My friend and I were both 12, our bodies simmering with new hormones.
We had known each other since elementary school. Sometimes I would ride my bike over to his house, and we would kiss on the floor of his bedroom amid the lacrosse pads and video-game controllers. This would never have flown in my own house, but his mother was not as vigilant as mine. His older brother, a few years ahead of us in school, was handsome in a cruel sort of way, and though he had never before acknowledged me, I had a crush on him.
One afternoon, as my friend and I shared a bag of chips in his kitchen, his brother arrived home with two friends, one of whom I recognized as the boyfriend of my neighbor. These boys were brash, and it was difficult to tease apart the allure and threat of them. When the brother’s gaze settled on me, my mind jittered. I was old enough to recognize that he was showing off for his friends, and I felt the careening wildness of that instinct, like a bike with an uncertain wheel. When he asked me to step into the bathroom with them, though I saw the look on my friend’s face — don’t, it said — I couldn’t stop. I might have stood on the deck of a departing ship and he on the shore.
By 12, I already felt vulnerable with a group of boys. As they encircled me, my heart sped. I don’t think they had any particular intention to harm me. They had probably expected me to decline. Now, there was a crackling energy between them that my presence kindled. I think we all felt its heat, what was suddenly possible. When the older brother asked me which one of them I liked best, I did not tell the truth despite my crush, because there was a hardness that I sensed more palpably in him than the rest, a curiosity about his own strength and an eagerness to test it.
I named my neighbor’s boyfriend, most likely out of some instinct that his loyalty to her might offer me some incidental protection. Were the others relieved or disappointed when they filed out of that dark bathroom?
It was different to kiss someone so much larger than me, so unknown. He shoved his fingers past the waist of my jeans, then inside me. Then, he pushed down on my shoulder, just firmly enough to indicate his desire. I came as close to no as I could without saying it. To my great relief, he suggested a hand-job instead. I don’t remember anything about the act, which must have been clumsy because of my lack of experience, but I remember the pattern of the hand towel that hung behind him: blue flowers. I don’t remember the humiliation of exiting that bathroom. What I remember is that I never again met my friend — a friend I had sort of loved — at his house after school.
In the years that followed, I sometimes saw my neighbor’s boyfriend. A few years later, our social circles overlapped, and we were sometimes at the same parties. Whenever I saw him, I felt deeply embarrassed, not only for myself and what I’d consented to but also for him, because I knew he had done wrong. But somehow it was his wrongs that embarrassed me, as if it were rude of me to remember them. I certainly never spoke of it, or any number of similar experiences, to anyone. These are the first words I’ve ever given it.
All sorts of long-buried memories of touch have been rising to the surface lately. It has been a year since we retreated from social life, and as our return to some semblance of it approaches, a specific dread has been brewing in me. Over the past year, I have often daydreamed about embracing my friends, holding my infant nephew and getting a professional massage. I have even craved those less intimate forms of touch: crowded dance floors, the ecstasy of a rough shampooer at the hair salon. But this long isolation has also been a respite from navigating forms of touch that I find more intrusive, even violating.
The phrase “skin hunger,” the state of longing that results from touch deprivation, has become newly familiar to many, but we still don’t have words for the receiving of touch we don’t crave but commonly endure and even consent to because we don’t feel entitled to resist it. I mean encounters like mine with that older teenager, but also countless less disturbing ones: the impulsive fondling of pregnant women’s bellies, hugs from mere acquaintances, sex that we simply aren’t in the mood for. During the pandemic, I have been happy to live without the inevitable close-talking men at literary or work events. I do not miss shoulder squeezes, back pats, draped arms or even handshakes. Of course, plenty of people don’t tolerate touch they feel ambivalent about or actively abhor, but I suspect that a majority of them live in male-identified bodies.
This year, at home with my partner, Donika, has been the first in which I have experienced only touch that I enthusiastically want. This has left more space for me to relate to my own body, to understand when I need to retreat or when I crave touch and what kind. These signals have been like a song, forever broken by the static of other people’s wants, that I have been able to hear uninterrupted for the first time.
For more than three years in my early 20s, I worked as a professional dominatrix. Now I can see that part of what drew me to the job was its explicit forum for negotiating physical boundaries. Before every session I would have a forthright conversation with my client about what we would and wouldn’t do and what our safe words would be. At the time, however, my explanation for why I took the position was that it paid more than food service, which described most of the jobs I had since I was 14. I was a feminist, I told my family and friends, and it was a feminist job. Or I was basically a kind of therapist, but in a corset and leather boots. I always played down the physical and sexual aspects of the work, though of course they were primary, for both my clients and me.
