When “I Guess” Means “Yes”: Coercive Sexual Assault and Desire Gaps in Intimate Relationships
Content warning: This article discusses the topic of rape and coercive sexual assault. Please take care when engaging.
Sexual assault is often represented as a singular idea of violent rape at the hands of a stranger assailant. However, it is actually most likely that survivors will know their assaulter, whether this is an intimate partner, a friend, a family member, or an acquaintance. Nearly 20% of women in the U.S and a little over 4% of men in the U.S. report having experienced some form of sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime.
This fact feels particularly important in light of a recent CNN article which revealed a horrifying online “global rape academy” with over 62 million views. In this forum, men swapped tips on how to drug and rape their partners (primarily their wives) without getting caught. This discovery emphasizes the way that predators often look different than the stereotypical masked stranger with a weapon—sometimes predators look like your husband, your partner, or another person you trust.
Unfortunately, this is not the only way that personal relationships can present unique risks for sexual assault. Read on for some important information about coercive sexual assault—another form of assault which does not fit classic depictions of violent rape and is thus often underrecognized.
Coercive Sexual Assault and Blame Attribution
Coercive sexual assault happens when somebody is threatened, manipulated, intimidated, guilted, or otherwise induced to “consent” to sexual activity. According to expert on intimate partner abuse and coercive control Lisa A. Fontes, Ph.D, (who was also a contributor to our anthology, Survival & Beyond), “The coercion may not happen at the same time as the sex. Picture an angry outburst in the morning making someone feel that they must ‘give in’ at night.” In other words, any time one person makes the other feel as if they owe them sex, this is sexual coercion.
Most often, coercive sexual assault happens between intimate partners or two people who know one another well. This creates unique physical and emotional challenges for a survivor, who often feels emotionally close to their assailant. In studies on sexual assault, there are two places where blame is assigned by the survivor: on themselves and on the perpetrator. Those who know their assaulter are more likely to engage in higher levels of self-blame, rather than putting the blame on the perpetrator. This can be motivated by love and care for the perpetrator, confusion about the circumstances, or an urge to maintain the relationship.
Survivors who engage in higher levels of self-blame experience higher levels of psychological distress, depression, and problem drinking. Self-blame also predicts increased chances of being assaulted again (also called revictimization) because one’s confidence in their ability to assess personal risk and refuse sexual advances decreases.
In other words, feeling partially responsible for one’s assault distorts a victim’s entire concept of safety, not just in moving throughout the world, but in trusting their own judgements to keep themselves out of danger. Those who know their assaulter are also less likely to even label their experiences as “rape” or “sexual assault” because of their familiarity with the aggressor.¹ This means that this kind of assault is even more underreported than other forms of rape.
In Issue 3 of our anthology, Survival & Beyond, “This time” by Dr. Sarah Jefferis provides an intimate look into what thoughts a survivor might have about their complicity in their own assault. The narrator vows that “this time” she will fight back and not “let” herself be assaulted, showing how self-blame can manifest in situations where a victim fawns, freezes, acquiesces for their own safety, or is otherwise unable to fight off their attacker.
Because of the unequal power dynamics in abusive relationships specifically, survivors of domestic violence are often subjected to sex which they do not want. The combination of familiarity with one’s partner and society’s oversimplified definitions of abuse make it difficult for survivors to know what constitutes sexual assault, just as they sometimes make it difficult for survivors to label their experiences as abuse.
“This time” by Dr. Sarah Jefferis shows how personal ties—via familial sexual abuse—can create complicated situations which impede survivors’ ability to escape abuse and receive justice.
Mind The Gap! Coercive Sexual Assault & Desire Gaps
Another facet of coercive sexual assault is a phenomenon known as the desire gap. The desire gap refers to when one partner consistently consents to sex without feeling arousal or without achieving orgasm. This is typically a gendered experience, with women—heterosexual ones in particular—disproportionately unaroused and unsatisfied, but feeling obligated to have intercourse with their partner anyway.
The Journal of Sex Research found that 67% of women who had engaged in penile-vaginal sex had faked an orgasm because, “orgasm was unlikely, they wanted sex to end, and they wanted to avoid negative consequences (e.g., hurting their partner's feelings) and to obtain positive consequences (e.g., pleasing their partner).”
In her memoir, Mad Wife, Kate Hamilton discusses the psychological toll of consenting to sex with her husband despite feeling zero desire for him. She says that she fell victim to the social script that sex is always healthy for a marriage, which was even pushed onto her by “couples counselors, who often recommend performing (sex) regularly in a kind of fake-it-till-you-make-it optimism.”
Hamilton says that she discovered that “the ways that sex made me feel then and traumatized me afterward have much in common with women’s experiences of what we call ‘rape.’” In this way, women, and other marginalized identities within couples, are told that their partners have some sort of right to their bodies and right to receive sex from them, no matter how the subject feels about that sex. This not only reenforces rape culture’s sentiments, but encourages guilt-fueled, coerced consent.
Love’s Tyranny, a piece by Lindsay Thurman in Survival & Beyond (Issue 2), tells the story of the author having to be convinced by her therapist that what she experienced in her marriage was sexual abuse. Because of common misconceptions about consent, the author thought that her failure to say the word “no” meant that she had said “yes.”
The author is then taught—and consequently teaches us—all the ways in which her abuser induced her to consent to certain sexual acts while ignoring both the verbal and physical protestations of his partner. Here, self-blame is depicted vividly, with an incredibly detailed look into how intimate partners can warp the concept of consent in order to evade responsibility for their sexual predation.
The Media on Sex and Consent
Because only some states have required sex education—and even that education is often abstinence-based or strictly heterosexual—young Americans are increasingly turning to media in order to learn about sexual norms and consent. This often comes from pornography, which consistently portrays problematic sexual violence, power dynamics, and misogynistic fantasies which are experienced by youth as “realistic” depictions of sex.
However, it is not only pornography which teaches Americans dangerous ideas about sexual safety. A study by The Journal of Sex Research found that an alarming amount of popular teen films punished female characters for expressing sexual desire. It also found that this media fostered the narrative that men must persistently initiate romantic/sexual advances while women act as gatekeepers of their “virtue.”
In other words, “It’s seen as the man’s job to seek out sexual fulfillment and to engage in a back and forth in which the woman may feign disinterest before submitting,” creating a dynamic in which men must, “push women towards their own sexual goals.” This romanticizes and normalizes coercive consent, likely contributing to a culture in which coercive sexual assault is not adequately acknowledged.
The poem “flick” (Survival & Beyond, Issue 3) provides an example of the kinds of rhetoric which an abuser might use to coerce a partner into sexual activity and how this manipulative coercion seeps into other aspects of the relationship. The abuser in this piece carefully chooses language which is deceivingly flattering in order to disguise their controlling behavior, coercive tendencies, and blatant deceit. It provides a sample script of coercion which could easily be represented or misconstrued as romantic, whether in media or in real life relationships.
Combatting Societal Narratives on Coercive Sexual Assault and Revealing the Real Stories
Sexual Assault Awareness Month is an important time check our own knowledge about sexual assault and the ways it can happen. It’s critical that we work to liberate ourselves from all of the limiting myths pushed onto us about definitions of consent and rape.
Our survivor anthologies—which are available to read for free online—contain stories from survivors of interpersonal violence. Many of these pieces offer real-life narratives to correct misinformation about sexual assault and educate readers on how coercive consent can function.
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