Forced Into Sex

Do you ever get the feeling you are being told what to do? If you do are you like me and feel the need to say “No!”?

Being forced into any situation is wrong, but sex without consent is rape. Of course the most obvious kind of rape is the horrible, physical rape mainly perpetrated by men against women. A crime that ranks alongside murder as one of the most abhorrent acts that one human being can carry out against another.

Is it too much of a leap of an extension of the coercion theme to assert that peer pressure and the effects of the media are a form of rape too? The pressure to act a certain way, indulge in a particular sexual practice or indeed experience sex at all is something that has always been present in society yet with sex so omnipresent in magazines and on TV that pressure seems to be almost irresistible to some in society.

Sex is a wonderful thing and can give a huge amount of pleasure to those that indulge in it. I don’t just mean the physical release of orgasm, I’m talking about the joy which can come from discovery, finding out about yourself and your partner too. Sex is very personal and a because of that feeling that you should or should not be acting in a certain way in the bedroom because of an outside influence doesn’t work for me.

I’m all for education and enlightenment, without it we can never make informed decisions and grow as individuals. But when education becomes indoctrination and people are scared to question the advice and proclamations of “experts” or “gurus” something has gone wrong.

When you are growing up and becoming sexual aware there is a pressure from those around you to get laid and lose that heaviest of burdens for a teenage boy, virginity. That in itself was a heavy enough burden, I pity anyone in 2010 who has to discard their virginity without any regard for its worth.

Perhaps I’m getting old but the expectation that sex is part of a night out and a form of social currency makes me feel uncomfortable. I wonder how difficult it is to say no?