An essentialist view of a thing is that there are specific attributes which are inseparable from that thing. In feminism, it’s usually used to say that someone – always the other person! – considers some things to be universal to women (and/or men), and is wrong to do so.

But essentialism is a word with several meanings and I wonder if our feminist conversations could be improved if we talked it through a little more deeply. At its simplest, it can be broken down into sex and gender essentialism:

When accusing somebody of sex essentialism, what’s commonly meant is that they seem to be considering, for example, a female-sexed body essential to ‘womanhood’, i.e. that only someone with a vagina, ovaries, womb etc. ‘counts’ as a woman. This accusation is most commonly levelled at radical feminists.

And when accusing someone of gender essentialism, the accusation is usually that they consider a female gender, composed of some set of behaviours, traits etc., to be some essential quality which resides in human beings, usually in accordance with but sometimes independent of sex. This accusation is most commonly made by radical feminists.

Firstly, I’d like to indicate some common ground (and also a common enemy), which is that patriarchy is both sex- and gender-essentialist. The patriarchal view of women is that our sex defines us as women, which implies our gender, which is expressed through such outlets as our enduring desire to perform emotional care work for men, a natural enthusiasm to appear in pornography and I guess our liking pink or something. Even though that used to be a colour for boys. Whatever.

A good (not perfect) feminist rule of thumb is that if patriarchy likes it, we shouldn’t. Which is perhaps one of the reasons why accusations of essentialism go off like a bomb. It’s true that sometimes, feminists are either or both of sex or gender essentialist. The idea that “gender is real” is probably the norm in most circles. But more nuanced arguments made by both ’sides’ can sometimes be overlooked.

An argument often branded as “sex-essentialist” by some feminists is the stance that sex matters. Not because it is magic, but because patriarchy treats us differently based on our assigned sex, and patriarchy’s actions have significant effects. So when a radical feminist states that growing up assigned female at birth produces a unique experience, she’s saying that patriarchy treats girls uniquely. She may, however, not be taking fully into account the experiences under patriarchy of kids who don’t feel natural in their sexed bodies, and/or have ended up – for whatever reason – identified with the ‘other’ gender.

It’s also possible to argue for the authenticity of gendered experience without being gender essentialist. As that argument goes, “gender identification” is a complex process which occurs in a context of ubiquitous patriarchal gender norms. But it sinks in regardless; once somebody has formed a deep, gendered identification, their most important consideration may not be theoretical but whether their life is livable (credit to Judith Butler for this idea).

Our discussions should not always stop at the word “essentialist”; if we consider these issues carefully, perhaps we can have more conversations in which we talk with, rather than past or at, each other – even if we don’t always agree!

Type “why do feminists” into Google and the first suggestion you get is, “… hate men”. I’m a radical feminist, which means I probably qualify for result number four on Google’s auto-suggest, “… hate men so much”. Several of my friends would probably agree. The weird thing, though, is that it seems I have a far higher opinion of men than they do.

Not individual men, particularly. As a separatist in principle, few of my friends are men – not because I hate them, just because I find male privilege draining on an interpersonal level. And not men as a class, because when you take the aggregate of men’s actions, what you get makes up a significant chunk of patriarchy, and I’m not such a fan of that either.

But in terms of men’s essential nature, their capabilities and their potential, my estimation is way up there.

I don’t think that men rape and abuse women because they’re animals, that “boys will be boys”. I think that people rape and abuse people because our culture encourages boundary violation and it is enabled by systems of power. In many cases where power dynamics are in play, there are horrific rates of rape and abuse over those dynamics.

So, men. Patriarchy is one hell of a system of power, and it’s one over which unusually many relationships take place. We also live in a rape culture in which rape and abuse are normalised and enabled almost regardless of the context in which they take place. Romance and pick-up paradigms are rape culture instruction manuals, and “nice guy” and “friendzone” memes are steeped in entitlement. Cultural masculinity (not men, but what men are taught) is practically a celebration of boundary violation and the objectification of women, and cultural femininity is an education in indirect or non-assertion of boundaries.

If one set out to evolve a system to facilitate men’s rape and abuse of women (and I’d argue that’s exactly what’s happened), patriarchy is the system that would result.

