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You know what is striking?

So many people have some kind of experience with their sexual boundaries being crossed. Or with crossing someone else’s sexual boundaries. 

This calls for action: we need to find better ways of educating how to understand and respect each other's boundaries.

One way is by sharing our personal stories so that others can learn from them. So tell us about your experiences with sexual consent: big or small, good or bad, deliberate or unintentional, incidental or within a long-term relationship, whether you were wrong or wronged, if it’s rare or something that happens so frequently that it has become an inherent part of our society...


Whatever your experience, your story is welcome here.

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Writer's pictureEveryday Consent

I was 13 years old when I was at a slumber party with my closest friends from high school. We got drunk on bacardi breezers and started playing Truth or Dare which soon turned sexual and I remember enthusiastically participating in the game, which involved things like taking each other's clothes off and pouring alcohol over each other's bodies.


Later in the night, I was lying somewhere with my eyes closed and three of my guy friends started touching and fingering me. I froze and didn't know what to do, so I just pretended to be asleep/passed out. The next day at school, they started bullying me about it, saying I was a whore and that they had also fucked me that night. They lifted me on top of a desk and started making penetration movements with their hips. A teacher came over to ask if I was okay and I felt embarrassed. I laughed it off saying that yes of course I was, and that we were just friends messing with each other! In my mind it was all just sexual experimentation followed by some innocent teasing.


In hindsight, I can see that it was indeed sexual experimentation, but that it didn't go the way it should have gone. There have been a few other situations where I froze and pretended to be asleep, because I didn't know how to say no - I was afraid to hurt the other person, or to hurt the friendship, and the words just didn't manage to come out of my mouth. I don't think any of these people meant any harm whatsoever, but that, as children, we've been left alone to discover and navigate the intricacies of sex and consent, without being given any proper tools how to do so. Had we been given the tools, I might have known how to say no, be it verbally or non-verbally, and they might have known that you should never touch someone who is asleep, passed out, or unresponsive/frozen.

Writer's pictureEveryday Consent

I'm now an almost 30 year old woman and this situation still causes me to feel so ashamed every time I think about it. I was 9 or 10 years old and a classmate and I were showering (in our swim wear) in the communal showers of a swimming pool during a school trip. I somehow decided it would be great fun to pull down his swimming trunks, and so I did. I started to laugh and make fun of him for how "small" his penis was and then told everyone in class. I feel so bad for disrespecting his body and - on top of that - for reinforcing harmful gender norms around the size of male genitalia

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