The sessions in which a client wanted some form of tenderness or sensuality were just as common as the ones that included insults. My clients were often profoundly lonely men and often trauma survivors. I have no doubt that a significant percentage suffered from skin hunger. It sometimes felt to me as though their skin were a tapestry of invisible mouths, all clamoring to be fed.
My first year on the job, I preferred the sessions in which a client wanted to be tended to with affection rather than corporeal punishment or humiliation. But over time, my comfort with more sensual sessions became distaste and eventually close to loathing. To enact tenderness often felt like a greater betrayal of self than many sexual acts. To let those men into a space — both physical and mental — reserved for people I loved would contaminate it. I instinctually understood that I could not let them in or else the meaning of intimacy would change for me. The problem was that it was also my job to exchange touch with them in the ways they most craved, whether coddling or cruel. So, I detached and locked them out. It may be more accurate to say that I locked myself in.
Later, when people asked me what I felt during these sessions, I answered honestly: “Nothing.” I remember many of my early sexual interactions with boys and men this way.
I don’t refer to any of my experiences in sex work or my early sexual interactions as traumatic, because it is an inexact description, and moreover the assumptions that the word prompts in the minds of others would be incorrect. Trauma, especially in the context of sex and sex work, connotes victimization. Unlike many of the world’s sex workers, I did not have sex work forced upon me by another person or circumstance; I chose it. Likewise, I have never been sexually assaulted.
Etymologically, the word “trauma” originates from the Greek word for “wound,” and that is typically how we use it today, to describe both physical and psychological wounds. I have often wished for a different word, one that implies profound, often inhibitive, change, but precludes the violence inherent in “trauma.” Sometimes I use the word “event,” whose etymology suggests consequences rather than wounds. As I’ve observed the more longitudinal effects of my past experiences — the recurrent dreams and tendency to detach from uncomfortable situations — I’ve become less interested in classifying what it was than in observing what it did to my psyche.
In a brain scan of a patient experiencing dissociation — referred to in extreme cases as “depersonalization” — the brain’s usual areas of activity look like empty fields, marred only by pixelated blemishes here and there. There is significantly decreased emotional affect. It is often described as an out-of-body feeling, the sense of a consciousness detached from the corporeal self, perhaps watching it as one would a figure in a diorama. Which is exactly why it is so effective as a survival mechanism. The frozen self doesn’t feel the affect of that self, though it is recorded in the body.
Sex work taught me a vocabulary for consent, but in it I also refined my techniques for silencing my own wishes. Something that I began to understand in the years that followed, and that this past year has clarified even further, is that every single touch has either reinforced or degraded my sense of autonomy.
Sex work taught me a vocabulary for consent, but in it I also refined my techniques for silencing my own wishes.
A few years ago, more than a decade after I quit working as a domme, a friend texted me a link to an event listing for something called a cuddle party. Reading its description, which sounded something like a platonic orgy with clear boundaries, I felt a powerful mixture of attraction and repulsion. The force of this response piqued my curiosity. Experience has taught me that kneejerk repulsion is a kind of metal detector; when such an alarm sounds, there is usually something buried nearby, something better dug up. When I expressed my curiosity to Donika, she volunteered to accompany me.
“There is so much emphasis on consent,” she pointed out after perusing the website. “You don’t have to cuddle with anyone you don’t want to.” It was true. The website listed the rules of the cuddle party, which included:
1. Pajamas stay on the whole time.
2. You don’t have to cuddle anyone at a Cuddle Party, ever.
3. You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before you touch anyone.
4. If you’re a yes, say YES. If you’re a no, say NO.
5. If you’re a maybe, say NO.
6. You are encouraged to change your mind.
Now I can see that the cuddle party presented another appealing forum to practice my own physical boundaries. Unlike with sex work, my livelihood didn’t depend on my consent. This time, I would be paying to participate.
I drove us to the location on the Upper West Side. At the top of a narrow stairway were rows of discarded shoes. We slid ours off and pushed open the cracked door. The floor of the loft had been arranged as an enormous bed, laid with wide cushions, blankets and pillows. The waning sunlight spilled in through two windows on whose sills sat an assortment of crystals. I took a deep breath.
We picked our way to a clearing on the floor and carefully settled. A young man with a nervous face sat nearby as well as a man in a teal onesie — like adult-size footsie pajamas — stroking the arm of a blond woman in fleece pants and a worn T-shirt.
The host spoke in a warm tone as he reviewed the rules. At the third rule (You must ask permission and receive a verbal “yes” before you touch anyone), he asked us to turn to a nearby person and perform a role play. One person would ask, “Do you want to cuddle?” The other would answer, “No.” The first would then respond, “Thank you for taking care of yourself.”