I also don’t think that men are the clueless idiots depicted in TV advertisements and soap operas who are unable to interpret other people’s desires, feelings and indirect communication. In a 1999 paper, Kitzinger and Frith performed conversation analysis on men’s accounts of conversations about consent and concluded that,

Drawing on the conversation analytic literature, and on our own data, we claim that both men and women have a sophisticated ability to convey and to comprehend refusals, including refusals which do not include the word ‘no’, and we suggest that male claims not to have ‘understood’ refusals which conform to culturally normative patterns can only be heard as self-interested justifications for coercive behaviour.

I believe that men are not children. I believe that men, as a rule, are intelligent, self-aware adults who comprehend the world around them and who are capable of making mature choices which take other human beings into account. So if there’s one way in which I hate men, it’s this: I believe that male rapists and abusers know what they are doing and that they do it anyway. To quote Christabel Pankhurst (via Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women):

Men have a simple remedy for this state of things. They can alter their way of life.

Oh, and that Google experiment I suggested at the beginning? The second result is, “Why do feminists love Ryan Gosling?”, so I wouldn’t read too much into it if I were you.

2. Be aware of the space you take up and the positions and privileges you bring, including racial, class and gender privilege.

3. Avoid assuming the opinions and identifications of other participants.

4. Recognize that we try not to judge, put each other down or compete.

5. Be aware of the language you use in discussion and how you relate to others.

6. Foster a spirit of mutual respect: Listen to the wisdom everyone brings to the group.

7. Be aware that not only do people “do feminism” differently but that we are all learning all the time. If someone’s opinion differs from yours, that does not necessarily mean they are wrong. Be respectful when you challenge someone’s opinon.

In my daily life, I don’t meet many people who will admit to being anti-feminist. 23 years in, I have (more or less) successfully pruned my social tree down to a verdant set of variously progressive political branches. However, the odd cuckoo is still to be found nesting. First, there is the common or garden ‘I’m not a feminist but…’, then there is the fairweather ‘I’m a feminist man stop oppressing me by saying I can’t direct feminist discourse because if I’m not allowed to maintain my traditional “active” role I’m not going to play any more’, and finally, the infestatious ‘Nice Guy’.

A typical example; I meet a man who reads the copy of Gender Agenda I leave lying around and seems to believe that women are fully human i.e. not just designed to fulfil man-enabling roles such as housework, child rearing, or providing sexual gratification. He is pleasant, we become close. A term down the line, he is still ostensibly pleasant, but cracks are beginning to show: he makes ‘thoughtless’ jokes, making comments like ‘that bitch can ride a pole’ on a music video. I didn’t get it either, but I think the punchline was that I am a feminist and therefore misogyny in my presence is funny.

This is still not a man who would proclaim his entitlement to a female ‘helpmeet’; you could have a liveable relationship with him. But there is obviously something about relating with a self-proclaimed feminist woman which has brought out a deep insecurity in him, manifest in his desire to make feminism a joke or little idiosyncrasy. This happens to me a lot: I obviously never embark on relationships with insecure, anti-feminist men if I know that’s what they are. Yet I end up leaving several relationships with insecure, anti-feminist men. And today I had an epiphany as to why:

‘Nice Guys’ are perfectly, even unusually, ‘nice’, but are nonetheless scared of feminism, because feminism threatens not just their sexual and economic access to women, but also their emotional access. Feminism centres women for women. Feminism creates sisterhood; its greatest asset is being a personal as well as a political programme. It legitimises women’s emotional experiences as real experiences, celebrates them, shares them, elevates that sharing into a bond equal or superior to the bond of traditional, ‘romantic’ intimacy. So, if a ‘Nice Guy’ is in an emotional or ‘romantic’ relationship with a woman who is a feminist, that means that the woman is likely to be relating emotionally with others – other women – too. For her, the relationship with him is not unique for the mere fact of being emotionally intimate; the man is not providing something irreplaceable in that sense. But, he is probably receiving it; ‘brotherhood’ is a gangster term, it doesn’t connote mutual emotional support. So for a man to relate emotionally and intimately to a feminist woman is for a man, perhaps for the first time in his life, to relate to a woman under an imbalance of power that, even if in just one sense, advantages her; she can take it or leave it, as far as fulfilling her need for emotional intimacy goes.

