Orgasm During Sexual Assault

TW: R*pe & As*ault

 

Most people don’t like thinking about rape, but what comes to mind when you do?

Violence? Rape committed by a stranger? Physical resistance?

Does it still qualify as rape in the absence of this? What about consent? 

Is it consent if there is no resistance?

What if the incident is far from these stereotypical assumptions?

Is it still rape?

And what about an orgasm when stereotypically, your body should be shutting down?

Does it make you a willing participant? 

Legally speaking, rape is said to have occurred when the sexual intercourse is said to be (i) against the person’s will; (ii) against a person’s consent; (iii) with consent, but against will.

This is where it gets a bit murky.

If consent is coerced, how do you determine “will”? If it is through actions, then surely, physical arousal and an orgasm during the assault would lead to an indication of willingness. It is, in fact, reciprocity. Afterall, an orgasm is a culmination of “want”, isn’t it?

Biology aside, let me simplify the concept of consent and willingness.

Consent is the verbal or non-verbal agreement to do a thing. Willingness is the “want” to go ahead with the act. The absence of either of these during sexual intercourse, is rape. Presence of both mitigates rape. That consent is an ongoing process and can be revoked even in the middle of the act.

I was in a severely abusive relationship between the ages of 17 to 19. I won’t go into the details of the abuse, except to say that there was enough emotional abuse layered with sexual abuse and sexual assault to have made me dissociate for at least the next decade. For those who are new to the concept of dissociation, let me fit a crash course in here for a better understanding of what I’m attempting to delve into.

Dissociation involves experiencing a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings, actions and identity. This usually develops as a reaction to trauma of a perpetually threatening environment. The disconnection makes it feel as if everything that’s happening is happening to someone else. As if you aren’t present. There's a lot to be said about dissociation itself but I won't go into that right now.

Why is this piece of information important?

Because while dissociation is your brain going into survival mode and protecting it from the potential damage of the situation, it also makes it difficult to recognise that there is ongoing trauma. How exactly are you to recognise this when it doesn’t even feel like it's happening to “you”?

Now add this dissociation to having an orgasm during sexual assault and you have a classic recipe for “but I was a willing participant, so was it really assault?” I mean, isn’t sexual assault supposed to be violent? But it can be silent, non-violent. It’s still sexual assault when he places a knife to his neck and threatens to kill himself if you don’t get in bed with him. So you do.

Not because you’re aroused, but because you must diffuse the situation, protect yourself, and maybe the person you’re supposed to be in love with. You do because you’re in a position without power. And then in the middle of the assault, you feel your biology taking over, and you orgasm. Now what can be more confusing than a full physical arousal in the middle of your assault? Don’t get me wrong, I never wanted it. Never wanted it. So imagine my horror as my mind said no but my body felt multiple orgasms through the course of this intensely abusive relationship.

Before your mind goes there, let me dispel it. This isn’t a result of a deep rooted fantasy where I wished to be raped. This wasn’t me “enjoying” it. Physiological signs of pleasure is possible from unwanted and non-consensual sex as it is fundamentally a physiological process, despite subjective emotional states being described as “anxiety-provoking,” “feared” and “unpleasant”.

Researchers Willy van Berlo and Roy J. Levin concluded in a review, published in 2004, that non-consensual sexual stimulation can cause unwanted sexual arousal. They noted that this does not mean that the individual had consented or “enjoyed” the assault.

According to sexologist Emily Nagoski - “‘Liking’— pleasure—is one system in our brains, the opioid system; ‘wanting’—desire—is another, mediated by dopamine; and ‘learning’—physiological response to learned cues—is a third,” “Genital arousal is the third—a learned response, the way Pavlov’s dogs salivated in response to the bell. The salivation didn’t mean the dogs wanted to eat the bell or that they found the bell delicious. It just meant that the bell was a cue that was associated with food. Genital response can happen in response to sex-related cues, whether or not those cues are wanted or liked. I’ve been doing work related to sexual violence for over two decades, so I’ve met many, many survivors who’ve experienced arousal and even orgasm.”

The fact that we traditionally associate an orgasm with consent, does several things. First, it makes everyone— including at times, the survivor— believe that there was no rape. Second, it may also lead to immense shame for the survivor in the absence of any reconciliation between feelings of disgust and violation on one hand, and having climaxed while being violated, on the other. Thirdly, this could potentially lead to problems surrounding arousal and orgasm in the future.

Having gone through all three of these scenarios, and the added factum of dissociation, it took me years to come to terms with the gravity of what had occurred. That there was violation along with so much shame also compounded the dissociation which only delayed the recognition of the assault for what it was.

Only when I began seeing a therapist was I able to break these emotions down and understand them. The relief when my therapist helped me understand what my body has learnt through cues and experiences is not to be confused with consent and willingness has made me stop questioning what happened. That biological reactions in the absence of willingness can co-exist. That if I had to be coerced into it, it was rape, regardless of how my body chose to react. There is no retrospective willingness due to the fact that I felt arousal.

I am still dealing with the long term scars that those three years of abuse have left me with. While some of the broken pieces have now been glued with consistent love and safety through the years, I do understand that parts of me may never come back to what they were before any of this happened. But there is solace to be had in the knowledge of what occurred and how my body did not “betray” me. After all, you can't heal without the knowledge of there being hurt.