Awful sex mistake - the shame :-(

[h20]

Sorry about this, but I have just had the most bizarre experience and I don't know what to make of it. I drop my sons off at School in the mornings and have noticed one of the dads of a kid in my eldest's class looking at me a lot since last summer. I often see him staring over, and have noticed him watching my arse as I walk away because I can see him reflected in a glass door etc.

He finally came up to speak to me last week and we made awkward small talk. I am thinking he is cute - not my usual type, but cute. He is a coach at a local sports club. I ask someone that knows him at work what he is like and the report back is positive. I am half thinking he might ask me out.

Anyway, this morning I have the day off and as I leave the school grounds he is there. We have a quick chat and I tell him I am off work today and tomorow. He asks me about my husband, I tell him I am divorced. I say why doesn't he bring his son to play one day. He say's 'I don't think my partner would like it much', but maybe have coffee some time? We go our separate ways.

A few minutes later he drives past, and then again and pulls over in front of me. "Want a coffee?" he says. I stupidly invite him to my house which is just round the corner.

Anyway, cut a long story short he says he is mad about my body etc etc and I tell him I'm not interested - he is in a relationship etc. I'm not sure what to do now, feeling awkward - he starts kissing me and touching my bum, and, why why why??? I did't feel able to say no and we have sex in my kitchen. It was crap. I now feel like crap.
He leaves saying see you tomorrow, like he wants to do it again, how about wearing hold-ups etc (YUK). I say I'm busy tomorrow.

How on earth do I make myself feel OK, what a total idiot I am. I am so embarrassed.

thanks Janos

bastard ex

:) UA.

Totally interesting

I read the OP yesterday and thought it familiar....... Co-erced into sex so as not to upset the apple cart and induce violence from the man.

If only we had the power to say at the first revolting kiss "no thanks", without fear of retribution, the world would be a better place.

The definition of rape atm is defined by men. If women were to define it, this scenario would be included. We are a long way off.

'If only we had the power to say at the first revolting kiss "no thanks", without fear of retribution, the world would be a better place.'

I have 'allowed' shit sex and regretted it.I've woken up in the morning and thought shit 'why,why why?'.I didn't fear retribution,I just wanted to be wanted (99% of the time,the chase/fantasy was more erotic than the sex when I look back)

I can't say I've been raped,I've been very pissed and blurred on the finer details though.

I've started sex with dh and then said half way through 'I'm actually not getting anything out of this,sorry' and dh has said 'OK that's fine,let's go to sleep' and we've cuddled up.

I agree entirely with SGB's post above. I think that there is a particular type of man who is like the pushy salesman, and I do think once someone is in your house, that sort of coercion is much easier than in a public place. It's why the pushy salesman always asks to come in, because people's guards are down generally when they're in their own home.

This thread - and the other related one- has been immensely valuable to me in dealing with thoughts of a past experience of mine where I believe I was coerced into sex. I was, on reflection, in a vulnerable state due to events that had happened that particular evening, and although I felt some attraction to the man involved, and I was happy to kiss him, I didn't want any more. I don't know why I didn't say no when it started to go further. Fear, politeness, perhaps feeling it had gone too far to say no.

I have perused all the OP's posts and it's true that at one point she did say, "I don't think it was rape" and "I wouldn't class it as rape in my case". Later she said, "I genuinely don't think it was rape". I can't find anywhere where she states categorically "I was not raped".

OP also says, "I just didn't really know how to stop it. He did ignore my verbal reasoning that I wasn't up for it." and "He invaded my boundaries" and "I felt pressurised" and "I personally think he did take advantage of my poor boundaries"and "I had sex I didn't want".

Consensual sex can be bitterly disappointing, it can leave you feeling "I wish I hadn't, why did I bother" Consensual sex does not leave you feeling "degraded" or "dirty" or in desperate need of a shower.

For me, the importance of this being rape doesn't lie in forcing the OP into the role of "victim" nor am I an egomaniac who needs to be "right". I am certainly not a feminist. However, if we say this was consensual sex then we are basically saying that, once a woman has said she is not interested and it's not going to happen, it is ok for a man to persist. It is not. Somehow, for the sakes of all our daughters, and our sons, we have to make that clear.

OneMoreChap I did not mean to patronise you. I am sad that you took it that way. Please accept my apologies.

I was going to type some spiel along the lines of

"WHy would anyone contribute to aiding sexual predators and rapists by colluding with them and pretending that men really can't tell whether women want to have sex with them or not."

But then I saw SGB's eloquent post on the previous page and I'll save all your eyes by not posting mine

Hi sakura

"the smiling charm hides a genuine predator."

oh so very true.

Emmy

I've just read your latest contributions to this thread and I want to say sorry - firstly for assuming you were unaware of the meaning of certain words - which you're clearly not, although when I was under attack from you it was hard to make sense of your posts, so I did not know what to think. I was just concerned at wrongful accusations and assumptions about me and misquoting and so on.
I won't apologise about that.