Now I will hasten to disclaim that this doesn’t hold true for all, or perhaps even most, men; many men will have close friendships with each other and with other women. And when I make my next point, I am not saying that it is inherent or essential. Here it is: women are, generally speaking, trained and expected to be emotional; emotionally intelligent, emotionally accessible. With men, it seems to be the opposite. I don’t know what it might be like to have no one or only one person with whom I could talk openly about my feelings, but I don’t imagine I’d like it very much. However, I’ve often felt in my previous relationships, that I was that one person for the man involved; it was very oppressive.

I have the happy option of pursuing ‘romantic’ relationships with women instead of, or as well as, with men. But as long as that’s not the case for everyone – or, in fact, even if it were the case for everyone – a construction of romantic love which places the entire onus for a man’s emotional happiness on a woman is a huge, insidious problem. It’s not new for a feminist to call for the patriarchal straightjacket of manly distance and stoicism to be discarded. What I’m saying is: it shouldn’t only be discarded in the bedroom.

• Firstly, my experience of feminism has actually been very different to what MacDonald describes. I’ve never felt excluded or “part of the problem” or even particularly confused. The feminists I know, and they are fewer than I would like, have all been extremely welcoming and friendly, and actually an embarrassingly happy bunch of people. My encounters with them have been characterised by joking and light-heartedness, though obviously they often hold much anger and frustration beneath the surface. None of this has ever been directed at me. I have three sisters but none has ever told me that “there’s just things you’ll never understand” (as MacDonald’s did).
• I do get a lot of surprise, however. Mostly from non-feminists. When I manned the student Feminist Society’s stall at fresher’s fair, I got many derisive snorts from strangers. A lot of my friends who happened to see me came over and congratulated me on actually being a male feminist. Even I was shocked at how much this happened. However – unusually for me – this didn’t make me feel guilty or unwanted or out of place. It merely stoked my feminist anger to a slightly higher notch – a slight sensation of outrage that the world is still so amazed by the concept of men not being happy with the gender status quo. One more thing that we need to change.
• I don’t buy the idea that our experiences define us so radically that we cannot understand where others are coming from when they describe their feelings and emotions to us. I have read my Foucault – and yes I do agree that people are fundamentally shaped by discourses and cultural power, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t communicate or empathise beyond this. I am a social anthropology undergrad – my discipline is founded on the practice of people integrating across discourses. A European goes to Indonesia and lives there for a long time – eventually they can understand what’s going on in that culture as well as any “native” and they are capable of explaining this back to other Europeans who can in turn comprehend it. Yes there are problems with cultural assumptions and so forth, but these can be identified and eliminated. Anthropology *has* essentially thrown off its colonial past. My point is that while men and women tend to have very different experiences in life and thus become very different people, it’s ludicrous to imagine that they cannot possibly comprehend the experiences of each other, especially when they have so many shared cultural referents.
• In fact, I’m even offended by the suggestion/implication (again, this has not come from any feminists I know) that I am incapable of knowing or caring about the problem of “women” or of any type/group of humans. As if the constructed boundaries separating us were greater than our shared humanity. As if the suffering of others doesn’t bother me or touch me, as if I can’t know or even imagine what it’s like to suffer. I *am* a feminist. Not in a detached or intellectual way. Feminism for me is highly emotional and experiential, founded utterly in my horror at the various gender-based realities that I have become aware of either first-hand (yes, men do get gender discrimination, and no, it’s not as anything like as bad as what women get on average) or via what I’ve heard from/seen in others. This is not a complicated or unusual state of affairs. It happens frequently in millions of people every day.
• I’m not a big fan of the idea that you can teach men to be feminists by following certain rules, as suggested in this article (though I do support *most* of what it calls for). That reeks of categorisation. You don’t have to tick boxes to “be” a feminist, whatever gender you define as. Feminism is personal – it emerges in each individual for different reasons and is composed of different feelings and experiences – we mustn’t essentialise it. I also dislike the idea that the author might view me as attractive by virtue of my feminism – it just feels uncomfortable, as if I was being judged as a person on the basis of my opinions/ideologies (though to be fair the author is mostly talking about actions).
• Refusal to categorise or essentialise is also key for thinking about the vast numbers of misogynist women and the male feminist heroes, both famous and little-known. For the majority of feminists (in my experience), I’m stating the obvious here, so I shall state it again, just to be clear: Men and women are equally key to ending the gender problems we care about. The categories themselves are central to these problems, because the problems are largely structural. The patriarchy is not a literal conspiracy, it is a social phenomenon that was not consciously created. Surprise at the creature known as the male feminist only indicates how much we still fail to appreciate structural and discursive power and how much we continue to cling to essentialism. Here comes the but.
• BUT. But, it is equally ludicrous to say that feminists are man-haters, or to blame them if they are. Not just because most don’t hate men. It’s ludicrous to say that feminists are man haters because – even if they are – saying so allows you to reject everything else they also are. Or more precisely, it allows you to miss the fact that feminists, as already explained, *are* not any definable thing or even set of things. I cannot count the number of times I’ve seen wonderful articles and brilliant analyses completely rejected out of hand merely because the author has indulged in a generalisation/stereotype/homogenising narrative/portrayal of “men” as evil. Sure, 90% of the time I agree that the generalisation was inappropriate, and these problems are endemic in feminism and need to be dealt with. But  it shouldn’t detract from the point being made. Worse, the dismissal is often arbitrarily extended to all of feminism, which is then branded as dogmatic and fringe.
• It is not a contradiction with my points about structure and categorisation to say that male people DO generate and sustain the majority of the problems feminists care about. The vast majority. People defining as women suffer BY FAR the most. The two genders tend to have PROFOUNDLY different experiences, so while I still stick to my point, above, that we can always empathise across experiential differences, this often requires A LOT more effort than we might imagine. It especially requires that all concerned LISTEN to each other, really listen, and make a strong effort to hear what is being said without one’s customary ideological or gender filters. Those who fail to do this should rightly be the subject of scorn and anger. They certainly make me furious, though I understand why it happens. Further, while the patriarchy is NOT a conspiracy, and seeing it as such can make us adopt misguided tactics for dealing with it, it DOES behave pretty much AS IF IT WERE a conspiracy. So casually treating it as such in our articles and conversations is not surprising, unforgiveable, nor the end of the world – though I do agree it should be avoided as much as possible.

