That article is cancer. Here's a summary of the parts that relate to the title so you don't have to read the whole thing.
The second date also went swimmingly, until they went back to Jack's flat, where things took an odd turn. Once they'd had sex, Jack turned to her and asked casually if she wanted to join a religion he was founding. As she mumbled a polite reply, Ruskin wondered whether she had inadvertently just agreed to join a cult. When she left the next morning, she was determined not to see him again, but felt pressured to go on a third date when he said he'd bought concert tickets for them both.
And then the date ended with his hand around her throat. 'It probably only lasted a couple of seconds, but they felt agonisingly slow. I couldn't breathe, and my feet weren't quite on the floor.'
Another encounter:
... She had a single vodka and coke — and then blacked out, something which didn't normally happen after two or three drinks. Had her drink been spiked? She doesn't know. When she came round she was lying in the back of a taxi next to Conor*, an auburn-haired man she had been dancing with in the bar. Although she couldn't remember telling him her address, they were on the way to her flat. Once they were inside, he carried her to the sofa, tore off her clothes and, although she was far too drunk to consent, had unprotected sex with her. The next morning he seemed quite unconcerned by what had happened.
Women can decide it was rape whenever they start to feel bad.
Months later, she was walking through London when she started crying uncontrollably, unable to shake off flashbacks of Conor forcing himself on her. She came to the slow, agonising realisation that she had been raped. 'My mind was slow to accept that my body had been raped because of self-defence,' she writes. 'After something traumatic happens, you don't want to acknowledge that it's happened. You don't feel ready to face it, or capable of admitting it.
'That's why I feel angry when I see comments online about it 'taking so long' for victims to come forward,' she goes on, 'as if that negates their claim. It can take weeks or months or years before you're even cognisant of the fact that you've been raped. 'People who haven't experienced rape will never know this, but it doesn't make it less true.' She was also reluctant to acknowledge the rape because 'I wanted to believe that women could have casual sex … without the threat of rape or assault. That they could be as liberated and fearless as they liked. The alternative was too bleak to consider.'
It's the porn what's wrong with men.
A large part of the problem, she believes, is the ready availability of pornography on the internet, where men 'can scroll through an endless stream of videos in which women are hurt and humiliated, in which men are aggressive and entitled and physically abusive. The existence of these videos on porn sites suggests that these things are sexy.
'Ethical, feminist porn does exist, but there's also some very dark pornography out there, and a lack of consent is regularly normalised — even glorified.'
Another encounter:
Scrolling through Hinge and Tinder, she spotted James*, who was 'almost ethereally beautiful'. When they first met he was strangely gloomy, 'a human raincloud', but as the evening wore on he changed, becoming funny and likeable. 'James wasn't like anyone I'd met before … all of a sudden I wanted to fall deeply and blindly with no hope of return.'
After they slept together for the first time, she almost floated home on a cloud of happiness. When they met up again, they kissed under a streetlamp, 'a perfect kiss: tender and affectionate and blissfully romantic.'
But back at her flat, he suddenly seemed overcome with anger. Pinning her to the bed, he grabbed her roughly, then began having sex with her. 'Wait a second,' she told him. 'Condom.' To her shock, James didn't stop. She blinked. Was he ignoring her? 'Condom,' she repeated, clearer this time, but he didn't stop. She never saw him again, and it took several months for her to admit to herself that she had been raped again. Being raped twice in one year brought 'an almost unbearable weight of grief'.
After all that, the evil rapists must be pleased with themselves and have moved on to their next conquest, right?
Many of the men who mistreated her over 2019 didn't seem to be aware they'd done anything wrong, 'requesting further dates and reminiscing about the 'great time' they'd had.' 'Is misogyny so ingrained that these men didn't care if they made me uncomfortable?' she asks. 'Has violent porn convinced them that rough choking is what women want? Is it a matter of cruelty or a matter of ignorance, or both?'
Oh.
But the pièce de résistance quote has got to be:
"You shouldn't have to get to know a guy before having sex with him, to give him the all-clear before letting him into your bedroom."
Other than that there's a lot of "he stopped texting me!" or "I was starting to feel for him and he dumped me!" as examples of bad men, completely ignoring that women do that all the time.
