Casual sexual violence in dating

Going back about seven years now I worked as a student advisor at a sixth form. Some of the things the girls would confide in me broke me. In a very small cohort 2 girls had anal sex as their first sexual experience. My office was unfortunately situated next to the boys toilets and had incredibly thin walls so I got to hear all the awful things they were saying about the girls. I was only in my early twenties at the time so there wasn't a huge age gap between us but the difference in attitudes and was massive. Porn and social media have a lot to answer for! I don't know if its better or worse now or if we just had a particularly toxic mix of students.

Gosh MrsFluffyMuff that's awful. I'm so glad you are out of all that now and have a loving relationship.

I find it incredibly concerning, the extent to which these sorts of sexual experiences are normalised so that women on the receiving end put it down to a bad experience. Sorry MrsFluffyMuff - I'm certainly not aiming this at you personally or victim blaming. But back in my pre-marriage sex in the city days, (80's/90's) I never experienced anything like this, and if I had I would have reported the man to the police and complained of sexual assault. And I do believe the police would have taken the complaint seriously, especially if there was evidence of physical harm/bruising or other injuries. There is substantial anecdotal evidence that the police these days would dismiss such a complaint as 50 shades of fun and impossible to prosecute if they were interested at all.

Hectates I would agree, not that I’ve read 50 shades as I never wanted to, but assuming it doesn’t cover being forced to eat shit and dragged around so much you have to have physio for a year!

I find it very frightening as a mother of 2 daughters, growing up in this world. It terrifies me to think that they will be put in this position one day. Apart from teaching them self defense! what can we do as individuals to stem the flow of violent porn becoming the norm?

Comparing 50 shades to violent porn is really poor in my opinion.
Its basically 'women do/want it too'.
As if 2 books written by one women where zero women were actually harmed is remotely the same as millions of videos of real women being tortured and hurt.
Its not comparable. At all.
My bad experience, nothing like some of the others detailed, he didnt actually hurt me, just said strange things, inlcuding that he didnt care if I enjoyed it, escalating to saying things that frightened me to the point I thought he might rape me.
I couldnt get away so I stayed and went along.
Ive known him for years, on off type thing, met in real life not old.
Hes done and said strange things before but never anything that scared me until that time.

And the kind of degrading porn that's being widely accessed on sites like porn hub on a regular basis bears little similarity to romantic novels!

I just don't accept Chestnut that this is what the majority of women desire. There are upsetting testimonies from women on this thread that evidence this.

Women's literature in the form of romance novels has been full of that kind of thing for decades. And there are a lot of women who read tons of the stuff. Whether it's presented as a historical thing, or a modern setting, the trope of some level of coercion and even violence is really common. It's been one of the most common forms of women's fantasy since they started tracking such things. Romance is one of the only area publishers now reliably make money, because they just need to produce such quantities to keep up with the readers.

It's not precisely the same mechanism as men, no, but I would say that in some ways it's very much complimentary, and maybe that's why it works. As for the characters not being objects - well, they sure aren't real people.

I don't really like apologising for this kind of thing as "not porn" because it's not the same as men's porn. It doesn't usually have the same problematic elements in terms of film production with real actors. It has more narrative. But it des affect how people think and what they find sexually arousing and it exists largely for the purpose of sweeping the reader into a sexual fantasy that they find more satisfying than the real thing. Often in what would be considered unhealthy settings and situations, or wildly unrealistic. Some also prey on taboos just like visual porn - monster-porn romance novels are a thing because they push boundaries, around around beastiality in a lot of cases.

If male-oriented porn is setting up men to be more aggressive than is right, or want to push boundaries to get off, this stuff is setting up women to see aggression as a turn on and also to want those boundaries pushed.

How sexual expression as a women seems to be more and more about demonstrating 'empowerment' by claiming ownership over and enjoyment in degradation

@HecatesCats So true

Yeah, I am not convinced that it is helpful to see this as all about men being awful.

I don't think it is either, but I do see who is being objectified, hit, pinched and spat on etc in the majority of this porn.

How deeply have women internalised this though? It wasn't men emptying the bookshelves and wetting themselves over 50 Shades of Grey which is basically a book about sexual violence against women.

Yeah, I am not convinced that it is helpful to see this as all about men being awful.

Fantasy around violence and sex seems to be something that is common both in males and females, and from well before porn was like it is now. I think men and women are both vulnerable to that kind of material, although men seem to prefer the visual presentation and women narrative and text. But that's a common difference between men and women in other areas too.

I read an interesting explanation of this some years ago based essentially on brain activity and things like hormones - basically it said that the same pathways and chemicals that related to aggression, fear, and pain, could during sexual activity lead to a heightening of sexual sensation, or a different kind of experience of sensation. For example, something that people don't always realise is that during sex, many of our senses are kind of dampened, even though we feel it's the opposite. So a hard or sharp touch can actually give a lot less sensation than it would under normal circumstances, and can also trigger a wave of chemicals that impact sexual experience.