I’ve veered far from my original thoughts about being a male feminist, but as I hope you can see, I think the issue is relevant to more or less all of feminism. I would love to develop these thoughts further!

Perhaps this thread can be a resource to share responses to and coverage of the anti-DSK protest/movement that have been written elsewhere? (Not to prevent anyone from writing their own separate responses on GA) I feel that I am still recovering and trying to process what happened, it was so important to me, and I don’t want to lose or forget that so much was created. Please add things I have missed. I have purposefully left off “The Cambridge Student’s” “coverage”, see here: http://www.facebook.com/events/334401786597637/?ref=ts

The original ‘Disinvite DSK’ petition:

http://www.womens.cusu.cam.ac.uk/campaigns/strausskahn/

Posts I have loved in response to the protest:

http://feministactioncambridge.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/i-am-still-shaking/

http://toughtea.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/2468-solidarity-is-great-3579-i-wish-we-could-do-this-all-the-time/

Cath Elliott’s speech from the speaker event:

http://toomuchtosayformyself.com/2012/03/09/strauss-kahns-presence-at-cambridge-uni-is-an-insult/

Earlier posts:

http://fuckyoufaithtaylor.tumblr.com/post/18186261953/disinvite-dsk-or-tcs-y-u-love-violence

http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2012/03/cambridge_shoul

http://raytherah.blogspot.com/2012/02/justice-for-dominique-strauss-kahn-dont.html

Coverage of the protest:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/09/world/europe/uk-dsk-protest/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/09/dominique-strauss-kahn-protest-cambridge-university

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2112655/Disgraced-Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-gives-Cambridge-Union-address-flanked-6-bodyguards.html?ITO=1490

http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/4601

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/dominique-strauss-kahn/9135007/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-bundled-into-Cambridge-speech-after-protesters-daub-graffiti.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-17311867

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/09/pair-arrested-dsk-cambridge-graffiti_n_1334841.html

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Activists-deface-Cambridge-Union-in-run-up-to-Strauss-Kahn-talk-09032012.htm

http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16185974

Earlier coverage:

Reuters UK: British students want Strauss-Kahn speech cancelled:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/02/24/uk-britain-strauss-kahn-idUKTRE81N1VZ20120224