The nervous young man and I faced each other.
“Do you want to cuddle?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and my mouth involuntarily stretched into a smile, as if I needed to soften the refusal. My face grew hot, and I felt myself blinking quickly. Was it really so hard for me to give an anticipated no? I felt uneasy, surprised by the strength of my reaction to the exercise.
Next, the host asked us to repeat the role play, but this time to ask our partners, “Can I kiss you?” Kissing is not allowed at the cuddle party, so this exercise was even more forgone than the previous one. Still, I had no interest whatsoever in kissing the young man, and to pretend, even in this transparent context, increased my discomfort exponentially. My voice croaked when I asked, and his face flushed when he said no. When he asked me, and I refused him again, my tone was so apologetic that it seemed farcical. I couldn’t seem to control my affect; like a pinched hose, the words eked out of me in odd directions.
By the time we finished the orientation, I would have been happy to leave. Instrumental spa music played as people crawled around the soft floor and entwined. The man in the teal onesie crawled over to me.
“Hi,” he said affably. “Want to spoon with me?”
“Sure,” I said. I did not hesitate to assess whether I really wanted to spoon with him. I had no lucid thought about it at all. I simply agreed and we settled on the chenille-blanketed floor. He curled around me. I did not think, I do not want this man’s body curled around me. My uneasiness did not occur as a thought at all. It was more like a shift in temperature or light, a texture inside of me that roughened.
“Can I rub your arm?” he asked, his breath on the back of my neck.
I nodded. I did not think of the verbal consent requirement. His body was warm against mine, and his touch didn’t wander from my arm. I felt the nubs on the sleeve of his onesie rub against my bare skin. I wondered for how long I needed to remain in this position to avoid seeming rude. To describe the way I felt as a “maybe” would be generous, but I did not consider Rule 5 (If you’re a maybe, say no). I did not feel “encouraged to change my mind.” That is, whatever the culture of the cuddle party, the culture inside of me presented its own dictates. It was not the warmly lit loft of my late 30s. It was a twilit space in which my thoughts moved like half-remembered dreams. It was a hallway with a closed door at the end. In it, I was half stranger.
When the man in the teal onesie proposed spooning, my yes traveled down some well-worn pathway, sure as a streetcar in its laid track. My body seemed to have recognized the situation as one in which complacency was the only option; its own desires or lack thereof instantly became secondary to this instinct.
It made sense. For years, it had been my actual job to override my own desire or lack of desire to accommodate the erotic fantasies of men. The neural pathways seared during that time easily crackled to life and produced their old responses. I found myself longing to talk with other former sex workers, so I reached out to some friends. When I asked if they’d ever consented on the job to touching that they didn’t want, their answers were unanimous.
My body seemed to have recognized the situation as one in which complacency was the only option; its own desires or lack thereof instantly became secondary to this instinct.
“Well, sure,” said Hallie, a friend who worked as a stripper in her 20s. “You could technically end an interaction whenever you wanted, but did you ever?”
“Almost every day that I worked,” said Margo, who had been employed by my old dungeon.
“I never enjoyed sex that I was paid for,” Lynn, a former colleague, said. “But I often wanted it because of the money. And, like anything, sometimes it was more bearable than other times.”
Sex work had been a place where we all learned to negotiate consent and also where we refined our ability to tolerate touch we consented to but did not want. None of their answers surprised me until I asked if they’d ever consented to touch that they didn’t want before they became a sex workers.
“All the time,” Lynn said. “I thought that’s what I was there for. I had no idea that I had any other worth besides what pleasure I could provide for men and boys. I was very confused for a long time about who my body belonged to.”
“I honestly think ambivalence was as good as it ever got for me sexually until I was like 23 or so, and I had sex a lot, beginning at age 16,” Hallie said.
If anything their responses made a case against sex work’s increasing the likelihood of their consenting to touch they didn’t want. I wondered more about the other factors they shared that might have primed them for what I began to think of as empty consent. I decided to survey some women who had never participated in the sex industry and designed five questions with my own experience in mind: Have you ever consented to touching — sexual or otherwise — that you did not want or felt ambivalent about? Have your boundaries around touch and relationship to consent changed much since your teen years? In the end, I collected about 30 responses from friends and friends of friends, mostly women in their 30s and 40s, educated, middle-class, about half of them white. I didn’t ask about their sexual preferences, but a good number of them identify as queer.
I was not prepared for the emotional experience of reading what were often lengthy, detailed accounts, entire lives punctuated by unwanted touch. Many of the women wrote at the end of the survey that they had never articulated the events therein to anyone, sometimes including themselves.
