Bad Sex

[HA's Note: Where did I crib this from?] Bad Sex is often understood to be about a lack of consent or encounters when coercion, threats, or manipulation occurred. Let me be clear that a lack of consent, or coercion, threats, or manipulation absolutely make a sexual encounter “bad."

But it is also alarming to this sex therapist that these are the examples of Bad Sex that we already know and understand as bad. It tells me that the bar is set really low and our collective understanding of Sex in general is still at the basic or beginner’s level. Shouldn’t the absence of these be the bare minimum in a sexual encounter?

And I would argue that lack of consent, coercion, threats, or manipulation isn’t Bad Sex; it’s Abusive or Violent Sex. That begs the question: What, then, is Bad Sex?

Example of Bad Sex

Consent doesn't matter! It is trust that matters, and you get that trust by earning their consent.

This is what happen when Consent is unearned

How my Date with the sweetest, most caring guy in the world It turned into the worst night of my life

She approached him because she recognized his camera flash — Aziz Ansari was taking pictures at the 2017 Emmy Awards after-party with a film camera, not a digital one. “I stood up, and I’m like tipsy at this point and feeling really confident. I’m in a gown, and I walked up to Aziz and said, ‘What’d you just shoot with?’”

Grace is a 23-year-old Brooklyn-based photographer, then aged 22. We are not using her real name to protect her identity because she is not a public figure. She says Ansari brushed her off at first, but after he realized they both brought the same kind of camera to the event, an old model from the 80s, he was impressed.

They flirted a little — he took two pictures of her, she snapped some of him — and then she and her date went back to the dance floor. “It was like, one of those things where you’re aware of the other person all night,” she said. “We would catch eyes every now and then.”

One of two photos Grace took of Ansari at the Emmys after party. They ran into each other one last time, right as Grace was leaving. At Ansari’s suggestion, she put her number in his phone.

When her plane landed back in New York the next day, she already had a message from him. They exchanged flirtatious banter over text for a week or so before he asked her to go out with him on Monday, September 25.

The date didn’t go as planned. The night would end with Grace in an Uber home, in tears, messaging her friends about how Ansari behaved. Babe spoke to the first friends she told about it, and reviewed the messages on her phone.

The day after the incident, she wrote a long text to Ansari, saying: “I just want to take this moment to make you aware of [your] behavior and how uneasy it made me.” To that message, Ansari responds: “Clearly, I misread things in the moment and I’m truly sorry.”

The mobile phone number from which his texts to her were sent matches up with his details on a searchable public register.

We spoke to Grace last week. When we met, Ansari had just won Best Actor for his Netflix show “Master Of None” at the Golden Globes, where he declared his support for the fight against sexual assault and harassment by wearing a “Time’s Up” pin on the red carpet.

Grace said it was surreal to be meeting up with Ansari, a successful comedian and major celebrity, and she was “excited” for their date.

Ansari at the Golden Globes with his Time’s Up pin. Before meeting Ansari, Grace told friends and coworkers about the date and consulted her go-to group chat about what she should wear to fit the “cocktail chic” dress-code he gave her. She settled on “a tank-top dress and jeans.” She showed me a picture, it was a good outfit.

After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. “It was white,” she said. “I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.” Then Ansari walked her to Grand Banks, an Oyster bar onboard a historic wooden schooner on the Hudson River just a few blocks away.

She said it was a beautiful, warm September night. They discussed NYU, comedy and a new, secret project he was working on, but she says she did most of the talking.

Grace says she sensed Ansari was eager for them to leave. “When the waiter came over he quickly asked for the check and he said like, ‘Let’s get off this boat.’” She recalls there was still wine in her glass and more left in the bottle he ordered. The abruptness surprised her. “Like, he got the check and then it was bada-boom, bada-bing, we’re out of there.”

Grace took this photo of their meal, lobster rolls and a side salad. They walked the two blocks back to his apartment building, an exclusive address on TriBeCa’s Franklin Street, where Taylor Swift has a place too. When they walked back in, she complimented his marble countertops. According to Grace, Ansari turned the compliment into an invitation.

“He said something along the lines of, ‘How about you hop up and take a seat?’” Within moments, he was kissing her. “In a second, his hand was on my breast.” Then he was undressing her, then he undressed himself. She remembers feeling uncomfortable at how quickly things escalated.