But what seems very clear from reading your posts from last evening is that you have a far greater experience and understanding of the issues around rape than I realised.

I am sorry for your experiencs which do sound horrific. You appear to be in a VERY different place to many of us - including the OP - having essentially been through sexual assault and rape many, many times and having processed it and come out the other side.

You seem to have an enormous amount of defensiveness surrounding the idea of men and 'dangerous' scenarios such as allowing a man to come round for coffee - yes, in your case, you probably wouldn't let that happen. And I can see exactly why.

However in the OP;s case and almost anyone who has not suffered repeated rapes, there is not that degree of perspective, not that defensiveness nor that assumption that every similar situation is a threat, every time you have coffee with a man you are putting yourself in danger. That can only come from extreme experiences I think. You have had to learn the hard way.

We are most of us at, or near, the start, while you have gone the whole hog. Please try to understand that we are, many of us, not in the same place as you.

I don't care if you see yourself as a victim or not, and I think it's fairly immaterial in a practical sense whether or not we consider we might become victims...the fact remains we might, and e might not.

Indeed your stance that you would NEVER allow a man in for coffee, for instance, does imply taking the role of a victim in a sense, because you are forewardly anticipating assault where they may well be none to anticipate.
Living ones life in that way may be necessary for some but it is not desirable for others.
Again I am sorry for underestimating you, but your reasons for your earlier postings were totally not clear at the time, and I was being got at badly by you, which in turn is why I retaliated.

Thankyou for posting about your experiences and perspective.

and thankyou SGB for taking up my pushy salesman idea and running with it.

I didn't explain it fully and you did.

I think it covers the situation fairly comprehensively.

'People are like sheep on here, follow the popular poster. I went through shitty relationships, abuse cycles all sorts and I had little self repsect, I was royally fucked up.

I went through years and years of help to stop that and I refuse to be a victim. I cannot abide by women always wanting to be the victim all the time with no personal responsibility.'

I think you underestimate most posters on here...if we were like sheep we would not be having this debate. There is a balance here, some pro, others against, whatever.

I don't see anyone 'popular' in here, just people trying to make sense of something they don't fully understand. That's what I've been doing anyway. NOT trying to convince the OP she is a victim, or was raped, or any of that.

'Wanting to be a victim all the time' is something I struggle to understand - do you mean wanting to blame someone else for the things that have happened to them?

I don't see the wrong in that. It's perhaps easy to confuse with looking at the future as a victim - which might well be misguided - but if someone HAS raped or assaulted you, you have been a victim of them.
It's not about wanting to wriggle out of responsibility in the future - that would indeed be dangerous. No one would willingly put themselves at risk of assault.

OP might have taken a risk but that does not mean she deliberately put herself in danger. She was not expecting the encounter to lead to sex - she said this. In your situation you might have anticipated it, but then again it may not have happened that way in the end. So who is right?

You have been so brave just to read this thread x

I'm still here - I was busy last night so not on mn.

The 'pushy salesman' is a good analogy. I agree with others that say it is only prudent to manage risk, but i don't think the fact that he had been eying up my arse should have made asking him for coffee potentially risky. I do remember thinking. Hmm, where is this going when he was sat at my table. I did get a bit steamrollered into it and it was from a 'cold start', but the overiding feeling at the time wasn't fear, or disgust, it was just complete disengagement.

I find this rather discomforting, because it does raise the question of politeness or conditioning, and why i would have done that when i wasn't really into it, but i suppose there was a bit of curiosity on my part too. It felt about as romantic as lending someone a stapler.

I will now vet someone (men) more thoroughly before inviting them in, if only because maybe i can't trust myself to look after myself or not to do something regrettable when i am tired and caught on the hop. It will also make me more wary. I have no idea whether he makes a habit of this sort of encounter or not - actually he looked pretty scared.

As for messages we give out by the way we dress, I have to admit I did wear a jumper, jeans and flat shoes to do the school drop off, to underline the fact to him that i was not wanting to continue to participate in this - he had mentioned he had previously noticed my heels, hold ups etc).

I will dress normally on Monday though. I don't dress
'tartily' or show a lot of skin, but i do wear quite close fitting clothes that show off my figure. Why shouldn't I?

You fucked up h20, I wouldn't beat myself up about it too much. You didn't cheat on anyone, he did.

The guy is a knobend and not even a crap shag!

Tell him to fuck off if he brings it up, you don't owe him anything, not even politeness.

I'm glad you came back. I was worried about you. x

There's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't wear what you normally wear. If he interprets that as a come on he is totally in the wrong.

And even if you wanted to wear very sexy stuff, potentially as a signal of interest to someone else, that would not make it OK for him to take it as a come on to him.

