CONTENT WARNING: This poem deals with sexual assault, domestic violence, and rape. Please do not read it if that might not be safe for you.
In Australia, you can call or visit 1800 Respect if you need confidential support with sexual violence and/or domestic violence.
Sex Ed
I remember snippets of the dodgy 80s VHS.
Puffed up permed hair, shoulder pads in her dress,
melodramatic drawl we’d imitate for weeks:
“but we love each other.”
The most important message she neglected was consent.
“Hand him a quarter.” Yeah, I think that’s 20 cents.
“Tell him to go outside and find a pay phone,
ask your father.”
“But what if Daddy says that’s fine, you two can go have sex?”
Impertinent suggestion! Deliberately insolent!
Well sure, I knew my own Dad would say no
but not all men.
What did this teach impressionable teen girls about respect?
Not that no means no, perhaps no just means “not yet”.
Nor that it was my body, nor really my choice.
“Behave yourself.” What mattered was never my voice.
Turned out what they wanted respected was not me, but a line
that, despite my questions, they couldn’t quite define.
No sex, I understood. But what was “heavy petting”?
Their instructions weren’t quite clear.
Holding hands? A kiss? A cuddle?
Answers only made it more muddled.
We weren’t told never to touch or kiss;
just somehow we should know when this
became that. And stop before —
before what, exactly? No one was sure.
Just know the line. Don’t cross it. Behave.
And they never even covered what happens when you’re wed:
that wedding rings do not negate your right to choice in bed.
JP II had written quite extensively
a theology of my body
and yet this “Catholic” school did not see fit
to teach me that what isn’t given freely is no gift,
that Love is not persistence
until resistance gives in.
They taught me to say “no”
but not what to do if he ignored it.
They taught me all the places
a good girl should never go,
but not how he’d move the line by inches,
each small no bargained down
until what’s left looked like consent
as long as you squinted.
They taught me I should save myself.
God knows, I fucking tried.
But they didn’t teach me what to do
when that choice was pushed aside.
So he wore away my protests
and then trespassed on my lawn,
and assumed that it was fine because he hadn’t yet been caught.
The sign remained in view,
an unambiguous interdiction:
STAY OFF THE GRASS
But when his first attempt — an accident, he says —
went unwitnessed, we all know what happened next.
He took more liberties, until I called him on his crime.
But both of us clearly thought the only sin was mine.
The line had been crossed, and it must be my fault.
He promised he’d have stopped if I’d only whispered “No.”
There was no recognition that I’d been unable to,
nor that I’d very clearly told him what I’d never do.
I didn’t have the words back then to label this as rape,
when he ignored the signs, and pushed aside the crimson tape
to trample on my verdant youth, all for his own pleasure.
All I saw was I had missed the mark when I’d been measured.
Every lesson they had taught me turned the accusations inward.
So I kept it secret,
kept him too,
What else was I supposed to do?
Fast forward to six months before the day we said “I do.”
He turned to me in the car, after we’d allowed the priest to think
that we were waiting still, not living in sin.
He acknowledged gravely that I must have found that hard,
then said he could make it better
with an honest heart-to-heart.
Turns out when he’d told me about the girls he’d fucked before,
they were just lies that made him feel more of a man.
“At least we were each other’s first,”
he said while holding my hand.
He said it with a smile, like this fact erased my hurt,
and he couldn’t understand when I began to cry,
and then he got upset with me
for focusing too much on his lie.
And that day I almost left him,
almost called the whole thing off,
almost found the strength within
to stand up for my worth.
But I parsed the lessons I had learned,
and I thought what mattered was the sex,
not whether I had wanted it;
the disrespected line, not who moved it;
virginity, not consent.
I was never taught the sanctity of my no,
only the gravity of my yes,
so I carried my shame to the altar
fraudulent in a white dress.
I thought I could forgive the lies.
I thought I could forget the pain.
“But we love each other,” and after all,
Love endures all things.
And I thought with naive relief,
that once the ring was on, at least
shame would no longer cause me grief.
Reader, I married him.
But unlike my favourite heroine,
this was no happy ending,
just a variation on the theme.
I endured.
I believed and hoped.
I tried to keep no record of his wrongs.
It took me almost a decade to understand
I’d been loving for us both,
and his wrongs kept their own record
as scars on my soul.
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