When Ansari told her he was going to grab a condom within minutes of their first kiss, Grace voiced her hesitation explicitly. “I said something like, ‘Whoa, let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill.’” She says he then resumed kissing her, briefly performed oral sex on her, and asked her to do the same thing to him. She did, but not for long. “It was really quick. Everything was pretty much touched and done within ten minutes of hooking up, except for actual sex.”

She says Ansari began making a move on her that he repeated during their encounter. “The move he kept doing was taking his two fingers in a V-shape and putting them in my mouth, in my throat to wet his fingers, because the moment he’d stick his fingers in my throat he’d go straight for my vagina and try to finger me.” Grace called the move “the claw.”

Ansari also physically pulled her hand towards his penis multiple times throughout the night, from the time he first kissed her on the countertop onward. “He probably moved my hand to his dick five to seven times,” she said. “He really kept doing it after I moved it away.”

But the main thing was that he wouldn’t let her move away from him. She compared the path they cut across his apartment to a football play. “It was 30 minutes of me getting up and moving and him following and sticking his fingers down my throat again. It was really repetitive. It felt like a fucking game.”

Throughout the course of her short time in the apartment, she says she used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was. “Most of my discomfort was expressed in me pulling away and mumbling. I know that my hand stopped moving at some points,” she said. “I stopped moving my lips and turned cold.”

Whether Ansari didn’t notice Grace’s reticence or knowingly ignored it is impossible for her to say. “I know I was physically giving off cues that I wasn’t interested. I don’t think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored.”

Ansari wanted to have sex. She said she remembers him asking again and again, “Where do you want me to fuck you?” while she was still seated on the countertop. She says she found the question tough to answer because she says she didn’t want to fuck him at all.

“I wasn’t really even thinking of that, I didn’t want to be engaged in that with him. But he kept asking, so I said, ‘Next time.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, you mean second date?’ and I go, ‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ and he goes, ‘Well, if I poured you another glass of wine now, would it count as our second date?’” He then poured her a glass and handed it to her. She excused herself to the bathroom soon after.

Grace says she spent around five minutes in the bathroom, collecting herself in the mirror and splashing herself with water. Then she went back to Ansari. He asked her if she was okay. “I said I don’t want to feel forced because then I’ll hate you, and I’d rather not hate you,” she said.

She told babe that at first, she was happy with how he reacted. “He said, ‘Oh, of course, it’s only fun if we’re both having fun.’ The response was technically very sweet and acknowledging the fact that I was very uncomfortable. Verbally, in that moment, he acknowledged that I needed to take it slow. Then he said, ‘Let’s just chill over here on the couch.’”

This moment is particularly significant for Grace, because she thought that would be the end of the sexual encounter — her remark about not wanting to feel “forced” had added a verbal component to the cues she was trying to give him about her discomfort. When she sat down on the floor next to Ansari, who sat on the couch, she thought he might rub her back, or play with her hair — something to calm her down.

Ansari instructed her to turn around. “He sat back and pointed to his penis and motioned for me to go down on him. And I did. I think I just felt really pressured. It was literally the most unexpected thing I thought would happen at that moment because I told him I was uncomfortable.”

Soon, he pulled her back up onto the couch. She would tell her friend via text later that night, “He [made out] with me again and says, ‘Doesn’t look like you hate me.’”

Halfway into the encounter, he led her from the couch to a different part of his apartment. He said he had to show her something. Then he brought her to a large mirror, bent her over and asked her again, “Where do you want me to fuck you? Do you want me to fuck you right here?” He rammed his penis against her ass while he said it, pantomiming intercourse.

“I just remember looking in the mirror and seeing him behind me. He was very much caught up in the moment and I obviously very much wasn’t,” Grace said. “After he bent me over is when I stood up and said no, I don’t think I’m ready to do this, I really don’t think I’m going to do this. And he said, ‘How about we just chill, but this time with our clothes on?’”

They got dressed, sat side by side on the couch they’d already “chilled” on, and he turned on an episode of Seinfeld. She’d never seen it before. She said that’s when the reality of what was going on sank in. “It really hit me that I was violated. I felt really emotional all at once when we sat down there. That that whole experience was actually horrible.”

While the TV played in the background, he kissed her again, stuck his fingers down her throat again, and moved to undo her pants. She turned away. She remembers “feeling in a different mindset at that point.”

