Here’s something both interesting and disturbing (hopefully not the first thing you’re reading this morning). A friend is conducting an impromptu, informal poll on her LiveJournal:
Mostly for the girls. But if the guys feel they can contribute, feel free.
Feel free to answer this one anonymously. For how many of you was your first sexual experience consensual? For how many of you was your first penetrative sexual experience consensual? Just curious and doing my own little impromptu poll. Me? Neither.
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p>So far, the responses tally like so:
- Both consensual: 10
- First experience nonconsensual, first penetration consensual: 3
- First experience consensual, first penetration nonconsensual: 2
- Both nonconsensual: 12*
Where both experiences had the same answer, it’s almost — but not quite — 50/50, and the nonconsensual experiences are in the lead. If you combine all instances of nonconsensual firsts into one category, then out of the 27 responses, barely over a third had fully consensual first sexual experiences — and just under two thirds were forced or coerced in some way into their first sexual experiences.
Admittedly, it’s a small sample group to work with, so no real statistics should probably be drawn from this. But I seem to remember hearing fairly often over the years that one out of every three women (people?) would end up being sexually molested at some point in their life. By this sample group, it looks more like two out of every three. Not an encouraging thought in the least.
Just for the record, all sexual experiences I’ve had have been consensual. One of the many things in my life that I’m quite thankful for.
*One comment indicated that both were “technically” consensual, but given the details that were explained, I’ve taken the liberty of adding that tally to this category.
CJ
Brandon
Tim Who?
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Hm… I don’t get it.
Isn’t lack of consent the same thing as rape?
Exactly — that’s pretty much the point, too, and why I found the ratios shown here to be disturbing.
hm, i don’t know, a poll like this is pretty fishy to me.
i don’t want to put a damper on the importance of the subject, but this really provides only a very skewed set of respondents. Meaning that the people who are most likely to respond are those who have had a non-consensual experience. I think it is a good question though and I would want to see the results if it were conducted a little more scientifically.
What I’m wondering is what the responses would’ve been like if the question was,
For how many of you was your first sexual experience a rape?
For how many of you was your first penetrative sexual experience a rape?
I know it’s audacious, but I’m just thinking from an objective point of view.
I mean, if you agree, it’s consent… if consent just means really wanting to do something, about 90% of life is nonconsensual…
I’m guessing the responses would have been essentially the same, if not identical. The point is that these experiences were forced or coerced in some way, against the will of the person. Debating the semantics of “consent” seems a little…well, icky (my brain stalled on finding a better word, sorry).
And Kirsten, it’s certainly not a statistically or scientifically valid poll, and I certainly didn’t try to present it as such. It’s a very small sample group, only really comprised of friends of the person conducting the poll, and it’s entirely possible that some of the respondents may be friends at least in part because of similar experiences in their past, which would definitely skew the results.
As with many other things that I toss up here, it was just something that caught my eye and prompted me to ramble on for a few moments.