Mission Aborted: Saying No To The Sex You’re Having

So, you’re with a guy. Maybe you met just a few hours ago, or maybe he’s that cute guy from the IT department you’ve been flirting with for the last few months, but you’ve finally invited him back to your place for sex. He looks really cute and you’ve been waiting to tear into him like a medium-rare steak all evening. You churn towards the bed in a mix-master of sexual desire, ripping off his shirt and unzipping his pants, perhaps you even begin… Then, without warning, and for whatever reason, you realize that you need to abort the mission: that is, you need to stop the sex that is about to happen immediately.

To do so is your absolute right. You alone are responsible for your physical integrity and any partner who does not accept your “no,” however late in the game, is breaking the law. Yet, having found myself in such a situation on more than one occasion, I have learned that aborting missions is rather a complex phenomenon and one that has given me pause for thought about a much more serious issue faced by countless women around the world: date rape.

The need to abort a mission can happen to anyone at any time and in any type of relationship. But I am talking here about a very specific type of aborted mission: when a woman finds herself alone with a relative stranger, someone who she doesn’t know well enough to know if she can trust him, and who, in the worst case scenario, could even be a complete psycho. Knowing that she has every right to stop things, and that she wants to, she still wonders if she is in a “danger zone.” News stories of date rape flash through her mind, and she wonders how this person, who still thinks he’s about to get lucky, will react. Having spoken to several girlfriends about this, I am confident that a lot of women have found themselves in similar situations with men and all have been a little bit scared that one might not respect their “no” when it comes to the crunch. That’s perhaps why, when I think back to my own aborted missions, I breathe a sigh of relief.

I’ve aborted three missions — on three separate occasions, with three separate men. And let’s be clear that we are talking about point of entry abortion of mission here, well after things have got underway. There was also a mission that I didn’t abort, but that I wish I had. And each time, somewhere deep in my gut, when I made the announcement that I couldn’t do it and had to stop, I felt a tiny jab of fear. I feared their reaction. Would they look at me with disgust? Would they get angry? Would they storm out? But my real fear was: am I in a potential date rape situation?

I wish to make absolutely clear that on none of the aborted missions I am going to describe did I have any real or perceived threat of any of the above. All of the men involved were perfect gentlemen: they were gracious and kind, cheerfully zipping up and shutting up and never exerting any pressure on me to go through with it or making any offensive allusions to prick-teasing. But I understood that when you barely know the person you’re with, you have no firm grounding on which to base your assumptions about their reactions.

The first time I aborted a mission, I was seventeen and with a gorgeous virgin I’d met on holiday. I began to feel queasy mid-fellatio, and knew that as much as I wanted to finish, I may be doing him more harm than good by continuing (after all, I had to balance which would be more traumatic for him: stopping mid-way through his first head job or vomiting on his penis -– I erred on the side of the latter). I made the mortifyingly awkward excuse of having suddenly realized the time and that my mother would be worried about me. He was slightly taken aback and did comment on how strange it was I’d suddenly noticed the time given I wasn’t wearing a watch, but cordially asked if he could walk me back to the hotel as he didn’t think I should walk unaccompanied at that hour.

The next time, I was in my early twenties, and by my own admission, had been mercilessly leading on a man of forty whom I had met at a bar. He was as charming as they come, and we’d been out a few times, me continuously accepting to see him again even though I always knew that when it came to the bedroom, I may not be so up for it. This is probably the closest I’ve come to being a “tease” in my sexual life, and I certainly don’t recommend it, but I’m also sure that many otherwise good people find themselves in such a position occasionally whether by conscious choice or by accident, and it should never make anybody feel pressured to do something they don’t feel comfortable with. Worse still was that on the night in question, he was at my place, in my bed (Lesson number 1 — it’s much easier to make an excuse as to why you have to leave than to try to make someone leave without hurting their feelings). My excuses were terrible, and he saw right through them. I’m sure I crushed his confidence that night (made worse by the fact he was already in the throes of an early mid-life crisis), but he was ever the gentleman, and climbed out of my bed and back into his self-esteem boosting sports car, perhaps having learned that sometimes, girls that appear too good to be true usually are twenty-two.

The last and most recent time it happened was with someone who visited London about once a year for business, meaning that even though we’d been in casual contact via Facebook for quite a long time, we’d only met up a couple of times in person before I asked him back to mine. I’d also just begun casually dating a man who was to become a long-term boyfriend and suddenly, when things were well underway, I realized that I couldn’t shoot my budding relationship in the foot for the sake of a scratching an old itch, and so I told him so apologetically. He suggested jokingly that there was no reason I shouldn’t just finish as it would make no difference to my relationship now that I had started. I disagreed, so he said ok and we watched a DVD instead.

So there you have it, my three aborted missions, from which I emerged safe and sound, and even stayed on good terms with each of the men. But these sorts of situations can go awry: a woman saying “no” after first having said “yes” is a story very familiar to criminal lawyers who tease these types of encounters out detail by excruciating detail in the courts on a daily basis. How different could things have been for me with the wrong man?

The worst sexual experience I’ve ever had was when I didn’t abort a mission even though I wanted to. I had gone back to a guy’s place after a few too many wines in the bar where we’d met up for a “blind date” earlier that evening. After being dropped off at his large South Kensington apartment by his private driver, I felt, for the first and only time in my life, afraid of being alone with a man. When his front door clicked shut, an insidious paranoia made me wonder whether it was dead-bolted and whether I would be able to get out if I tried. I wondered how thick his walls were and whether they were shared with community-minded neighbours who would come to the aid of a woman in distress. When he went to the kitchen to bring me a glass of water, I even allowed my mind to suggest that he may come back wearing a clear plastic raincoat and holding an axe American Psycho style.

Of course, he didn’t, and I must make absolutely clear that this man had done and said nothing during the course of the evening to make me feel the way I did, and was totally oblivious to my internal chaos that night. But the enormity of the situation was not lost on me then and it still isn’t today: I had met this man only hours before, I was drunk, and now I was in an isolated apartment with him in the early hours of the morning and wasn’t even sure where the closest tube station was. I felt that should things turn nasty, I was probably going to be on the losing end.

Of course, if I’d been enthused with passion for the man, I doubt I would have been having these thoughts at all — I would have been too busy with other things. But the truth was that he didn’t look so good to me there in his flat with my tipsiness waning as he had in the darkened bar. For all the reasons described above, and doubtless many more, I decided to go through with the plan that night, leaving to catch the first tube the next morning after employing yet another far-fetched excuse as to why I had to leave at 7am on a Sunday morning to get to an urgent appointment.

When I got home, I felt disgusted with myself. I showered for a long time, but needless to say my feelings didn’t come off in the wash. It took a couple of weeks for me to really put the incident behind me. When I told a female friend of mine what had happened, she confessed that a similar thing had happened to her — she had also had sex with someone even though, at the last minute, she had wanted to stop. She commented that she couldn’t believe consensual sex could ever feel so awful and we agreed how lucky we were to never have been in a situation where we were forced or coerced into something we didn’t consent to.

Looking back, the moral of the story could be that it’s best to wait until you know someone really well before you have sex with them. That way, you are surely minimizing the risk of being with the wrong type of man and becoming an all too common statistic. But we are modern women living in modern times and there is no reason why women shouldn’t be able to enjoy casual, impersonal sex if they want to with the same confidence that many men do. Maybe the moral of the story should be that deciding whether or not to have sex with someone should be determined by how comfortable you would feel telling them “no” if you wanted to, and to actively avoid being in a location where you would feel less able to say this. Put that way, from a safety perspective, perhaps a quickie in the back loos within shouting distance of the bar staff is the way to go. In fact, maybe that’s one to try next time…

Contact the author, Reliable Joe, here: editors@morningquickie.com