“I remember saying, ‘You guys are all the same, you guys are all the fucking same.’” Ansari asked her what she meant. When she turned to answer, she says he met her with “gross, forceful kisses.”

After that last kiss, Grace stood up from the couch, moved back to the kitchen island where she left her phone, and said she would call herself a car. He hugged her and kissed her goodbye, another “aggressive” kiss. When she pulled away, Ansari finally relented and insisted he’d call her the car. “He said, ‘It’s coming, but just tell them your name is Essence,’” she said, a name he has joked about using as a pseudonym in his sitcom.

She teared up in the hallway, outside his place, pressing the down button on the elevator. The Uber was waiting when she left the building. He asked if she was Essence, she said yes, and then she rode back to her Brooklyn apartment. “I cried the whole ride home. At that point I felt violated. That last hour was so out of my hand.”

Ansari has released a statement, which you can read in full here. In it, he acknowledges that they “engaged in sexual activity” but says “by all indications [it] was completely consensual.”

Why Consent is not enough

Introduction

TIAN XIA didn’t realize her sexual belief was different from others until she went to America. As a Christian, she firmly believed that people shouldn’t have sex before marriage. However, in western society, such a notion has become outdated as sexual revolutions since the 1960s gradually dissolved boundaries in gender relations. Therefore, as someone “from the last century,” quote courtesy of her friends, she became a deviant in this open world. Although she object to premarital sex, this was not the purpose in telling me this story. Instead, She was trying to argue here that since our sexual identities are so subjective and vulnerable, consent is not enough to constitute morally acceptable sex.

She loved her boyfriend. They shared the same hobbies of music and sports, and our career goals coincided; so if fortunate, they would study the same major in the same college. Even our sexual ethics were similarly in favor of the Catholic view of sex. However, one day, he embraced her in his arms, looked into my eyes, and said: “Would you go for a night out with me?”

“Why?” she raised her head. His eyes were so genuine and passionate that it would be stupid to reject him. He told her that teenagers had already had sex at our age, and he would be regarded as a “baby” if he had not already done so. “Why care about them?” She struck back and found myself being inconsiderate at that very moment. She knew she would never engage in sex before marriage because of her religion, but she also knew that the power of peer pressure is so enormous that she couldn’t blame him for his thinking. Of course, she didn’t want his friends to look down on him, but when no one seemed to ally with my interest, she felt weak to insist on my voice being heard as well.

She contemplated the dissonance between her peer values and her sexual self. On the one hand, she care about the dignity of marriage and family, and she desired to save her first time for her husband. On the other hand, she dreaded not only losing her boyfriend but also the prejudice from other people against her. Is it ever possible that she will find someone willing to wait until marriage? What if her future lovers break up with her when she refuse to have sex with them? After all, what’s the matter with premarital sex? Why holding on to this conservative notion when everyone is acting otherwise? She couldn’t withstand the loneliness of being left out, as the need to belong is part of her vulnerable human nature. But when She was about to decide, she realized she still can’t forsake the traditional Catholic values embedded in her personality.

At last, her boyfriend broke up with her because she had never consented to his requests. This seems to be a proper ending, but what if she agreed to have sex with him out of fear? Would it make the subsequent sexual encounters morally permissible? The answer, as she would exemplify in the rest of this paper, is no. There’s more to consider for morally permissible sex than consent.

Why Consent isn't worth a damn

Good sex shouldn't depend on faultless self-knowledge. Katherine Angel puts forward the case for desire's emergent and contextual nature.

In recent years, two requirements for good sex have emerged: consent, and self-knowledge. Consent, in Joseph Fischel’s words, gives ‘moral magic to sex.’ Self-knowledge too, is paramount. ‘Know what you want and learn what your partner wants’, urged a New York Times article in July 2018; ‘good sex happens where those two agendas meet.’ ‘Have the conversation’, a sex educator exhorted on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The New Age of Consent’ in September 2018—the direct, honest conversation about sex, about whether you want it, and exactly what you want. Have it before you are in the bedroom; have it in the bar, have it in the cab home—any awkwardness will be worth it later. This rhetoric is not entirely new; Rachel Bussell Kramer wrote in 2008 that ‘as women, it’s our duty to ourselves and our partners to get more vocal about asking for what we want in bed, as well as sharing what we don’t. Neither partner can afford to be passive and just wait to see how far the other person will go.’ Women are urged to know their desires, and be clear and confident about expressing them. Simple, right?