All of the women reported having experienced some form of nonconsensual touch — from rape to public groping to creepy hugs to “the Quaker rub” as one subject’s fellow congregation members privately referred to a common aspect of their hugging tradition.
“From my 20s until my early 30s (when I married), being touched without consent was honestly just part of ‘being a woman,’” one wrote. “My job as a woman was to roll my eyes or laugh and move on.”
“Hmm, every time I’ve had sex?” Holly, a successful entrepreneur in her early 40s, said. “Literally. Every sexual encounter, there has always been an element of ambivalence.”
On some level, we know how often we are touched by men without our consent, from childhood onward: belly and cheek pinches, tickling, waist squeezes. But most of us rarely talk or even think about it. Really, you need look no further to understand why a woman would be “very confused about who my body belonged to” or even why she would consent to being cuddled by a stranger. Despite warnings of overt sexual molestation, we are mostly socialized not to reject the hands of others.
Shortly before we began social distancing, I went to a birthday party for a friend in Fort Greene, in Brooklyn. It was a warm and casual event attended mostly by artists and writers, a few children. My friend’s apartment on the third floor of a brownstone grew increasingly crowded as the night progressed. I stood in the kitchen, engrossed in conversation, when a tall man squeezed past me. As he did so, he rested his hand in the small of my back. It was a familiar gesture; my partner does it multiple times a day as we share our own kitchen. But the intimacy of this stranger’s touch startled me, enough that I glanced up but not so much that it interrupted my conversation. As the startled sensation flickered through my body, it became annoyance and then something sharper: a precursor to fear.
There are many gestures like this that would be welcome from a friend, but for a diminutive woman making my way through the world, they all carry a potential trace of menace when delivered by a stranger, or relative stranger, with the power to physically overwhelm me. I am barely over five feet tall and have spent most of my life looking up at other people, which is a constant reminder that they are looking down at me. The progression of feeling provoked by that stranger’s hand on the small of my back is so subtle and so common that it would be impossible to remember all the countless times it has moved through me and I have ignored it. I was not surprised to see how often the women I surveyed described giving empty consent because they feared something worse. Often, they negotiated a lesser act than the one a man wanted.
Sarah, a 39-year-old writer, described an incident during a college semester abroad. After being groped so forcefully by a fellow American student in a cab on the way back to her dorm that she felt almost certain the boy would rape her if she declined, she agreed to go back to his room. “Even the slight chance (and it didn’t seem slight) that he wouldn’t listen to my ‘no’ made me want to withhold it. It was my last opportunity to salvage any power, to decide what would happen and what it would mean.”
Another woman described being groped, in her 40s, by an elderly man in an adjoining seat at the opera. She said nothing because she didn’t want to “make a scene or disturb the performance.”
Here, I see two powerful imperatives that collaborate to encourage empty consent: the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by displacing the responsibility onto ourselves. I think again of my after-school encounter: my inability to say no and the embarrassment when I saw that boy afterward.
In 2014, California was the first state to pass into law affirmative-consent standards for colleges to apply to sexual-assault cases, followed by New York, Illinois, Connecticut and Colorado. The guidelines for affirmative-consent policy are similar to the code of conduct held by the cuddle party: Consent should be ongoing; should apply to each progressive act; can be rescinded at any time; and cannot be given if a person is incapacitated or under coercion, intimidation or force. As these new standards take hold across our country’s campuses, public discourse around consent has begun to reflect their ethos. That is, we are saying the right things, but the fact remains that we continue to live in a greater world where such statutes are not observed, let alone internalized.
The argument against “yes means yes” policy is that sex is driven spontaneously by desire, and so it is: by the spontaneous desire of the person who most wants it. A 2017 study of male college students published in the journal Violence Against Women confirmed that although participants understood and largely condoned standards of sexual consent, they don’t employ them and consistently “use ambiguous social cues that are common in both consensual and nonconsensual sexual interactions.” As an article published in Time after affirmative-consent legislation passed in California explains, “discussing consent is widely seen as awkward and likely to kill the mood.” As if interrupting a man whose spontaneous desire is prompting him to remove your clothes or penetrate you is not awkward for women who have spent their entire lives being socialized not to upset or disappoint people.
Even if the practices of affirmative consent were adopted by every college student in this country and subsequently spilled into life beyond those privileged spaces, we would all still live in a society in which vast numbers of people are conditioned from childhood to consent to touch we don’t want.
