(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

In my late teens I went over for supper with a middle aged couple I didn’t know well.

She made a curry.

It was far, far too spicy for me (I have the palate of a Caucasian five year old). Every bite I took hurt my mouth more, but I didn’t want to be rude. So I didn’t say anything. And I ate it. She probably had yogurt in the fridge. I could have just eaten the rice. There were easy fixes on this issue, but I still didn’t say anything. Because I didn’t want to be rude.



After the curry we went upstairs and had a threesome, also because I didn’t want to be rude.


I didn’t fancy her, I really didn’t fancy her husband. But they’d been so nice to me, and I had sort of half known that it might happen. The idea of having a threesome had seemed like a good one. Fun. Exciting.

Less so once it became a reality, though. Which was how I found myself lying on their bed, my eyes very tightly shut, trying to focus on the sensations that weren’t unpleasant and reminding myself that this, like all things, would end.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Afterwards I smiled a lot. She told her husband to walk me back to the tube with their dog. I lied and said I was going to get a taxi because I honestly couldn’t cope with spending another second in his company. It wasn’t as if he’d had anything to say to me beforehand. Even less now.

I only ever saw them a handful of times afterwards. It wasn’t a traumatic experience. I hadn’t thought about it for years, until I read a short story in The New Yorker, titled ‘Cat Person’ about a 20 year old woman who had sex, like I did, out of politeness.

It transpires that this experience is not uncommon. ‘Have you ever had sex, just to be polite?’ I threw out as a question.

Yes, came the answer. Yes, yes, yes.

With boyfriends. Best friends. Employers. Family friends. Older guys, younger guys, guys you might have fancied under different circumstances.

‘I’m pretty sure that the majority of my sexual experiences in my teens and 20’s were done out of politeness’ says Maya, 28. ‘You end up in a situation where you’re worried about offending someone if you don’t go ahead – whether you’ve led them on or what they’ll think about themselves if you back out at the last minute. And in relationships, I’ve had sex when i definitely did not want to but just kind of felt bad about not doing it – what if the other person thought that i thought they were crap in bed or didn’t fancy them anymore?’

Maya’s story was echoed over and over again by the women I spoke to. ‘I didn’t want him to be upset’ ‘We’d got that far and it seemed pointless to stop then’ ‘I didn’t know him well enough’.

There are hundreds of reasons why, but they all boil down to the same thing. We’re nice girls. We’ve been raised to be nice. Sweet. Don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Don’t disturb the peace. You’re sugar and spice and all things nice, remember?

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

And then there’s the inconvenient but true aspect of safety. You might know that you would never, ever lose your temper if a woman changed her mind about sex.



She doesn’t know that.

You might know that you’re not violent, that you’d drive her home or call her an Uber or suggest you just watch a film instead.

She doesn’t.

Women die at the hands of angry men all the time. I’m not being dramatic and I’m not suggesting for a moment that all men are violent. But the thing is, the violent ones don’t wear signs around their necks. We don’t know which ones they are. So we have to be careful.

And sometimes being careful means having sex that you don’t want, that leaves you feeling dirty and sad and a bit icky.

It’s not rape. It’s not abuse. But it’s not nice, either. It’s a sad, sticky, gross grey area which women shouldn’t ever had to find themselves in. But we do. Time and time again, we do.

I don’t think that many men would take joy in the idea that a woman had sex with them because they were just being polite, because they did an equation in their head and they decided that having sex was going to be less scary or difficult than not having sex. But it happens. It happens a lot.

I understand why this discussion makes some men so angry. It sounds like I’m saying you’re all a bunch of sex pests.

That’s not what I’m saying, at all. Women are just as sexual, just as likely to want sex. But unfortunately, they’re also likely to have it when they don’t want it.


So when you’re looking for consent, really look for it. Don’t take a woman not saying no as a confirmation that she wants to have sex. Make sure that she knows she’s got an option – that the option is really genuinely open to her.

That way you know that the person you’re in bed with really, genuinely wants to be there.

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