That article is cancer. Here's a summary of the parts that relate to the title so you don't have to read the whole thing.
The second date also went swimmingly, until they went back to Jack's flat, where things took an odd turn. Once they'd had sex, Jack turned to her and asked casually if she wanted to join a religion he was founding. As she mumbled a polite reply, Ruskin wondered whether she had inadvertently just agreed to join a cult. When she left the next morning, she was determined not to see him again, but felt pressured to go on a third date when he said he'd bought concert tickets for them both.
And then the date ended with his hand around her throat. 'It probably only lasted a couple of seconds, but they felt agonisingly slow. I couldn't breathe, and my feet weren't quite on the floor.'
Another encounter:
... She had a single vodka and coke — and then blacked out, something which didn't normally happen after two or three drinks. Had her drink been spiked? She doesn't know. When she came round she was lying in the back of a taxi next to Conor*, an auburn-haired man she had been dancing with in the bar. Although she couldn't remember telling him her address, they were on the way to her flat. Once they were inside, he carried her to the sofa, tore off her clothes and, although she was far too drunk to consent, had unprotected sex with her. The next morning he seemed quite unconcerned by what had happened.
Months later, she was walking through London when she started crying uncontrollably, unable to shake off flashbacks of Conor forcing himself on her. She came to the slow, agonising realisation that she had been raped. 'My mind was slow to accept that my body had been raped because of self-defence,' she writes. 'After something traumatic happens, you don't want to acknowledge that it's happened. You don't feel ready to face it, or capable of admitting it.
'That's why I feel angry when I see comments online about it 'taking so long' for victims to come forward,' she goes on, 'as if that negates their claim. It can take weeks or months or years before you're even cognisant of the fact that you've been raped. 'People who haven't experienced rape will never know this, but it doesn't make it less true.' She was also reluctant to acknowledge the rape because 'I wanted to believe that women could have casual sex … without the threat of rape or assault. That they could be as liberated and fearless as they liked. The alternative was too bleak to consider.'
A large part of the problem, she believes, is the ready availability of pornography on the internet, where men 'can scroll through an endless stream of videos in which women are hurt and humiliated, in which men are aggressive and entitled and physically abusive. The existence of these videos on porn sites suggests that these things are sexy.
'Ethical, feminist porn does exist, but there's also some very dark pornography out there, and a lack of consent is regularly normalised — even glorified.'
Another encounter:
Scrolling through Hinge and Tinder, she spotted James*, who was 'almost ethereally beautiful'. When they first met he was strangely gloomy, 'a human raincloud', but as the evening wore on he changed, becoming funny and likeable. 'James wasn't like anyone I'd met before … all of a sudden I wanted to fall deeply and blindly with no hope of return.'
After they slept together for the first time, she almost floated home on a cloud of happiness. When they met up again, they kissed under a streetlamp, 'a perfect kiss: tender and affectionate and blissfully romantic.'
But back at her flat, he suddenly seemed overcome with anger. Pinning her to the bed, he grabbed her roughly, then began having sex with her. 'Wait a second,' she told him. 'Condom.' To her shock, James didn't stop. She blinked. Was he ignoring her? 'Condom,' she repeated, clearer this time, but he didn't stop. She never saw him again, and it took several months for her to admit to herself that she had been raped again. Being raped twice in one year brought 'an almost unbearable weight of grief'.
After all that, the evil rapists must be pleased with themselves and have moved on to their next conquest, right?
Many of the men who mistreated her over 2019 didn't seem to be aware they'd done anything wrong, 'requesting further dates and reminiscing about the 'great time' they'd had.' 'Is misogyny so ingrained that these men didn't care if they made me uncomfortable?' she asks. 'Has violent porn convinced them that rough choking is what women want? Is it a matter of cruelty or a matter of ignorance, or both?'
Oh.
But the pièce de résistance quote has got to be:
"You shouldn't have to get to know a guy before having sex with him, to give him the all-clear before letting him into your bedroom."
Other than that there's a lot of "he stopped texting me!" or "I was starting to feel for him and he dumped me!" as examples of bad men, completely ignoring that women do that all the time.