Agence France-Presse: Strauss-Kahn invite angers Cambridge students:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hnxe9yoUW4155LXUjS2fwnaKjIXQ?docId=CNG.7453e80027294121b001455bf26f9292.1f1

The Chicago Tribune: British students want Strauss-Kahn speech cancelled: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-rt-britain-strauss-kahn-update-1l5e8do8za-20120224,0,6079884.story

The Jerusalem Post: British students want Strauss-Kahn speech cancelled: http://www.jpost.com/Headlines/Article.aspx?id=259294&R=R101

Le Figaro: DSK indésirable à Cambridge: http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2012/02/24/97001-20120224FILWWW00582-gb-dsk-indesirable-a-cambridge.php

Le Monde: Une pétition d’étudiantes de Cambridge contre la venue de M. Strauss-Kahn: http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2012/02/24/une-petition-d-etudiantes-de-cambridge-contre-la-venue-de-m-strauss-khan_1648256_3214.html

Calgary Herald: Strauss-Kahn invite angers women’s group
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Strauss+Kahn+invite+angers+women+group/6209237/story.html

Straits Times: Strauss-Kahn invite angers Cambridge students: http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/World/Story/STIStory_770652.html

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/02/who-still-invites-dsk-speak/49056/#.T0t7vryhCOw.facebook

_____________________

Dear Union Society Committee,

I am writing to you to resign my membership of the Cambridge Union Society and to demand a refund of my membership fee on the basis that I was mis-sold membership of the society. When I joined the society, it was on the understanding that it was committed to the promoting of free speech. That claim was made a mockery by the actions of the society over the last week, and is I believe now untenable and irrecoverable unless a full apology were to be made.
When I joined the union society in my first year, I was proud to think I was part of a society committed to debating the most challenging issues of our day, that brought such eminent speakers to Cambridge and enabled me to hear them. But on Friday evening, I found myself standing on the pavement outside the society building, on the other side of a metal barricade erected to protect the rapist inside, being stared at by lines of hired security guards and watched nervously by police, as woman after woman stepped forward to the megaphone to share her testimony, to speak out about her experience of sexual violence. From that makeshift platform, the speakers moved me beyond tears. I learnt more about the reality of sexual violence in our society, about rape culture and what it does to women’s lives, than I would have thought possible in a single evening, and I learnt more about feminism than I have learnt from any book I have read or from any lecture I have attended.

But it is an outrage and a travesty that those women were speaking on the wrong side of those barricades, excluded, by force, from the chamber that is supposed to be a forum for real learning and real debate, while Strauss-Kahn was wined and dined, heard and applauded, privileged and protected. Later that evening, I watched some women’s anger boil over as they tried to scale the barricades and force their way into the chamber to confront Strauss-Kahn, to make him hear what they had to say, and I watched them thrown to the floor by security guards, I watched them being grabbed, tackled, beaten. I watched all this knowing that the society of which I am a member had made this happen, had directly caused this brutality by inviting a rapist to speak in the chamber, then by refusing to allow these women a platform inside the union to express their feelings, and finally by hiring security whose sole priority was to ensure Strauss-Kahn was not embarrassed, at absolutely any cost. You put the personal pride of a serial rapist above the dignity and safety of your own members: you ignored the rape survivors speaking out in the cold so you could listen to a rapist in peace.

If a politician whose politics are controversial or even hateful is invited to speak at the union, then the rationale has always been that the politician will be questioned on those issues, that the platform he is being given will become the platform by which his ideas are disproved. Yet Strauss-Kahn was invited to speak as an economist: we were asked to forget that he is a serial rapist. This sidelining of the issue of sexual violence – why do you care so much? If he hasn’t been proved guilty in court why does it matter to you? – would be impossible if you had heard the testimonies of the women outside the union, if you had come to understand the prevalence of this experience, right here in Cambridge, and understood that when so very, very few women ever see justice, Strauss-Kahn’s evasion of criminal responsibility becomes an exacerbation and not a mitigation of the offence his presence causes. No platform was provided to debate the really pressing issue that Strauss-Kahn’s continued presence in public life raises, which is the question of why rape is thought so trivial that a man’s career can survive rape allegations.

