I Don’t Know if It Was Bad Sex or Sexual Assault
A few years ago I had sex with a stranger in a hotel room
For a long time I filed it away as a bad hookup, awkward sex, an unpleasant experience that did not need to mean anything more than that
Recently that stopped feeling so simple
I saw a TikTok talking about sexual assault statistics and it brought the memory back in a different way. Not like some huge revelation, more like a small shift that made it harder to put back in the box where I had been keeping it
I think part of what made this so unsettling is that I wanted a clean answer immediately. If it was not sexual assault then maybe I could put it back in the box of awkward sex and move on. If it was sexual assault then maybe whatever confusing mix of feelings I have (or will have) are valid
Instead I seem to be stuck in between
What happened
What happened on the day is not hard to describe
I met a stranger in the hotel lobby and brought him up to my room. I was interested. I had agreed to it. We started having sex
Then almost immediately after he penetrated me I wanted it to stop
I did not say no. I did not tell him to stop. I just froze
I went still and silent and waited for it to be over
At the time the main thing in my head was that the fastest way to get him out of the room was to let him finish. I did not want him frustrated or uncomfortable in a way that would cause conflict and lead to him staying longer. I just wanted it to end in the quickest, least complicated way possible
That feels ugly to admit because it sounds so passive. It makes me sound like someone who could have said something and did not. Maybe that is true. Maybe it is not. I genuinely do not know
I also do not know if I was scared
Until recently I would not have used that word at all. I would have said I felt uncomfortable, that I wanted it to stop, that I froze, but not that I was scared. Now I am less sure, at the time I was not out to anyone and I was dressed femme. Even outside of this situation I was already deathly afraid of people seeing me and judging me. So in hindsight I wonder if part of me was afraid of causing a scene or being noticed or being seen like that. I do not know if that is a real explanation or something I am projecting backward now
All I know for certain is that for an uncomfortable amount of time I was lying on a bed and having sex I didn't want while trapped in my own head trying to figure out how to get out of this situation
How I thought about it afterward
For years none of this felt important enough to examine properly
I told myself it was just a bad sexual experience a sort of "Everyone has awkward sex sometimes" or "Everyone tries things they do not end up liking" That was the category I put it in and I more or less left it there
What started to bother me recently was realizing that when most people talk about trying something sexually and not liking it there is usually a moment where one person stops enjoying it says so and the other person stops
It seems obvious when written out like that but can I still say I didn't consent if I didn't verbalize my desire to stop and there's no clear danger from the other person to justify this
Maybe because it is much easier to talk about consent in the abstract than to apply it to your own life, especially when your own behavior does not look like the clean version people use in examples. There was no shouted no, no dramatic struggle, no clear line that I could point to and say "There! That was the moment, that was obviously assault any normal person would know it"
I thought I understood consent
The most embarrassing part to admit is that I thought I was good at understanding consent
I am involved in kink spaces where consent is treated as important and actively talked about. In a lot of ordinary life people seem to assume everyone knows what consent is. In kink scenes people make a point of discussing it and setting clear standards. I think because of that I had this unexamined confidence that I knew what sexual assault looked like
That feels even more confusing because in my relationships before and since then consent on both sides has been enthusiastic, explicit and ongoing. It has meant talking through safe words, limits and creating an environment where saying no is okay. That kind of clarity feels normal to me which makes it harder to understand why I suddenly do not know what I am looking at when I try to apply those ideas here
I thought I would be able to clearly tell when something crossed that line
Apparently not
A friend I told later basically said the same thing. That he would have expected me of all people to know. He did not mean it badly. It was just one more thing that made the whole thing feel stranger. How can I say I understand consent if I don't even know how to classify my own experience?
Trying to get an answer
After the TikTok brought it back I started trying to get an answer
First I thought about it on my own. Then I searched online which was not very helpful because everything either felt too vague or too certain. Then I called a sexual assault hotline
What I wanted from that call was simple. I wanted someone to tell me whether it was or was not sexual assault
I was not really calling for emotional support, I wanted a verdict. I wanted someone else to hear the facts and tell me which box this belonged in so I knew what to do with it. If it was not sexual assault I could go back to thinking of it as an awkward hookup and forget about it. If it was then maybe I could start unpacking whatever I am supposed to feel about that
The hotline call
The person on the other end was very kind. That matters. This was not a problem of them being cold or dismissive
They focused much more on consent and on how I feel about it now
That was the problem though, I don't know how I feel about it now
I do not know if I feel violated, angry, sad or almost nothing. I do not know if feeling very little means it genuinely does not affect me much or if I filed it away under the wrong name for years and now do not know how to think about it
That left the call feeling unresolved. Not because they did anything wrong, I came just wanting a clear answer and got directed back toward my own feelings which are the exact thing I do not understand
Telling a friend
A few days ago I mentioned it to a friend
It was basically a doorknob confession. We were finishing up a call and I half-jokingly introduced it like that to ease into it, I told him about the experience and how lately I have been trying to figure out whether it was sexual assault or just bad sex that I have started interpreting differently years later
He was compassionate, a little surprised (obviously) but kind
What threw me off was my own reaction
I felt almost nothing while saying it. Not nothing in the sense that I do not care, more like I was reporting the weather. Normally if I tell someone something personal especially something confusing and unresolved where I am not even asking for anything specific I would expect to feel embarrassed or awkward or emotional. Instead I felt weirdly flat
And that made me more confused, not less
If this was sexual assault should I not feel more? If it was just a bad hookup why am I spending time trying to classify it at all? If I can say it out loud that calmly does that mean it was not serious or does it mean nothing except that people react strangely to things they do not know how to name?
The part that makes this harder
I think part of the confusion may also be that I already have this general belief in life that I do not really deserve happiness or anything nice
If something good happens it feels like there are strings attached or like I don't really deserve it. If something bad happens it makes sense to me very quickly. I can usually come up with a reason why it was justified, fair, expected or somehow my fault. Not just in this situation but in general
If a friend excludes me I can tell myself they probably do not actually enjoy my company and that makes sense. If something goes badly I can usually explain why it was deserved. Bad things happen to everyone but when they happen to me they make sense
So I think part of what is confusing me here is that if this was just bad sex that fits pretty neatly into that framework "Fine, it was unpleasant. I deserve unpleasant things all the time" is easy enough to absorb
But if it was sexual assault then I do not know what to do with that
Because on the one hand I have this deeply ingrained habit of explaining bad things happening to me as deserved. On the other hand, I do not actually believe that anyone deserves to be assaulted. I can say that very easily about other people. No one deserves that. It feels obvious. But when I try to apply that to myself, something breaks
I do not know how to reconcile those two things
The embarrassment
There is another layer to this that I also find hard to admit
Part of me is embarrassed that I am even having this question at all
Maybe I am turning an uncomfortable hookup into something bigger than it was. Maybe this was just bad sex and I am being dramatic. Maybe even writing this down makes it look like I am trying to rewrite an awkward experience into something more serious so I can cast myself as a victim
I am not consciously doing that, I am not sitting here trying to get pity but I know that is one possible reading of what I am doing and I find that deeply embarrassing
That makes it harder to think clearly. I am not only trying to work out what happened, I am also trying to work out whether even asking the question says something bad about me
What I feel now
I keep circling the same questions
Sometimes I go about my day normally and feel basically nothing about it, other times I sit there with my headphones on trying to force myself to work out what exactly I am feeling
I do not know whether I want to put this back in the box of awkward sex or start pulling it apart as something more serious
The part I dislike most
I do know that I still want someone else to decide for me
That is probably the part I dislike most. Not just the confusion itself but how badly I want an external ruling. I want someone to tell me whether I am mixing up bad sex with sex I did not consent to. I want someone to tell me whether this is something I can safely minimize or something I need to properly work through
Maybe it's because just having these questions at all means I don't properly understand consent & SA. Maybe it is because if I pick the wrong box I am scared of what that says about me
I do not really have a conclusion here. I don't know what the fuck it was or how the fuck to feel about it