I wonder about the disengagement. It is interesting as to why it happens and I do relate strongly to it. I also relate to the 'curiosity' because until someone is doing something (to you or with you) you can't actually know what they are planning to do, unless they give you advance notice.

I can remember feeling similarly paralysed when it happened to me. It was almost a refusal to take the responsibility for what was evidently incongruous and inappropriate behaviour - it was him doing it, and I froze emotionally - not physically but emotionally, in order not to alter things or make them potentially worse.

It's like when someone spouts a load of bullshit at you, and none of it makes sense - you're partly shocked, but partly just have NO CLUE how to respond, so you don't - you take time out - you stop talking and just look surprised for a minute, which you consider where the hell they might be coming from to get it so wrong.

So in a sense perhaps you were doing this.
His behaviour was unexpected, not congruous, and you didn't want to handle it wrong so you stepped back metaphorically and just watched it unfold.

I'm sure there must be a name for this type fo reaction to an event.

This isn't projection btw. This is a suggestion. It doesn't mean I am assuming it is what happened, just thinking it could have been.

I don't know if that came across well - what I mean is that when someone is doing something wrong, overriding a normal resonse of yours (like ignoring your previous indication that you weren't up for it) or just acting bizarrely, you kind of don't want to muddle it up so it might look like you are the one doing anything wrong.

You almost put them in a picture frame, 'looking' at them doing it, to separate and remove yourself from it, because it is literally nothing to do with you.

You detach and you disengage.

I'm certain this is a common reaction to certain types of situation and there has to be a name for it.

I, too an glad to see you back, OP. I don't think it matters one jot what "label" you put on this incident. I just think it's important that you do not shoulder one ounce of "blame" for what happened. I also hope you nave a great weekend.

SOrry, in advance for spelling and grammar- in haste.

It's called dissasociation and can be an effective survival mechanism. In a benign situation it's called daydreaming (when bored at work etc) - in this situation where we are threatened -it's a way of getting through something that's a threat to us -we remove ourselves as much as possible.

If you beome conditioned to expect life to be threatening, it can become a way of surviving life and along with hypervigilance it then becomes damaging to self.

Ingrid- I though you explained the process really well in your post. (hope that didn't sound patronising)

h20, I hope you're ok, you may go through lots of different feelings and different thoughts about what's happened to you. I have been raped (repeatedly in a d/v relationship when younger) and I recognise much of what you describe.

I'm just really sorry this happened to you and like many, I don't believe you're to blame in anyway for this either.

I agree with thelibster about how you choose to label it is not so important right now. Take care.

Disassociation - good, I'm glad there is a word!!!

Thanks for explaining that, Iso, and no, you don't sound patronising. I was just going from my own experience and trying to take it apart to see what was going on iyswim.

Dissociation?

"What is a fair indication Larry?

Most non-rapist men who are competent lovers, would say that the absence of enthusiastic participation, is a fair indication that a woman doesn't want sex.

Your post makes it sound like you belive that women are responsible for ensuring that rape doesn't take place Larry. Unfortunately, we can't be responsible for that, because we don't have control over men's behaviour. Only they do. Women can't stop rape, only men can. If we could, we'd have stopped it thousands of years ago."

Rape is a very specific offense, which is imprisonable. It does not mean engaging in sex with someone who is less than enthusiastic. It does not mean an absence of great sexual technique. It means forcing oneself upon someone in the reasonably knowledge that it is something they do not want to happen.

It is interesting, given your second paragraph, that you do not believe yourself to be a rapist. After all, even men have unenthusiastic half hearted sex sometimes, to please their partner. I am 100% certain that it has happened at least once in your life, even if you are the best lover since aphrodite.

Sex is a dialogue, normally without words. Normally, although not always these days, men are meant to make the running. Most women still prefer the man to make "the first move". In return for this, women give clues as to whether they want things to progress further. These are normally pretty easy to read, though clearly (seeing above situation) some women seem incapable of seeing that they have a duty of communicating very clearly as some men are somewhat tone deaf to subtle innuendo.

In response to your first question a fair indication is "no, I don't want this to happen", said clearly and firmly, any meaningful negative gesture, such as pushing away or shrinking backwards. These are non exclusive. There are plenty of other ways to communicate a clear "no".

I am not in any sense saying that a woman is in a "permanent state of consent" as someone said above. What I am saying is if two people are in a sexual dialogue (flirting, inviting in for coffee etc), it is up to someone who does not want sex to CLEARLY change the dialogue. This is not just morally right but is where the law stands on the matter.

Before someone jumps on me, "inviting in for coffee" is not, in itself, sexual. But, if you hardly know someone, have been eyeing one another up and then invite him in for coffee, it is clearly an invitation of a sexual nature.

How is inviting someone in for coffee considered to be engaging in a sexual dialogue?