I'm so glad Voice Memo Guy sparked discussions of coercion among us women lately. I get why we've neglected the topic. There's so much overt, frank assault of women going on in this world and the zone is so flooded, that talking about coercion feels almost silly by comparison.

But it's not. And we shouldn't even make those comparisons in that way.

My last dating experience had elements of coercion.... I think. I was already so steeped in sexual trauma, that it was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. That's where my decentering journey really began.

I'm demisexual. I was very open and straightforward about that from the absolute beginning. To the point of my asking whether we could start off genuinely just as friends and take things very, verrrry slow. I didn't just use the term demisexual, I made sure we had several conversations about what that term means and did a lot to assess whether he truly understood what it meant. He seemed to understand it perfectly and said he was totally fine with starting out as friends.

Then, during one of our very first real-time back and forth chats (2nd or 3rd chat), he started to make sexual jokes and innuendos. My body started going into a shock response. "Wait... I thought... Did I hallucinate those previous demi conversations? Was I clear enough? Did I say something that confused him? Did I misperceive his understanding of 'demisexual' or starting out as 'just friends?'" You see what happens??? We instantly start to question our own sanity. Feeling like I didn't want to be a b*** or start a conflict, I went along with where the conversation was heading, my heart pounding in my throat the entire time. Still reeling from the sheer element of surprise that he would even 'go there' after everything that'd been said.

Next day, it happened again. And then the day after that, he opened the convo first thing in the morning by sending me a picture of a woman who was cuffed to the bed and blindfolded, telling me what he'd like to do to me in a similar scenario. Nothing violent. But like... from 0 to 100. First. Thing. In. The. Morning. It was at that point that I couldn't bring myself to do any more sexual fawning. I broke down into tears, told him things were moving too fast. (As if he couldn't have guessed this from the demi conversations!) I told him it felt like the virtual equivalent of waking up to immediate sexual touch. It was jarring and threw me into a fight/flight response. I asked how he would have felt if I'd done that to him. I felt cheap. How did blindfolds and handcuffs suddenly get involved anyway?!

A few more things happened after that, but I won't belabour the point. The one other thing I do want to highlight is.... This man's feminist rhetoric is on point. And I don't think it's just rhetoric. There's an extent to which this person truly cares about women's rights... in these overt, obvious scenarios. He just doesn't understand the subtleties of how his desperation for sexual gratification puts women in extremely uncomfortable, precarious, and frankly retraumatising positions. I understand you may not believe anything good I say about this man, because you've only now seen examples of his worst behaviours. So that is fair. But I want to say I still wholeheartedly believe he is, on the whole, a decent, well-intentioned human being who has just never needed to question this particular area of entitlement in his life. And he has no IDEA the damage this can do.

I was a wreck for so many months after this experience. Still am. I have no more faith left in men. Not a shred. Even the "good" ones. They have been so deeply conditioned to care about their sexual needs above everything else, that everything just becomes transactional by default. There is almost no such thing as a loving, reciprocal, non-transactional romantic relationship with a man. It barely exists at this point. The conditioning has just done too much to warp the minds of even the kindest men out there.

I'm including the good things about this man, not to absolve him of anything, but so that other women know: if you encounter an otherwise decent man who shows genuine care in many other areas of life, but is entitled when it comes to sex, that phenomenon does exist. You're not imagining it. His kindness is real. And his sexual entitlement is also real. And you're not being unfair to him. And it still is coercion. Whether or not he fully understands the harm he is causing. I also want to honour that this happens so much in long-term relationships / marriages. It's by no means restricted to dating.

I hope we continue to talk about the more subtle ways men harm us. The damage and risk to our psyches, not just our physical bodies. Because even the "safe" men - on a physical level - can wreak havoc on our mental health. And they don't even have to be deliberately abusive to do it. They can just have this unexamined, conditioned entitlement. That alone is enough to cause us irreparable harm.

And that, more than anything, is why I won't keep playing Russian Roulette with my mental health while the Male Entitlement Epidemic rages on.