What You Really Really Want (17 page)

So when a friend of mine took a self-defense class that was then called Model Mugging (it's now called IMPACT in most places) and showed me the video of her “graduation,” in which she took on gigantic padded assailants and fought them off with the power of a very focused tornado, I was transfixed. A month later, I was sitting in my sweatpants on a gym mat in a nondescript room, waiting for the first session to begin.

To say I knew nothing about self-defense would be an understatement. The sad reality was that the guy who attacked me was smaller than me. I now know that it would have taken very little to get him off me, to prevent all the trauma that I've suffered since. But I didn't know that then. All I'd ever heard growing up was the opposite message:
If a guy is trying to rape you, there's really nothing you can do. Don't fight back, or you'll just make him angrier.

Now, this advice is completely, utterly bunk. Actually, it's worse than bunk—it's actively harmful. It's the opposite of what's true, and it puts women who follow it in much graver danger than they'd be in otherwise. In fact, researchers have discovered that women who fought back against would-be rapists
not only were less likely to be raped, but, even if they were raped, had no more physical injuries than women who didn't try to defend themselves.
⁴

But I knew none of that at the time. Not until the third class of IMPACT, the class in which we tackled what they call “reversals.” They call sexual assault scenarios “reversals” because the strategy they recommend is all about reversing the script the assailant has in his head, and reversing the power dynamic of the situation.

Until that class, I'd been
loving
self-defense. Before IMPACT, everyone in my life had always told me to shush. I'm a loud girl by nature, so that's hardly a surprise, but damn if it didn't feel transformative for the IMPACT instructor to tell me to use my powerful volume on my own behalf. I'd also never hit another human being. (Well, maybe my sister when I was little, but I was never really trying to hurt her.) I'd certainly never hit another human being with my full force. I had no idea how hard I could hit! It felt amazing. I had never felt more powerful.

That all changed the moment I lay down on the mat and let the male instructor in his suit of padding, playing a potential rapist, climb on top of me. In that moment, the fire IMPACT had lit in my belly went out. I just couldn't put my heart into fighting him off. I went through the motions, yes, I even fought hard enough to “win,” but it wasn't a win I could feel inside.

It took me a long while to figure out what the problem was. After all, I was ferocious when fighting in stranger-on-the-street scenarios, and I had so much more motivation to fight hard when it came to rape. What I eventually realized was this: I was afraid that if I knew now how to have prevented what happened
to me then, I would no longer have the right to all of my feelings about what he did to me. It wasn't rational, of course, but trauma rarely is. It took me years to really find the fight in those reversals.

The other objection some women have to self-defense is that it puts the responsibility on women to protect themselves, instead of obligating rapists to not rape women in the first place. I'm pretty sensitive to this argument, having edited an entire book about how to stop making women responsible for rape prevention and to put the focus where it belongs: on the rapist. But advocating self-defense for women isn't about blaming current or future victims. It's about dealing with reality as it exists today.

The truth is, violence against women isn't going to end tomorrow. Realistically speaking, it's going to take decades (if not centuries) to undo all of the ways our culture encourages and allows rape. In the meantime, all the women living in the world are still, well, living. In the world. The current world, in which rape is shockingly common. Teaching women some tools we can use in case of emergency will help us deal with the world as it is while we're working to make it better.

Imagine we each have a toolbox in which we can store tools for keeping ourselves safe. In it, we've got condoms and dental dams, maybe, and good communication skills, self-awareness, safecalls (more on those calls in chapter 8)—you get the picture. Well, why
not
have some more tools in there as well? Doesn't having more tools make it more likely you'll have the one you need in an emergency?

Does that mean I'm never afraid for my safety? Of course not. But it happens a lot less often since I trained in self-defense, for a few simple reasons:

Of course, self-defense isn't a silver bullet, and it won't make you invincible. There will always be the possibility that something will happen that you can't have been prepared to handle. But that likelihood will be much, much smaller if you get training. By the same token, however much training you have, you're under no greater obligation to fight back against an attacker than if you had no training. The act of rape is still their fault, never yours.

CHAPTER 5

I
T'S IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT SEXUALITY without talking about love, and I wouldn't want to even if I could. For many people, including me, sex as an expression of love is one of the most intimate and emotionally moving experiences we can have. It's far from the only healthy way to experience sexual interaction, but it can be a really great one.

There are all kinds of ways to think about sex and love. For some people, attraction and love are completely intertwined. These people can't conceive of being sexual with someone they don't love. For others, love and sex have almost nothing to do with each other. But these are the extremes—I suspect that most people fall somewhere in between. They experience love and sex as related but not exclusive to each other. Loving someone in a particular, intense way can make us want to be sexual with them, even if we wouldn't have otherwise been attracted to them. Some of us don't need to be in love with a person to have sex with them, but must at least have some basic respect
or fondness for them. It can be any number of dynamics. The important thing is to figure out how
you
feel about the way love and sex interact in your life, not how others believe you should feel.

For Cassie, age thirty-eight, love came first, then attraction. “When I first met my husband, I had no interest in him whatsoever,” she recalls.

The default assumption for girls and women is that we prioritize not just love but also relationships first, before sex, so we're willing to “give up” sex in exchange for commitment. That same model assumes that men want sex first and are sometimes willing to trade love and commitment to “get it.” Of course, this model assumes that all women sleep only with men and vice
versa, and that all people identify as either “men” or “women,” so that should be a strong clue that this model is severely limited. At best.

The reality is that women—just like all people—vary quite a lot in terms of their sexual priorities. Further, unlike the model above, sex doesn't have to be a zero-sum game in which one person “gives it up” and another “gets it.” Good, healthy sexual interactions give something positive to all participants. In other words: When sex is good, everyone's a winner.

But the kind of sexual contexts that leave us fulfilled are as varied as we are. Here are just a few examples of totally valid reasons to have sex with someone: