When bad men get lucky

By Chesed

Content warning: Discussion of rape and sexual assault, rape fantasy. Names have been changed.

I have climbed in bed with a lot of (alleged) rapists. Most men I slept with in college were accused of rape or sexual misconduct. I don’t believe that most men are predators. I also don’t believe that all of these accusations were spurious. I picked bad men. The bad men didn’t rape me. They got lucky. So did I.

I arrived at college at 18, a few months after losing my virginity. I had slept with two men. The first was a guy I had met at a Junior State convention. It was the kind of weekend conference where high school students dress up in a slutty approximation of business casual, debate policy proposals during the day and then party at night. He was reprimanded twice for dancing inappropriately, the chaperones addressing him and ignoring the small girl furiously tugging her dress down over her ass. I was excited to have finally found the bad boy who could push past my freeze response and finally rid me of my pesky virginity. I was embarrassed at the prospect of arriving at college as a virgin, nervous that it would make me uncool and unappealing. I went to prom the next day with a different guy, my hair left down in a futile attempt to cover my hickeys.

We had sex a few days before I graduated high school. I remember excitement, then pressure, then pain. The pain subsided and was replaced by a strong urge to pee. I didn’t bleed, which led him to believe I wasn’t actually a virgin. Pop culture had prepared me for two minutes, but I was treated to at least an hour of thrusting. He had me try to mount him. He had me get on my hands and knees. I went to the bathroom to see if I could get rid of the urge to pee, but I couldn’t. He groped me in front of a mirror, and I marveled at how good our bodies looked together. I told him I was done, but we kept going. He hadn’t come yet. After, I texted a friend “It wasn’t very good but I can see how it could be good.”

We kept seeing each other that summer. I learned that he expected monogamy after he exploded in anger on the phone when I mentioned I had sex with another guy. I thought he would be proud of me for exploring my sexuality or at least amused by the story, which involved housesitting gone awry. I was wrong. I apologized and didn’t sleep with anyone else until I dumped him in August in accordance with the traditional ritual of going off to college.

Free from my hometown boyfriend, irrepressibly horny and dressed in tiny scraps of clothing, I was ready to begin my sexual adventure. I expected to meet similarly horny men and women, have some uncomplicated horny time and then maybe pair up, fall in love, and graduate with a ring on my finger. The first thing I learned was that the social scene I found myself in was heavily driven by alcohol. I had kissed and cuddled plenty of people in high school, mostly fully sober or occasionally mildly buzzed. In college, the drinking culture and hookup scene were one and the same. Formal dates were rare. No one approached me or hit on me in class or on campus during the day. Instead, I did what all the other girls around me did when we wanted male attention or maybe to get laid. We crowded in a dorm room, drank rapidly, and then went out to official or unofficial parties. At the parties, men would approach us, especially if we were dancing, and attempt to get us alone.

The next thing I learned was that I had joined an alien sexual culture. Most of my early high school sexual experiences had been with progressive boys (and occasionally girls) raised on an ethos of enthusiastic consent. The boy I had lost my virginity to had been different, but I thought that was a fluke, a consequence of his evangelical upbringing and disreputable vibe. At the first party of the first weekend of my first semester, I met a boy at a party.

We danced. He filled a solo cup for me from the plastic-lined garbage can that served as a punch bowl. He invited me to his dorm room a few feet away. I agreed. As soon as the door closed he kissed me. I was excited but afraid of getting carried away at my first party and told him I wanted to keep my panties on. My shirt and my bra came off quickly. He boosted me up onto his semi-lofted twin XL and began unzipping my shorts. I resisted, pushing his hands away while we kissed. Eventually I let him slide the shorts off. His fingers reached under my panties. No, I told him, squirming. I want to keep them on. He slipped his fingers under the panties, fingering me with them on. I wiggled around, unsure what I wanted, unsure what he would do. We stayed there for awhile, making out, him fingering me, me wiggling away and pushing away his hand. He asked if he should get a condom. I realized that I couldn’t stay in his room without having sex with him, and I left.

I drank more with my friends and eventually left the party with another guy. I was drunk and blissful. I luxuriated in his desire and his comfortable bed, floating as he undressed me. I began to drift off between kisses. His touch on my clit occasionally roused me. Eventually he noticed that I was only intermittently conscious. “Ok, you need to go,” he said, with worry in his voice. I didn’t understand - I felt sweet and soft and cutely vulnerable. I wanted him to grab me to his chest and hold me as I fell asleep in his warm bed. I obediently stumbled back to my own room instead.

