She even took my hands and placed them her breasts and then between her thighs to show me how in need of sex she was and how I should also be turned on as well. I wasn’t turned on. In fact, I was the opposite. I tried to move my hands off her, but she kept grabbing me and putting them back on her body.

stereotypical understandings of women as sexually harmless,

Male victims may experience pressure to interpret sexual victimization by women in a way more consistent with masculinity ideals, such as the idea that men should relish any available opportunity for sex

38 percent of victims were men

In order to live sexual lives, people with intellectual disability needregular social lives so that they can make friends, education about sexuality and their ownbodies, a means of communicating their sexual needs, opportunity for sexual expressionand relationships, privacy, and the right to make mistakes. All of these are aspects of ourown lives which we take for granted and removal of those rights would cause us con-sternation.

Poor life experiences lead to limited knowledge of the body, sexuality and sexualexpression.

By denying individuals with intellectual disability the opportunity to learn abouttheir sexuality and develop social relationships with others, society has denied themthe right to self-fulfilment.

blog posts begin by challenging the idea that experiences of abuse are rare. For example, Kitty Stryker's (2011a) post, 'I never called it rape', describes several experiences when saying 'no' or safewording were not respected, when dominants used toys or engaged in practices which she had not consented to and/or had explicitly stated that she did not want, and where dominants had continued with play after a scene had ended.

The spate of erotic books that have been published in the wake of Fifty Shades almost all retain the successful male dominant/inexperienced female submissive dynamic

The books include explicit references to BDSM contracts, safewords, and checklists of activities, drawing on common understandings and practices from BDSM communities.

Not only are women disproportionately targeted, but they experience disproportio-nately negative consequences when they are targeted.‘The sexual double standard’(Mil-hausen & Herold,2002) rewards men for heterosexual sexual behaviors but stigmatizesand punishes women for the same (while simultaneously demanding it from them).

Even more alarming, privacy law has shielded abusive men from the legal consequencesof their actions. Prior the feminist movement, conventional legal wisdom held that homeand family were a man’s private domain and not to be interfered with by the state, even incases of physical or sexual assault

The use of the phrase‘especially a woman’in the earlier mentioned Supreme Court rul-ing is case and point; not only is it patronizing but it implies an imperative of modesty forwomen. The purpose is to suggest that women deserve extra protection, but by linking ofprotections to gender presentation, it creates a scenario where a court may blame a victimif it deems she has not appropriately performed femininity. In other words, recognition ofthe right to bodily integrity is made contingent upon one’s conformity to social norms,particularly with regards to gender

Media and popular culture of all kinds does shape the way we think about sex, about our own sexuality, about the kinds of sex we should and should not be having— regardless of our age or sexual experience. But it does this in complex ways that are not reducible to simple cause- and- effect statements. We all bring different experiences to our readings of media, resulting in different interpreta-tions.

As romance novels are predominantly aimed at and read by women audiences, the messages they send about what an ideal romantic relationship looks like are a target of feminist scrutiny.

106chaPter 5An alternative and perhaps more constructive ap-proach to the idea that pornography acts as a major source of knowledge and sexual scripts not just for young people but for many in our society has come in the form of sex and relationships education materials.

expression and ex-ploration of sexuality is a key part of that improvement project, then there is significant pressure to engage in sex in order to continually improve ourselves.

In long-term relationships, unwanted sex is some-times explained as relationship maintenance: doing things for your partner, even if you do not necessarily want to, in order to make or keep them happy or

Sometimes, we may choose to have sex for rea-sons other than desire (for instance as work, or as a way of becoming pregnant). But in many cases unwanted sex is experienced as a violation, or at least as something not quite right, and nonetheless consented to.

There is, for instance, a myth that sex workers cannot be raped—that the nature of their work means they waive the right to withhold consent.

It works side by side with the myth that unless a woman put up the utmost resistance (screamed, kicked, fought, tried to run away, and sustained other physical injuries in the process), she consented.

Where the stranger rape myth suggests that we can tell if it was a rape from the circumstances and the relationship between victim and perpetrator, the violent rape myth suggests that we can tell whether rape allegations are true from the physical state of the victim, again detracting from the core question of consent

It also includes a culture where not only gender, but also race, sexual orientation, age, disability, and myriad other dif-ferences are wielded as tools of power

14chaPter 2Bodily autonomy is the idea that you get to decide what you do with your body, what happens to it, who else has access to it, and how that access is obtained and exercised. And you should be able to make those decisions without external pressure, coercion, or others wielding power over you.