Faking It by Lux Alptraum

Author:Lux Alptraum
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

“I eventually find myself talking to one of the girls that Tom handed a beer to.… I thought me and her were enjoying each other’s company, when she got up close to me and said that she was astonished that I looked exactly like one of her friends at the school that she went to. I took this as a sign that she was flirting with me.”

This is how Brock Turner, a Stanford student found guilty of three felony counts of sexual assault, describes meeting his victim in a statement he submitted to the court. Turner—whom two witnesses found fingering an unconscious woman, who lay half naked behind a dumpster—is an obvious outlier in the spectrum of sexual behavior, but the narrative he weaves, one in which he repeatedly talks of assuming and rationalizing and thinking things were going fine, isn’t all that different from the way most men talk about their romantic and sexual pursuits. Turner talks about his victim as a person whose consent was apparent because he, and he alone, perceived it to exist; because he interpreted her behavior in a way that suggested she wanted sex, then clearly that interest was real. It didn’t matter that she was blackout drunk, that she didn’t vocalize her consent, that there was no way she could have expressed consent. Turner desired her and assumed he could manifest her consent in response.

In her memoir, Sex Object, Jessica Valenti encapsulates what it feels like to be on the receiving end of this sort of one-sided romance. In the essay “D,” Valenti writes of an email she received from a married friend, a man whose sons go on play dates with her daughter, that expresses his interest in fucking her—an interest, he notes, that’s persisted for almost a year. Valenti’s take on the moment that sparked this man’s lust reads as follows:

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