The Unexpected Trauma Of Casual Sex

We were sitting in a dark corner of a bar when he brought up his friend Rohit. We’d met through Rohit whom I had hooked up with on a slow Saturday afternoon but I didn’t know either one of them well so I just offered a few empty words of familiarity about him to move the conversation along.

“You had sex with Rohit, no?” he asked, looking away from me.

“That’s none of your business, really, but yeah, I did, so?” I said to him.

“And now you are here, with me,” he said, as if implying something much more sinister with his silence.

I did know what he was trying to say but I played the fool until he had to come out and actually say it. He started with the usual spiel about self-respect, followed up with how I shouldn’t be sleeping with so many people and explained to me that I probably did it because I had some kind of preexisting sexual trauma. When I tried to explain to him that I had sex with whomever I wanted because I enjoyed it and his patriarchal view of my sexuality was not welcome, he pulled out his phone and opened up his chat with Rohit. Here is the gist of what Rohit had to say about me:

She’s really weird and desperate. I’ll introduce you to her and I’m sure she will sleep with you too. She just directly asked me if she can suck me. She’s definitely fucked up in the head and so dumb she doesn’t see what everyone thinks of her. She has no respect for herself at all.

At the time, I was just livid and enraged at how fucking sexist the world truly was and I was always ready to give it a piece of my mind. I was a teenager—not yet even sixteen—so the rage was new and with many situations, it was the first time I was getting mad at men for their audacity so it carried a special type of fervour. All of these men were 20-26 years-old and I was fifteen, they had no qualms about that but my self-respect was constantly in question. All of them were happy to line up to hook up with me, but that made me a desperate slut, while they were just nice, good guys who hooked up with a desperate slut. I made sure they always had to hear my version of it too. I didn’t hook-up with randoms because I had no respect for myself, I did it because I was aware of and interested in my sexuality. I was fucking empowered. I do still believe that. Fortunately, I don’t think I’ve ever approached my own sexuality from a place of self-loathing, but for a long time, I also didn’t realise that empowerment (or the lack of it) is not just internal and when it takes place in a hostile environment, it could carry a type of trauma we don’t often consider.

Half a decade ago, I was at a conference where a speaker (who was a psychologist, I think) was talking about how casual sex is traumatic to women, she went on to say it was because the female brain is more emotional and connection-focused so we probably shouldn’t engage with sex casually at all. I do not fucking agree with this and I want to make that very clear, when I say there is unexpected trauma to casual sex, I am talking about the social trauma of trying to freely live your sexuality in a patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic (or otherwise bigoted) society. It manifests in different ways. Sometimes, it’s caused by men like Rohit who denigrate you after sleeping with you and pass you on like a joint to other men (which, honestly, if that was his fetish  he would not have found a person more amenable to it if he had just talked to me about it). Sometimes, it manifests in your decision-making, like one of the big reasons I hooked up with clusters of college and grad students instead of people at my school was because I knew how they treated girls who had sex with more than one person. Sometimes, it’s the trauma of going into every single sexual encounter worrying about whether they will record you or blackmail you later. Sometimes it is the constant shaming about your identity everywhere you go. Once a guy I hooked up with slapped me after sex (not slap me, daddy as usual) in the middle of a conversation about casual sex because he thought I was too loose and needed to be made to realise it. One gentleman told me the story of his ex-fiancé who self-immolated after she had sex with him because she had lost her virtue and he held her up as a role-model.

I am not traumatized by my sexual-decisions, but in retrospect, I can see how my social environment has been traumatic to my sexuality. In the last six or so years, I stopped dating men and it’s not because I have a one-penis-policy (I have no problem with penises, just with cis men), nor because I am not attracted to men, but I am triggered by dating men.  This is not a question of sexual orientation, I am as pansexual as ever, nor of monogamy, I am as poly as ever, but a question perhaps of social-orientation and I am averse to cis men. If you’re tempted to “not all men” right now, please go away, because my choice not to date men is just that, a choice to which I am entitled, and if you feel the need to cry about how unfair that is, you don’t actually get to adjudicate people’s choices, and if you think you do, that’s exactly the reason I don’t want to date you. The problem is that I no longer want to fuck people who want the fun of fucking me but also want to control, pass judgment on my sexuality, think of me as alluring but also repulsive because of the “desperation” tag,  deal with manipulation. I don’t want to constantly feel unsafe expressing my sexuality, worry about revenge porn, hone my image in accordance with what is attractive to men or feel the pressure to infantilize myself because that is more desirable to this gaze and demographic.

Of course, I recognise that some of this fear is blown out of proportion. The whole world is not out there just waiting to victimize me, but that’s what trauma does to you, it does make you scared of the world and a little bit paranoid. That being said, my fears also come from a real place. It’s hard to walk the tightrope but the alternative is oblivion. When I was a teenager I was loud and proud but I was also idealistic enough to believe my empowerment alone could fix the environment around me, but now I am older, and while I am still loud and proud, I understand the traumatic potential of the environment. I see the impact it had on me too. I still want to fix it but I realise the process is much longer and bigger than just me.