Sexual Harassment, Assault, and Hypersexualisation: My Story

By Jordan Johnson

One surprisingly cool night in June, I was doing the usual song and dance with a man that I had matched with on Tinder. I was being polite and asking him what he was doing, to keep the conversation going. He said he was watching a movie and invited me to join. I might’ve been relatively new to hookup culture, but I wasn’t naive. I knew that if I accepted this invitation, we weren’t going to just be watching a movie – if the movie got put on at all. But I was horny and looking for a way out of the house. So, I said yes. He ordered an uber for me to his apartment. 

I got to his front door at 1 am, overdressed and heart-racing, not knowing what awaited me behind the door. The door opened to a brown-skinned man, a few inches shorter than me, who led me to his bedroom. Music was blaring from a laptop resting on the bed. We exchanged small talk and a blunt before he put his hand on my thigh and leaned over to kiss my neck. I’d been here before. I knew the logical next moves to make; I still felt a little awkward completing them. 

However, it became scarily unfamiliar very quickly. He stuck his fingers in me hard and put a hand around my throat so tight that I couldn’t quite breathe. It felt like he was made of hands. They were moving too fast for me to track. One minute there were fingers shoved too deep in my mouth, and the next my head was being yanked up so that he could have room to bite at my breasts. It all felt surreal. 

Short of refusing to have penetrative sex without a condom, I let it happen because I wanted to get home in the same shape that I had arrived in. After he finished, he stood up and started messing around on his phone. A minute passed in silence before he looked up to tell me that my Lyft was arriving in five minutes. I blinked the shock away and started pulling on my clothes. I received a hurried and cold farewell and made my way home.

This experience was over a year ago now. As I’ve matured sexually (at that time, I was still new to sex as a whole), I’ve learned that I do like rougher sex. The difference being that with partners following this we’ve always discussed what was okay for both of us before we did it. I feel comfortable setting explicit boundaries in a way that I did not at the time of my assault. 

While I am deeply traumatised by what happened to me and do hold anger towards the man for what he did, I don’t know if I can completely blame him for it. There should’ve been more communication by both of us to make it a better experience. That didn’t happen, however, so now I’m left to heal from it and address how I handle sexual relationships going forward. 

In the days following what happened, the idea of sexual trauma kept popping into my head even as I repeatedly shut it down. I kept telling myself that I never explicitly said no. I knew what I was agreeing to when I walked into his apartment. 

Maybe my issue was with casual sex more than anything else. It boiled down to my feeling like a used thing. It was dehumanising to have my body be manipulated in ways that weren’t always enjoyable and being ushered out without a word when my usefulness was over. Without knowing how to address this feeling further, I pushed it to the back of my mind. However, in doing so I found myself leaning more into Tinder and the aggressively horny men on there. 

Hypersexuality became the word of the day. It is a surprisingly common symptom amongst people who have endured a sexually related trauma. It happens as a way to foster a sense of control over one’s sex life, control that was taken away during the traumatic incident. I didn’t want to ever be caught off guard like that again. 

When I continued to have sex, there was always an aspect of it that was firmly under my control, whether it be the location or what happens in the buildup, or even the positions that we had sex in. There’s always a desire to have something I know I can shut down if need be. I thought engaging more in hookup culture would help me move past what happened last June. Unfortunately, it exacerbated the separation I felt between my body and my sense of self. 

A concept that I think a lot about is the hypersexualisation of ‘thicker’ femme bodies. Even when I was looking for more casual sex, I would still be disgusted at the number of men that would hurry away from getting to know me to find out what they could do to me in bed. It felt like my value as a person was tied to my appearance rather than my personality. This led to a skewed sense of self and, consequently, a steady decline in my self-esteem. 

I grew up in New York City; I know what sexual harassment looks like. In the history of my experiences with that, the moment that recently triggered a depressive episode was pretty basic. I was going to meet up with a friend and a man followed me out of the train station trying to talk to me. If you’ve been through this, you know the multitude of emotions that start streaming through your body. The fear that sits in your spine, the anger curling your hands into fists, the resentment and tiredness weighing down your shoulders. What does it feel like to simply exist in your body without someone making you into a sexual object? I don’t know if I know. And this strange man made me wonder if I’ve ever known. 

The first time a grown man tried to talk to me in a non-platonic way, I was twelve. My parents’ genes combined so that I developed way ahead of my peers. My breasts and my butt have only continued to grow since then, so the comments have multiplied. Men struggle to take no for an answer no matter what you look like, but as ‘thickness’ remains trendy, women (particularly women of colour) whose bodies adhere to that standard are sexualised more often and are thus at increased risk of harassment. This all led to my growing resentment of these parts of my body. I do not want to be perceived as a woman because it’s begun to not feel like a part of myself anymore. 

Eventually, after a lot of therapy and self-reflection, I stopped giving time to men who made me feel that way and focused my attention more on my friends and a couple of people that demonstrated that they could value me personally as well as engage with me as a sexual being.