Read Online What You Really Really Want by Jaclyn Friedman - Free Book Online

choose to engage only in sexual activities that don’t bring you into contact with your partner’s fluids.
    Sound a lot like my advice on pregnancy prevention? That’s because it is. And you should turn to the same resources to learn more: Planned Parenthood’s page on STD prevention ( www.wyrrw.com/ppss ), a Planned Parenthood counselor, or Our Bodies, Ourselves.
    And the same caveat holds true as well: If nothing quells your fears about STDs, it may be because this fear is a stand-in for deeper fears about sex. The sooner you can figure out what’s really at the root of your fears, the sooner you’ll be able to get what you really really want.
Rape
    When we accept the blame for rape, even hypothetically, the fear of it can really hold us back. “I was taught ‘sit with your legs closed. Don’t be loud. Be damn near unnoticeable,’” says Gray, when she thinks about the rape-prevention messages her family taught her. “And now I feel like there’s this constant corseting I do to myself. A conceptual corseting. It sounds terrible, but at one point, I was afraid of every man I saw on the street.”
    Gray is far from alone. One of the tricky parts of the pernicious myth that women bring rape on ourselves is that women
internalize the blame and then start to worry that anything we do that’s remotely sexual puts us in danger of being raped.
    Let’s clear this up now, shall we? You know what puts you in danger of being raped? Being in the presence of a rapist. You could be wearing seventy-three layers of shapeless, baggy sweats and still be raped if there’s a rapist around. And you can wear your tightest, tiniest, hottest outfit and be completely safe if there’s no one around who has the drive to violate you sexually. Thing is, the fear that acting sexy or sexual will get you raped is based on a misunderstanding of why and how rapists do the horrible things they do. Rapists don’t attack because they want you so bad they can no longer control themselves. Rapists attack because they like raping. And the vast majority of them prefer raping victims they already know. They pick out their victims in advance and deliberately get them into situations where they’re easy to attack. That means they don’t look for victims who are super-sexy, they look for victims who they think will be easy to manipulate. That’s why alcohol is so often involved with sexual assault: Rapists deliberately encourage their targets to get drunk so they’ll be more malleable and less likely to fight back.
    So go ahead. Wear what you like. Flirt how you like. Sleep with whom you want to. None of it is going to “get you” raped, because that’s just not what rape is about.
    And if you’re still struggling with the fear of rape (after all, as many as one in five women in the United States will be raped in her lifetime; it’s not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of), instead of curtailing your own activities, I strongly recommend taking some good self-defense training so you’ll have some more
tools with which to combat those fears. I’ll talk more about self-defense in chapter 4.
Being Labeled a Slut or a Prude
    Being called a slut or a prude hardly ever has anything to do with how much sex you are or aren’t having. Girls who get labeled “sluts” are just girls who seem disobedient or threatening to the status quo. Sometimes this happens just because you have opinions and aren’t afraid to speak up about them. Sometimes it happens because you’ve rejected blame and shame and that can seem like you’re “out of control” to folks who haven’t.
    Girls who get labeled “prudes” aren’t that different, actually. Maybe people call you a prude because you choose not to get drunk, or like to be sexual only with people you’re in a committed relationship with. Sometimes it’s just about your