As I sat in a room with two of my close friends recently almost shaking after revealing to them my deepest and darkest secret, that I had been the victim of not one, but two, non-consensual acts of sex, I thought the scary part was over.
But it wasn’t. The scary part began when both of my friends displayed faces of sadness but not surprise, before telling me that they had both been victims of similar events.
As Irish children who grew up in the 21st century we’ve heard it all, from feminism to the meaning of the word ‘no’, but we’ve also grown up in a country where the words ‘ah go on’ or ‘sure look’ can somehow make legitimate excuses for just about anything.
The idea that ‘fair is fair’ seems to have rooted itself in the minds of the Irish and when it comes to sexual relations this should not be the case.
Just because someone kissed you, doesn’t mean they have to sleep with you, just because someone is in a bed with you, doesn’t mean they have to sleep with you, hey, just because someone is your girlfriend, boyfriend, husband or wife, doesn’t mean they have to sleep with you.
Girls don’t owe boys anything and vice versa, no matter what the situation might be.
When it first happened to me, I found myself naturally defending the boy in question, after all I had gone home with him - so what exactly did I expect?
That is how I had been nurtured, in a school and college environment where a low top says you’re asking for it, and a bit of fake tan basically puts you on a street corner there and then. Looking back now it seems so ridiculous but I honestly believed I was in the wrong.
I remember lying there saying I didn’t really want to, making any sort of excuse I could think of not to engage in sexual intercourse. He said that was unfair because I’d shifted him on a few nights out now and I shouldn’t do that. I was racked with guilt.
So, I lay there like a doll, unmoving, and let him work away.
I remember waking up the next morning and just feeling really sad. My companion woke chirpy as ever and we had a conversation about lectures as if nothing had ever happened.
It was months before I even found the courage to ask someone if what happened was wrong. Not to tell them, but to ask them, because I still didn’t know. Or maybe I did, I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.
When you think of non-consensual sexual intercourse, you think of stories of aggressive attacks and strangers, but the reality is that is almost always not the case.
The second time it happened to me, I was drunk. Absolutely stumbling around the place drunk, the kind of drunk where it’s no fun anymore and all you want to do is crawl up in a ball to make the world stop spinning.
For a girl who is very much in touch with her sexuality, before this second time I still hadn’t worked up the courage to have sex again, and had barely even kissed a boy since, something about them made my skin crawl now.
This made it easier for me to identify this time around, that my consent had not been granted or even asked for, because I was blacked out for every minute of it.
In fact, it wasn’t until around 3pm the next day when a friend had told me they heard I’d had sex with so-and-so last night.
I felt violently ill.
I had woken up that morning covered in blood and very afraid. I was sore and my period was in no way due. But I couldn’t remember a thing so I had tried to forget about it until I was told this.
I didn’t want to do anything, I just wanted to pretend it never happened, but for fear of pregnancy or worse my friends eventually convinced me to say something. I messaged this boy and asked him what had happened, to which I received a shockingly innocent, ‘oh yeah we did, you were so drunk though’.
A real case of what happens on a night out, stays on a night out.
But that’s the thing, it doesn’t. It follows me everywhere I go and has removed pretty much any small hint of faith I had in Ireland’s education on consent and the amount of information available to the people of Ireland.
The issue is consent is not only a grey area in Irish law, but a grey area in Irish mind set. I would hope that I could discuss issues with my friends like how difficult I find curling my hair or the amount of money I spend in Penney’s and for them to say ‘Oh my god, me too.’ Not to say I was a victim of non-consensual act of sexual intercourse and have them chime the same response.
We as Irish people need to realise that the issue of consent, while being incredibly complex, is also undeniably simple, yes or no, and simple as. A hesitant pressurised yes, is not a yes, nor is an unresponsive subject a yes.
I can only hope the next time I engage in sexual activity it will be with my permission, and the next time I have a conversation with my friends about something we can all agree on it will be something as simple as how many sugars they take in their tea.
