see in my words that I am hurt, but I have given this a lot of thought, and it is not an emotional reaction. I hope that you can see in my words that I want to help you be a better man. I know that it is hard to hear these thing. They are harsh. But they are my truth, and the truth of women I know here and in many other countries. I know that when I share this story with friends back home, they are in agreement with the conclusions I have drawn here. I don’t expect to hear from you again, and that is your prerogative. I don’t really know if I do want to hear from you again or not. If your heart is opened and you want to take into consideration what I have said here, I would be opened to a conversation. It is likely I will be seeing you again on Tuesday at the parlana event, but anything beyond that is up to you.
Be well,
Kiki
Loading comments...