These principles are framed as common-sense, and easy enough. They are also framed as inherently liberatory, since they emphasise women’s capacity for—and right to—sexual desire and pleasure. But in urging women to be confident and clear about their sexual desires, the consent discourse risks denying the fact that women are often punished for precisely the sexually confident and assertive positions they are being asked to cultivate. What’s more, the exhortations to confidence and positivity—the insistence on defiant affirmation—have an underbelly: they render lack of confidence, insecurity, or not-knowing as ugly, abject, and shameful. They brook little vulnerability or ambivalence. And they make inadmissible the experience of not knowing what one wants in the first place.

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It’s often been acknowledged that fear of male violence can make it difficult for women to say no to sex; a hurt and entitled male ego is one more likely to lash out. One target of Weinstein’s campaign of sexual intimidation spoke in an interview of having been afraid to ‘poke the bear’; afraid, when confronted with his demands, to do anything to inflame his anger, violence, or desire for retribution. A witness in his ongoing trial has told the court that if Weinstein ‘heard the word “no”, it was like a trigger for him’.

Equally important, however, is the difficulty of saying yes, and of expressing desire. Evidence that a woman has used apps such as Tinder to meet sexual partners can work against her in a courtroom, even if this is irrelevant to the allegation before the court. Helena Kennedy has shown in Eve Was Shamed that a woman’s willingness to have casual sex with a stranger often counts heavily against her in a trial. If the case in court, Kennedy writes, resulted from ‘a contact made through a hook-up website, there would be little hope of conviction.’ You can’t be raped, in other words, by someone you met on Tinder; by someone you are thought to have met out of a confident desire for sex.

Women know, then, that their sexual desire can remove protection from them, and can be invoked as proof—not that violence did not take place, but that violence wasn’t wrong (she wanted it). A woman’s sexual appetite can be invoked to justify male aggression, and it is often the very means through which violence is exonerated. Why else would a lawyer hold up a rape complainant’s underwear in court? In a trial in Ireland in which a seventeen-year-old alleged a twenty-seven-year-old man had committed rape, a female counsel did precisely this, saying ‘You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a lace thong.’ Once a woman is thought to have said yes to something, she can't say no to anything. Her desire disqualifies her from justice.

Where do these ugly facts leave women, the very same women who are told, in relentlessly upbeat tones, to know and express their desires; that they owe it to themselves, to their sexual happiness, to their sexual partners, and to their safety, to proclaim their desire without shame? What good is all this expression of positivity and confidence? As Sara Ahmed observes, sometimes ‘the repetition of good sentiment feels oppressive’.

It’s no coincidence that the reformulation of consent as affirmative and enthusiastic took root in the 1990s, a decade in which post-feminism made sexual assertiveness and sex-positivity imperative. In the era of post-feminism, the utterly reasonable claim that women should be afforded sexual freedom— that it should be acceptable for them to declare their desire loudly, to be perverse and lustful and up-for-it—slid into the more dubious insistence that women areand mustbe so. And something of this insistence—that in the name of sexual equality, women must hold their end up and be assertive, declamatory, unashamed—found its way into the affirmative and enthusiastic consent initiatives.

Emphasising women’s desire is often thought to be inherently liberatory: if we establish once and for all that women are lustful creatures, then shame and stigma will wane—and if we normalise the expression of desire in women, it will be harder for men to coerce them, or to claim confusion about whether a woman ‘wanted it’ or not.

But this logic does not, in fact, get us very far. Who does the exhortation to know one’s desires and express them really serve? In a recent interview, Donna Rotunno, the female lawyer defending Harvey Weinstein in trial, said that ‘women need to be very clear about their intentions’ and ‘prepared for the circumstances they put themselves in.’ She also said that men ‘in today’s world’ should ask women to sign consent forms before sex. Here, knowing one’s desires serves as a condition for protecting oneself from violence; in the consent conversation, too, knowledge of one’s desires too becomes something with which we must come, as if armed, to sex, in order to be clear and avoid confusion. We must know our own desires, as a condition of pleasure and of safety. That seems like a steep bargain to me.

