Consent and ‘anything goes’ sex

[Anothernameforallthis]

I work in an educational establishment, not in the U.K. but English-speaking. Without going into revealing detail, we recently had a presentation from a professor of sexual health from the U.S. Her presentation was great in many ways. The overall message was that, frankly, as long as there is consent, anything goes in a sexual encounter and nothing is shameful in any way. Butt plugs, anal, choking, fisting; whatever - she provided graphic expectations of all of them. As long as both parties are consenting adults, anything - anything - goes. She encouraged straight men to experiment with anal penetration. She provided a detailed « Sex toys and how to keep them clean » guide. The whole shebang.

Is this the way it is now ? All I could think was that a lot of this comes from porn.

her focus on consent as the green light for all this really troubled me. I’m not convinced that all young girls / women are necessarily able to consent, properly, even if they say Yes.

My sister works in a UK university, in student services. Basically when a student breaks the university code of conduct (which all students sign up to when they matriculate) she’s the one that investigates the complaints and assesses the evidence for / against the student. A lot of the complaints are of student-on-student sexual assaults, but where the female student does not want to go to the police. Often it’s because she feels like she ‘consented’ to something that she really didn’t want to. We bring girls up to be so compliant, to be kind and nice and polite. They seem to have no idea about the boundaries they c are allowed to set. That they are allowed to say no to rough or unpleasant or kinky sex.

i guess alcohol and drugs are a confounding factor here. The prof is talking about an ideal situation where both parties are sober. Assertive. Aware of and ready to enforce their personal boundaries.

i just seemed to me that we are in the worst of both worlds. Where, literally, anything goes sexually. But where we are still socialising girls to be ‘nice’ and be ‘kind’.

When it comes to discussions of different kinks, that seems one aspect of mumsnet where quite a lot of posters are like omg, that's a no no topic etc.

There is a difference in removing shame for things like anal sex, exploration and things like that to encouraging bdsm and the murky waters of consent there. Did she go into that?

And yes porn should be discussed

The key is informed consent. It's a very complex area because so many are pressured or coerced into consenting to things they feel uncomfortable with or that ends in trauma.

2 consenting adults absolutely should not be shamed for exploring their sexuality. But someone coerced into agreeing to say, anal penetration because their partner saw it in porn and thinks it's NBD is a different matter (yes done right it is enjoyable but it can also be incredibly painful and have lasting effects if forced). How many cases have we seen of predominately women killed with the excuse of rough sex?

I say all this as someone who is into kink. My concern is that the sex positive/anti-shaming approach to discussing sex (and the OP is talking about university age students here) often seems to translate into a lot of focus on kink practices and more extreme practices. I think it would be more 'sex positive' to focus on pleasure (particularly women's pleasure) and how internet porn can distort the concept of what actually constitutes good, pleasurable sex for many people.

So yes, we should all have the right to be into whatever we're into and enjoy it with others provided enthusiastic consent is given. But I think we also need to be having conversations about what informs that consent in the first place and that young females, in particular, often feel under pressure to agree to things they may not like, or get much enjoyment from, because of this distorted, porn-driven perception of what sex should look like.

I also think that this whole concept of 'kink' and 'vanilla' brings its own pressure on young people. In the same way that no one under 25 wants to self-describe as a boring straight heterosexual nowadays (and hence the 100s of sexual identities that now exist), there is a similar pressure to not be vanilla. I see it in the kink community all the time - people will bang on about being sex positive and jump on perceived 'kink shaming' but have no problem with 'vanilla shaming' non-kinky people as boring and unadventurous.

Which is, of course, fine. But if I choose to engage in other consensual sexual activity, I'm of an opinion that that is no one's business but mine and my partner's.

I have never heard anyone being shamed due to a "kink", not in twenty odd years.

What I do hear about, endlessly is people going on and on and on about their kinks on public forums, sharing photos and so on, because they are apparently so lovely and brave and everyone else is such a vanilla prude, and should stop shaming them It's probably part of the kink to talk about it, and they are likely having a jolly old wank while they do that. Just piss off, no-one is interested.

My fear is that young women with little or no prior experience are going to feel that this is normal because they don’t know anything else. If their partners watch a lot of porn and maybe aren’t particularly experienced either , the expectation may be that sex should be like porn. For both parties. For a man who is experienced and his whole education is based on porn,
many women will lack the courage or confidence to say no.
I think it’s all utterly horrifying personally. What should be consensual and pleasurable between two people who have a bond has become something else entirely.

How can your post ever reply to mine?

Please tell me.

To make sure both sides of a relationship are knowledge about various activities, would more presentations similar to what the ok describes, but with any improvements needed, would these be more helpful if rolled out in UK universities ?

Op*

I'm not sure what you mean? I was trying to say that you are free to choose the sex that you find romantic, and other adults are free to choose the sex they like to have. There isn't one "right way" to have sex, and it is no one else's business tbh.

But why is it being promoted to such young people? Young people, especially girls, in the UK have such poor mental health. Rape culture is a thing. Yet adults are going around promoting harmful types of sex, rather than the fun of any sex in a loving relationship. It's not just to 18 you at olds either, it's to much younger children. Leave those kids alone! Pisses me off.

It’s not harmful sex if everyone involved is a consenting adult.

It’s not harmful sex if everyone involved is a consenting adult.

It is if somebody dies.

Or even 'just' gets injuries, or just does things they aren't really comfortable with, because some trainer at their college or uni said it's all just part of the fun, and they feel prudish if they don't do it.

This only happens when somebody wants the other person to die. People aren't routinely dying from choking. The men who do it are 100% accountable lol. They use the 'rough sex' defence to a) get away with murder and b) degrade the victim by insinuating they're XYZ. This isn't even the same as choking- we can get into that, but this isn't even what we're talking about.

I think we've all heard the cases where man strangles wife and blames rough sex. That's just straight up deliberate murder. That's not what happened.

Anyone who thinks this sort of stuff belongs in a school is a rape apologist.

This is how girls end up in abusive relationships - because so many older women are paving the way for them.

I agree OP. I actually think the emphasis on consent is wrong headed. It leads men to think that if they can get a ‘yes’, no matter how thinly given, or at least not a ‘no’ they can do what they want. But as you say, in reality a lot of young women, or even older, can find it hard to say ‘no’, for many reasons, wanting to please, wanting to be liked, fear of what will happen if they say no. But they can actually be quite reluctant about the sex, or type of sex, that is being asked of them.

What we should really be teaching is that your partner needs to be enthusiastically and joyously engaging in the sexual encounter. Only then do you know you have a ‘yes’!

But life doesn’t work like that. No-one would expect that if we had white people regularly watching films degrading people of color, that this wouldn’t feed into racist attitudes. So why do we think men watching women being degraded for their pleasure won’t feed into misogyny? Especially when men are allowing porn companies to wire their sexual appetites to enjoy women being hurt and degraded.

You are losing out if you think romance and degrading sex are compatible.

How young are you?

You are losing out if you think romance and degrading sex are compatible.

It depends. Lots of sexual acts could be called degrading, like having a man put his penis (where he urinates from) in your mouth. It gives the woman no physical pleasure. It's not as simple as 'that's degrading'.

For me, most things would feel degrading with a causal partner.

Thank God I'm single and in my 60s and dont want sex any more. I've had a very active and fun sex life during my life and not once even contemplated being fisted, choked or having large objects jammed into my anus.
Is this what youngster's are being encouraged to do now? It horrified me and is 100% the influence of porn. Its just so horrific to me.

Poor you for not ever experiencing romance. True, no?

That was targeted to @bigbloom