Worst of all, the society changed the rules of entry at the last minute and without proper consultation with its own members. We could no longer queue up to hear Strauss-Kahn speak and to challenge him, but could only enter on the basis of a ballot. The system that had been deemed good enough for every other speaker was dismantled, for a man whose presence was not a unique honour but a disgrace for the society that has hosted so many better men – and no longer could the most committed students, who wanted to hear him the most, queue up the longest to get a place. The message was clear: no silent protest would be tolerated, no show of dissent, not even hostile questioning. The principles of free speech by which the society has always claimed to operate were overturned, and all in honour of a man whom even members of the society’s committee have been unwilling to defend.

The union society has been debased by these actions out of all recognition, and it is no longer the society I joined. This was not the controversy of a difficult issue debated and explored, this was the cheap sensationalism of wilfully caused offence and wilfully mistaken priorities, to which I would never have thought the union society would be capable of stooping.

I will never be able to enter the chamber again without knowing that it is the place where Strauss-Kahn’s platform was upheld and defended; I will never be able to walk past without seeing those barricades. There was a time when the union society had no need of protection from its own members, and I am sickened to think that the committee have taken no responsibility for bringing things to this pass.

I therefore wish to resign my membership of the society, and to call on the society to refund my membership. Yours Faithfully Clare Walker Gore

Trigger warning: This article involves discussion of DSK protest, including stories of rape survivors and references to police violence

We fight for a small space – though it is also a big space, to hold all that it must – where our experiences are ours and are real.

As a rich and powerful man – flanked by eight bodyguards, protected by a steel fence and dozens of cops – is given an exalted platform to rehabilitate his image as an ‘economic expert’, whitewashing his abuse of women’s bodies, we create a makeshift platform from a megaphone and a wall. As students queue up to hear DSK speak, with their tickets, their two forms of ID, the body search, the surrendering of phones – looking smug because they are upholding the principle of free speech – we hear survivors of sexual assault speak out and break the silence that was imposed upon them. We create a space, there on the road, where women can speak and we will listen – they shake as they speak, and so do we.

Because it is our experience. We are here in solidarity with Diallo and DSK’s other victims, but these are also our experiences, our daily lives – the vast majority of women will have experienced sexual assault or harassment, and the threat is ever present. Survivors talk of silencing – the disbelieving of their experiences by police, friends, the legal system, psychologists. ‘Were you drunk, did you flirt, maybe you didn’t say no loudly enough, maybe you misunderstood him, he’s not very good at approaching women…’ They call this the second trauma for victims of sexual assault. In isolation we have all been silenced from speaking out against misogyny, rape culture or sexual assault, often rationally protecting ourselves from the harm of the retaliation visited upon us for speaking out.

We have seen this backlash against those who speak out in Cambridge, where women have been told not to protest, not to be ‘shrill’ and irrational, to untwist our knickers and stop ‘whining’, that being raped is akin to leaving your front door unlocked. The weapons that privilege uses to protect itself are petty but insidiously powerful. But this time we find courage from being together, we sustain one another, we create a vocabulary for our experiences, a discourse where we get to tell our own stories, and no one else can tell us what they mean. Outside the Union, we feel our hurt and our bravery as two sides of the same coin. We get angry.

We cry with our sisters and we fight with our sisters – breaching a peace that has long attempted to pacify us with claims that ‘no one listens to an angry woman’. Our bodies are our own. We use them as our only tools, our sisters’ hands reach out to catch us when we climb up high, they hold us safe, their voices are raised with ours. Our bodies are not our own, they are handled, carried, dragged, pushed, punched, leaving myriad bruises in the morning. A violent institution protects a violent man, just as they have protected so many violent men in the past. And the police tell us we mustn’t put ourselves in danger, that they are keeping us safe while throwing us to the floor – if only we had stayed indoors, if only we hadn’t shouted, resisted, this might not be happening.

Women keep safe – stay at home and, for god’s sake, shut up!

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in a court of law.

But we didn’t. We broke our isolation, we broke our silence. Together we reclaimed our voices. That space we created opened a space in me, and I will carry that solidarity within me as I walk alone outside of the safe spaces.

Until two days ago, I never saw myself as a rape victim. I could – to trusted friends – acknowledge and occasionally talk about the sexual assault that happened when I was an adolescent, and I was happy to make jokes about “that music teacher who locked himself in a cupboard with me…” without looking properly at the consequences of either of those events. I felt as though those two occasions were the limits of my negative sexual experience.