When you look at it from that POV, it seems like a lot of what people are doing with some of these activities is trying to harness this sort of thing. Breaking taboos has a similar effect as well. All toward intensification of the sexual experience.

But in every case the more you use these techniques, the less "exciting" they become, and the less able the individual is to enjoy sex without them. Which leads to trying to push it even more.

This is exactly what has happened with porn. As people see more of it, it doesn't work as well, so the people selling it have to ramp it up to get the same effect.

There is no way that can fail to impact people's in-person experience of sex, you've trained the brain to react in a particular way.

So in a way, it's not at all a paradox that, as someone upthread said, by making sex not a sin we somehow made it awful. It's by not recognising that it is potentially dangerous, even when it's inside our own heads, that we have allowed it to manifest in ways that are absolutely dangerous and dehumanising.

Mine was 2 dates in.

And I think there is probably something in the fact you aren’t a human to them.

Human depravity.

Placemarking. Very insightful points about identity and OLD.

I also think there has been a move, since the 60s, to take a naturalistic view of sexual activity, without acknowledging that it is overlaid with cultural expectation.

Particularly things like making fun of people who had only tried the missionary position, or didn't think oral sex was just great. These were seen as prudish. According to this naturalist view all these activities that anyone thought of were good and enjoyable so long as someone liked them.

It didn't seem to occur to them that they were just setting up a new set of cultural expectations - that everyone should have a repertoire of positions, that a good lover liked performing oral sex, etc. And anything else that someone wanted or liked could equally be seen as normal and then become an expectation - anal sex, waxing the genitals, light BDSM, not-light BDSM...

I wonder about the OLD thing too. It's interesting that for many younger people especially, dating people at work is now considered a big no-no because of the possibility of sexual harassment. I met my husband at work, in fact he was mu supervisor, and I know a lot of people my age for whom that is the case. We've shut down so many in-person places where relationships can start, for fear of exploitation, that we've kind of driven them into this impersonal realm. Not just that they don't know each other, but also they don't know any of the same people. If my dh had been a weirdo abusive prick when we both worked at the same place, it could have had serious consequences for him, even if just social ones. Not every workplace is like that, but with OLD there are zero social consequences if you are an abusive prick but not rising to the level of legal action.

@BounceyBumblebee I have been wondering something similar myself. Is it easier for a man to objectify a woman who he's only been on one or two dates with, compared to one he's known for months as a friend (or work colleague) first?

Recently, I read about a psychiatrist who worked with men who liked to view child abuse online. He found that they were able to watch the abuse dispassionately, but became very distressed when he asked them to think about the child as a real person - what they might be learning about at school, what their hobbies might be, did they have any pets etc.

I wonder if parallels could be drawn between these two situations. Those of you who have been unfortunate enough to experience these horrendous dating experiences, would you feel able to share how well you knew the man who treated you in this way, please?

Thanks @queenofknives, I am safe now. It wasn't just one man, it was 3 in different short term relationships a few years ago. Thankfully my partner hates anything to do with violence or pain and would be immediately turned off if he thought I was hurting at all!

Porn is so damaging. Why is it that men get off on this violence. Must be something deep in their psychology. Also sex having become so available means vanilla sex not exciting any more? But it's odd isn't it, why this violence and abuse has to be involved. Perhaps the movement of feminism has downgraded men in society and there is deep resentment that even they don't understand. It needs to be analysed and it needs to be stopped. Are there any campaigns to publicise the dangers more and reign it back. I'd like to get to the bottom of the psychology of it all. It horrifies me and is bad for both men and women and ultimately society.

I heard a psychologist (can't remember who) say that porn was hacking into the male sex drive.

It's like the food industry hacking into our liking of sweet things to produce obesity and a public health disaster. The process is so successful because we haven't evolved a way to withstand it.

Also there's a difference between wanting and liking. (Dopomine Theory, Kent Berridge) Expt placed electrodes in brain of gay man (bad) to stimulate sexual desires, these included extreme and bizarre. The point is he experienced no pleasure, they'd expected him to say it was fantastic.

I'm starting to wonder if sex addiction does exist. It's a paradox that just when we've established that sex is not a sin we've managed to turn it into a kind of atrocity.

If sexual violence is 'normal' and porn normalises men getting off on violently abusing women, then no doubt many women are having horrible, abusive sexual experiences and blaming themselves for not enjoying it.

Been there done that. I've been slapped, choked, had my hair pulled far too hard, been spat on, had anal sex against my will, had my arm twisted round my back so I couldn't move, had my nipples bitten so hard they were bruised for a week, and I came away from those experiences wondering what the hell was wrong with me for not enjoying it.