Unable to say no

An article from the Guardian's "Women" section with some important echoes from my own thoughts, some alarming statistics, and a lot to ponder.

In a recent NSPCC survey of girls in their mid-teens, it turned out that 45% had had unwanted sexual experiences, and at least half of these were made to feel guilty for saying no. Fifty-six per cent of these experiences happened before the girls were 14. One in three kept quiet.

There's the alarming statistics. The context of the statistics is given by the article's title: "Too embarrassed to say no".

At first I thought, "hey, that's a neat tie in to my own post, 'How a Girl Learns to Say No'", but when I read the article more closely, there's a much darker side to it - in some of the situations described, it seems that saying "no" had more cost than just embarrassment - or was even ignored.

I will plead one extenuating circumstance, though - when Esther Freud writes:

I have written about a similar scenario in my new book, Love Falls, with more devastating consequences than those I suffered, and I've had two very different reactions. The first, mostly from men, is frustration, anger: "Why didn't she do something?" The second, from women: "That chapter, that was just so very familiar." These reactions have inevitably led to a discussion about the embarrassment of being a teenage girl. How hard it is to call out, to make a scene, to risk looking ridiculous, even if you are being abused.

I had the women's reaction, not the men's. Maybe because I have listened to women who have told similar tales of their first sexual experiences before, and maybe because I have written a female character in a novel that I'm writing, whose first sexual experience was similar in that she was just too embarrassed to say no.

This blog is not about "de menz" here, and I in no way wish to trivialise the very serious issue of unwanted sex and, ultimately, rape, that the article covers. But I do want to flag up briefly that the "too embarrassed to say no" type of thing is something that as a teenage male, I experienced as the victim. It didn't lead to actual sexual contact, but the same pressure, victimisation, taking advantage, was there, from girls my own age or slightly older, who were so much more confident in what they were doing. It can happen to boys as well as girls. Maybe not as often, and maybe not with direct sexual contact as being such a frequent outcome, but the same type of intent is there.

Bottom line is, sexual inhibitions work to stop us stopping sex when we should (and protesting properly when we should), as well as to stop people enjoying it when they can.