And then on Friday I found myself talking to a close friend about various relationships, and I described my relationship with the man to whom I lost my virginity. (As an aside, I really don’t like the terminology of ‘losing one’s virginity’ – it puts a really uncomfortable value on the whole thing, for me.) Having tried to explain what it was like, I ground to a halt. My friend looked at me, and said: “That was rape.”

Point blank. I’d never looked at it like that before. Or rather, I had not wanted to.

And I am troubled by it now; is it rape, for example, when you enter into a relationship with someone, knowing that they will have sex with you, and that your choice in the matter is almost nil? If you know that will happen, and yet you go ahead anyway, is that rape? I take sides against myself to say ‘no, it can’t be, and it isn’t fair on X to call it rape’. I brought it on myself, is my main feeling.

Two people very close to me are both victims of rape; probably if I asked, I’d know many more women who are. I’ve always therefore assumed that you know that it’s rape; that there’s something in your mind that tells you straight away that this is wrong, even if you can’t react to it at the time. Maybe I did have that warning voice, without recognising it. Maybe I deliberately chose to ignore it.

Consent is often very difficult to negotiate. Many laws globally make reference to the importance of “free and active” consent. In my case, I don’t know that any law would legally call it rape, although my consent was given more out of a sense of inevitability than because I actually wanted to be part of it. I remember, during the many times we had sex, staring at a point above his right shoulder and wishing he would just go away, wanting it to be over, and wondering how long it had to last. I felt more honour-bound to be part of the performance, than actively excited by it. I used to wonder what the point of sex was – I certainly didn’t find it enjoyable, I didn’t ever really want to be there, but I said yes, so in my mind that was consent.

Looking back, it seems very difficult. I’m in a relationship now where I know – for the first time – what it feels like to actively want to be in bed with someone, to feel confident enough with them to initiate contact, and to feel loved enough that it is possible to say no. It is not as though I was ever threatened by my previous boyfriend; he was ever so careful to make sure I knew that he wasn’t going to put pressure on me and that I was at perfect liberty to say no. I also knew – because he told me – that if we didn’t have sex, he would go and sleep with other people (which didn’t, in his eyes, mean he loved me any the less, just that it was more important he had regular sex than that we had a relationship that both of us were comfortable with). So I could have said no, and not minded him having sex elsewhere – that could have been an arrangement we came to. “Like Sartre and De Beauvoir”, was his contention. We could both have other partners, but we each came first to each other. Or rather, he could have other partners, and I would pretend to be happy with it. Somehow, at the time, that didn’t feel like emotional pressure.

Because of the state of mind I was in at that point in my life, I went out with him like a rat leaving a sinking ship. Everything else felt slightly futile; he was someone to be with to make life more interesting. If I had to have sex in order to spend time with him then that was a sacrifice part of me was willing to make. The part of me that curled up in inward disgust every time we were alone in bed together, the part of me that hated the contact of skin to skin and begged to be allowed to sleep in a T-shirt rather than spend the night naked with him, this was a part that – in my self-imposed tyranny – had to subside in order to preserve this strange and uncomfortable relationship.

He was a nice guy. I’m never going to tell him that what happened was – probably – rape. I don’t know if anyone else would define it like that; I’m sure that for people who are victims of much more serious assaults, this seems easy in comparison. I don’t know what I want to call this. I don’t want to live with the knowledge that I brought it on myself.

Consent is tricky; victim-blaming is even harder when it’s self-directed. And through this all, all I want is for someone else to define what happened for me, to take on the responsibility of anger, because I can’t bear it myself.

I’m sorry if this sounds more like a confession than an attempt at an article. It is in part a flood, perhaps. It is also, however, an attempt to recognise from within myself, how easily undefined consent is. I don’t think there is any law that would recognise what happened to me as rape, and perhaps rightly so. What is necessary instead is so much more emotional education about sex and sexuality from a much younger age. If there were some way of teaching everyone to recognise the processes in their own minds that are leading them into situations they may mistrust, and to recognise pressure both from within and without, maybe that would help. Maybe a shift in the way we recognise consent would help as well – either way, a huge dialogue needs to open up to change the way that consent is considered; it is not always (perhaps never is) as black and white as a simple yes and no.

Request for trigger warnings before referencing acts of violence, and special request for special warnings before referencing rape and suicide.