Consent: some might find it an easy concept to grasp, but sadly the same can’t be said for others.
One young woman has shared an incredibly candid and heartbreaking tale about a time she didn’t consent to sex.
It serves as an important reminder to young girls and women everywhere that any grey area surrounding sex is certainly not consent.
The post, which was shared on the Humans of New York Facebook page, explains how the girl - who was in her early teens at the time - was drinking with a guy she had been seeing.
He kept asking her to have sex with him. She was “terrified” and kept saying “maybe”.
The guy told her he’d flip a coin to decide. When he did, it fell in his favour and they ended up having sex.
In the courageous post, which has garnered more than 143,000 reactions, the young woman explained that she felt hurt after it had happened and thought she was “being overly sensitive”.
“It took five years for me to realise that consent is not a coin flip,” she concluded.
Consent has been a particularly hot topic over the past year. One person who has been praised for her analogy of it is Emmeline May, who likened it to making a cup of tea.
The idea was later used by Thames Valley Police as part of their #ConsentisEverything campaign.
In a blog post published on The Huffington Post UK, May wrote: “If you say ‘hey, would you like a cup of tea?’ and they go ‘omg fuck yes, I would fucking LOVE a cup of tea! Thank you!*’ then you know they want a cup of tea,” she wrote.
“If you say ‘hey, would you like a cup of tea?’ and they um and ahh and say, “I’m not really sure...” then you can make them a cup of tea or not, but be aware that they might not drink it, and if they don’t drink it then - this is the important bit - don’t make them drink it.
“You can’t blame them for you going to the effort of making the tea on the off-chance they wanted it; you just have to deal with them not drinking it. Just because you made it doesn’t mean you are entitled to watch them drink it.”
She added that if a person says they don’t want tea, then don’t make them a tea, don’t make them drink it and “don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea”.
Some people might say they want a tea, but when that tea arrives they realise they don’t actually want it at all, she continued.
“They remain under no obligation to drink the tea,” she explained. “They did want tea, now they don’t. Sometimes people change their mind in the time it takes to boil that kettle, brew the tea and add the milk.
“And it’s ok for people to change their mind, and you are still not entitled to watch them drink it even though you went to the trouble of making it.”
She concluded: “If you can understand how completely ludicrous it is to force people to have tea when they don’t want tea, and you are able to understand when people don’t want tea, then how hard is it to understand when it comes to sex?”