Before the first weekend had even ended, I had learned two important lessons:

1. Going to a man’s room implies that you will have sex with him, even if you tell him you don’t want to have sex

2. Men will not necessarily cuddle you or let you sleep in their bed even if they are trying to have sex with you

Unfortunately I also learned something about myself that night, and the next night, and all the nights that followed. When men pushed past my boundaries, I got wet. I was mad about it. I knew they were behaving unethically. I knew that what I was doing was stupid and possibly dangerous. More than once, I felt a man’s hands close around my neck and wondered if he would stop in time. Habitually, I assessed the distance between the door and the bed and wondered if I could make it if he didn’t let me leave. I knew that it was a bad idea to be alone with men who didn’t listen to me or respect me. But it turned me on.

I didn’t want to have sex with bad men. I wasn’t roaming the campus asking girls for recommendations on the rapiest guys they knew. I wanted to have good sex with nice men, but I was selecting for:

• Men initiating in a competitive setting (e.g., crowded party, dance floor)

• Men who consistently sexually escalated and suggested moving to private areas

• Men who were attracted to displays of vulnerability (e.g., barely any clothing, tiny woman)

• Men who displayed dominance during sex (e.g., roughness, moving me, light choking, spanking) without any explicit negotiation

It isn’t shocking that I ended up having sex with a lot of bad men. Technically speaking you could do all of the above ethically if you had near-telepathic levels of ability to read women’s body language. In reality, I think most men doing these things to me were also doing them to women who did not like it, and may have been terrified by their actions.

I was not. I was frequently disappointed in the college hookup scene, but it was by things like whisky dick, tentative touch, and poor manners. What kept me coming back was the incredible beauty of being taken. Many of them didn’t even do it that well, but there were brief moments when my fantasies felt real. I squirmed in his arms and he pushed me up against a wall with his hand on my throat. He moved me in his bed as if I was a sex toy. He took me by the hand and didn’t tell me where we were going. He slapped my ass and called me a good girl. I was so hungry for this that I ignored the rest until it became unignorable.

The reports and warnings came and kept coming. It was a small campus and the news filtered to me in whispers and Snapchats and texts and Facebook posts. Duncan*’s ex-girlfriend accused him of pressuring her into sex she didn’t want throughout their relationship, and noticed a pattern of him picking up drunk freshman girls after. Nina* warned me that Clayton* had taken advantage of her when she was drunk. Facebook posts circulated about George*’s pattern of sexual assault. I danced with David* at a party and a senior girl I didn’t know walked up to me and whispered to avoid him. I thanked her but stayed. Kevin* came to me for comfort, telling me he had attempted suicide after his girlfriend accused him of sexual assault during a breakup. He said he had performed cunnilingus even as she pushed him away.

I didn’t quite know what to do. Sometimes other students, knowing that I had slept with these men, encouraged me to add to the complaints. I had nothing to add. I tried to avoid sleeping with men who had already been accused. I felt guilty. I was horny. I was guilty, on some level. My sexuality rewarded men for actions that hurt other women. I was not playing with consent at that time in my life - when I said no I meant no - but I still said no and got wet, or said no and relented. I was the slut of their fantasy. I was the slut that asked for it and wanted it. I was young and dumb but I still knew there was something wrong with my actions and something wrong with me, throwing myself at bad men and ignoring good men.

I pick good men now. I ask good men to behave like bad men, just for me. I have also found the occasional good man with bad fantasies, fantasies they act out only with women like me (these men are uncommon and very, very popular in certain circles). The whispers about my partners are recommendations rather than warnings. I think that I am incentivizing the men in my community to treat women well.

All it took to have good sex with good men was to admit to myself what I wanted, which was painful, and then to tell other people, which was excruciating. The thing about having sex with men who aren’t rapists is that they will want confirmation that they are not actually raping you. A decade ago, at the time of these stories, I couldn’t imagine telling anyone about the truth of what turned me on. It still makes me blush but I have now done it again and again and even made a sex doc.

I have a loving husband and a caring community in the Slut Cloud. I am objectified and loved, degraded and indulged, disrespected and respected. Every night I sleep next to a man who has promised to protect and care for me. If you have been chasing sexual highs by allowing yourself to be dragged off by monsters, I want you to know about the possible future in which men destroy you and then feed you chocolate covered raspberries. I would like to help you find it.