Knowing one’s desires, in Rotunno’s logic, also functions as a form of protection for men anxious about later allegations. These equivocations, and Rotunno’s use of them, should at the very least signal to us how limited the injunctions to know and to express our desires really are as the overwhelming rubric for ensuring good—pleasurable, ethical—sex. With friends like these, who needs Weinsteins?

We must be wary of urging particular (namely, assertive, direct) modes of sexuality on women as the pre-emptive solution to male sexual violence. This is a strategy that places the burden of sexual communication, and of sexual violence, disproportionately on women, making them—their feelings, and their words—responsible for good sex. And if women fail in these requirements, who bears the burden of that failure?

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When did we buy the idea that we know what we want, whether in sex or elsewhere? This idea assumes that desire is something that lies in wait, fully formed within us, ready for us to extract. But a sexual ethics that is worth its name has to allow for obscurity, for opacity, and for not-knowing. Sex is social, emergent, and responsive; it is a dynamic, a conversation. Our desires emerge in interaction; we don’t always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn’t know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want, or don’t, only in the doing.

This feature of desire—its uncertain, unfolding quality—is frightening. It’s frightening because it opens up the possibility of women not knowing their own desire, and of men capitalising on that lack of certainty by coercing or bullying them. But we must not deny this aspect of desire as a consequence; we must not insist on a sexual desire that is fixed and known in advance, in order to be safe. That would be to hold sexuality hostage to violence.

We don’t always know what we want, and we are not always able to express our desires clearly. This is in part due to the violence, misogyny, and shame that desire’s discovery is difficult, and its expression fraught. But desire’s emergent nature—its responsiveness to context, to our histories, and to the desires and behaviours of others—is also what can make sex exciting, rich, and meaningful. We are social creatures; our desires emerge—and have always emerged, from day one—in relation to those who care, or do not care, for us. How then, do we make this fact galvanising rather than paralysing? How do we resist retreating into an insistence either that desire is something it is not (transparent, fixed, certain), or that sexuality is too complex for any sustained ethical enquiry? How do we have good sex without insisting that we must first know all of our desire? This is the task before us; instead of fiddling with notions of consent on which we place too high an ethical burden, we need to articulate an ethics of sex that does not try frantically to keep desire’s uncertainty at bay. We need, in contrast, to start from this very premise—this risky, complex premise: that we shouldn’t have to know ourselves in order to be safe from violence.

It's time we get serious about changing sex education

If we as a society want to have the above examples of both Abusive or Violent Sex and Bad Sex decrease in frequency and severity, then it means we change our sex education. I'm talking about a total overhaul. Teaching pregnancy and STI prevention and basic anatomy (and I mean basic: How many of you clitoris-havers were actually taught about the clitoris?) is not enough and never has been. I would argue it has only led to two things: All of the Abusive or Violent Sex we have been talking about these last few years and all the Bad Sex people are having that I and so many of my fellow sex therapists and sex educators must help them address.

Only solo masturbation happens with ourselves. The rest of it happens within the context of relationships, however brief, with other people. “Teaching about sex” also means teaching self-knowledge and relationship skills. It means we grow up and let go of what is not collectively serving us anymore. This includes our beliefs, attitudes, laws, and ethics about sex. Are we ready to advance to the intermediate level of understanding Sex in general?

As is often the case, when we start to talk about sex a whole bunch of stuff comes up for people, like memories, hopes, fears, desires, and feelings. As a result, it has been difficult for us culturally to separate Abusive or Violent Sex from Bad Sex or to take a more nuanced approach and piece out one type of Bad Sex offense from another; they all get lumped into one category. And that’s particularly problematic for us all because as we contemplate all these different experiences, we become acutely aware of how many of us do not have or have not been taught the intrapersonal and interpersonal skills to keep ourselves sexually safe, set sexual boundaries, and accept others’ sexual boundaries with grace, or communicate, negotiate, or self-soothe. Certainly it makes me think about how all of us, not just children, could benefit from being taught about “tricky people" (the new version of the old and inaccurate “stranger danger” concept) and what to do when we encounter them. Here’s an interesting thought exercise: What are some behavioral traits that a sexually tricky person demonstrates? How good are you at identifying them in the moment? What do you do when you notice someone is a sexually tricky person? Or what gets in the way of asserting your needs with a sexually tricky person?