I felt disappointed in myself after the cuddle party, as if my empty consent were a betrayal of my feminist values. But over time, I began to question this assessment, aided by the experiences of all the women I surveyed. What models had I ever encountered for real, enthusiastic consent? Hardly any, until I found a queer community as an adult. Even then, there were few people who seemed capable of the deep attention required to actually know what they wanted, especially when faced with the wants of someone else. I had learned to ignore my body’s signaling as an adolescent and, to some extent, practiced doing so well into my 30s. It was not a habit that would be hastily undone.
Still, when Donika suggested that we attend a second cuddle party so that I could expressly practice saying no, I balked. “Isn’t that rude? Like going to a restaurant and ordering only a glass of water?” She reminded me that it cost the same amount to attend, whether you cuddled or not.
There were few people who seemed capable of the deep attention required to actually know what they wanted, especially when faced with the wants of someone else.
As I again drove uptown, a quiet dread accumulated in me. “We can leave anytime we want,” she reminded me. I knew that my dread was a reason to follow through with it: to teach the dreading part of me that she did not have to do anything she did not want.
Again, we ascended the narrow staircase and deposited our shoes in the mass outside the loft. Then, we made our way to the only clearing on its soft floor. Beside me sat a man whose anxiety radiated from him in waves, like heat corrugating the air.
“Hi,” he said. He had a bright patch of razor burn on his neck, and his face looked clammy. I lifted my hand to offer it to him and then realized that I did not want to shake his hand, so I waved instead. “It’s my first cuddle party,” he told me.
I forced a smile.
“I’m sorry my socks don’t match,” he went on.
“I don’t think anyone will mind,” I said.
Observing this exchange, Donika leaned over and murmured, “Are you doing any unnecessary emotional labor?”
I grimaced at her. If only someone were there to whisper this every hour of my life.
When the orientation began, the host led us through the familiar rules. When he got to Rule 6 (You are encouraged to change your mind), he clarified, “You can simply say, ‘I’m done’ or ‘this isn’t working.’” I felt my eyes prickle with unexpected tears. What a simple idea that was. I thought of my younger self, all those hands I had never wanted to touch me. I thought of all the women’s stories that I now carried. What if we had all been taught that we could stop whenever we wanted?
The final exercise of the orientation was to stand and hug as many people as possible. I rose, suddenly faced with the trunks of other bodies, as if I stood in a forest of men.
“Can I give you a hug?” asked the man whom I had eluded during the role play.
“No, thank you,” I said, and noted the way that I softened the word in my mouth like a cracker I didn’t want to make a sound when I crushed it. I made a mental note to scrub the “thank you” from my response.
“Thank you for taking care of yourself,” he said haltingly.
“Can I hug you?” asked a second man, a third and a fourth.
“No,” I repeated, bracing myself each time. I watched the quick but transparent digestion of the word move through them. In some, it produced flickers of surprise, hurt, disappointment, anger and finally surrender as they finally uttered the phrase “Thank you for taking care of yourself.” I understood that I was enacting a resocialization beyond my own. What if we taught all boys, I wondered, to appreciate this sort of rejection as a form of care?
What if we taught all boys, I wondered, to appreciate this sort of rejection as a form of care?
Ignoring my body’s wishes for decades made them illegible to me, but, gradually, they have become increasingly recognizable. In my fantasies, healing comes like a plane to pull me out of the water. But real healing is the opposite of that. It is dropping down into the lost parts of yourself. A lasting, conscientious change in the self is similar to one in society: it requires consistent tending.
Social norms feel more solid than they are. They discipline us to behave in ways that, ideally, protect our larger society, though that society was not designed to protect everyone. The past year has revealed the plasticity of our social conventions. Now we recoil from outstretched hands and cringe while watching movies in which maskless characters embrace with abandon. If we want to change the ways we touch more permanently, we can. If we want to normalize the sovereignty of all bodies in our society, we can. I am divesting from the system of manners that conditions me to censor my own body in ways that prioritize the desires of others over my own.
I try to envision what might happen, soon, when we have to negotiate these boundaries once again. “Hey!” an acquaintance might greet me on the street, stepping forward with his hands out. Not a hug, but the micro-gesture that precedes one. I imagine my pause, the first impulse to react ignored in favor of a truer one. I smile, without stepping forward. “Nice to see you,” I say with a wave. And then, silently, I thank myself for taking care of myself.
Melissa Febos is the author of the recently published essay collection “Girlhood,” from which this article is adapted. She is also the author of “Whip Smart,” “Abandon Me” and a craft book, “Body Work,” coming in 2022. Marta Blue is an Italian creative director and photographer based in Milan. In 2018 she won a LensCulture Emerging Talent award.
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