Lucy, 24, has now been in a steady relationship for a year, and she’s beginning to look back on previous sexual encounters through a new lens.
“There was the friend of a friend who slapped me so hard in the middle of us having sex – no warning, just from nowhere. It actually made my teeth rattle. There was another guy I met at a bar. We got together that night and he started choking me so hard, I felt this sharp pressure, this pain I’d never experienced before. I was drunk but it sobered me up in one second. I still wonder what he did to me to cause that pain.”
“Among my friends, there’s this competitiveness about not being boring, not being ‘vanilla’. I think it’s very prevalent for women my age, and no one wants to kink-shame anyone… There’s a lot of talk about online porn and what that has done to men’s brains and expectations, but I also saw a lot of very violent porn when I was a teenager. I don’t know why or how I found it. The women in porn never push back or say, ‘Don’t do that’ when they’re choked. I think I became quite performative. I like to think I’m a strong woman but… I don’t know if it’s about male validation.”
In 2018, Fiona Mackenzie formed We Can’t Consent To This (WCCTT) in response to the growing number of women and girls killed or injured during violence that was claimed to be consensual.
“When we began, we were focusing on two aspects. The first was the men who were successfully using the ‘rough sex defense’ to murder women, claiming it was consensual and therefore getting away with it or getting ludicrously short sentences. The other part, which is the part I didn’t realize was an issue until a month or two in, was that so many young women were being strangled by their sexual partners.”