THROAT: Unknown Unknowns

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.

It is her last night in Byron Bay and the woman is wasted. It is May 2012, she is 18. She has been in Australia for five months, three of which were spent in this tourist trap beach town saving up enough money to travel the rest of the East Coast and fly home. It is the end of the night and she is in the staff room of the hostel where she cleans the kitchen and mops up puke in the bathrooms. All 12 or so staff members live together in this room, each with a squeaky bunk bed to themselves. They put their suitcases on the top bunks and sleep behind makeshift curtains on the bottom. A few people are sitting around drinking on the carpeted floor. 

To celebrate her last night in Byron the woman drank too much goon (shitty boxed wine drunk by broke travelers in hostels, and cooked with by the rest of the Australian population) and went bar-hopping with five other Canadian women whom she does not really like, and who do not really like her either. (She tries to be included by them regardless.) After, the woman stumbles home and lies in her bed on top of the covers with all her clothes on — an oversized sweater and a black sequined skirt whose waist is so tight she has to pull it down over her shoulders to then fit it over her ass. Her mind is meandering a drunken haze on its way to sleep. 

She is throttled awake when a man suddenly enters her bed and gets on top of her. He is vaguely familiar — maybe a new hire or guest — but she cannot place him. His hands grope at her breasts and shove her skirt up to her waist, the sequins scratch her thighs. She tries to push him off but can only flop her leaden arms against his shoulders and beat his chest with hands that feel far away and foreign. She does not feel scared. Not because she isn’t but because fear is too fast and pointed of an emotion for her to grasp when she is this drunk. She feels like she is nearly drowning in a thick viscous syrup. She tries to scream but it's as if the air gets trapped, making bubbles in molasses. The woman also feels an acute sense of embarrassment that this man is seeing how pitiful and ineffective she is. She almost wishes to impress him with the strong athletic self-defense she knows she is capable of sober. He forces his dick inside of her. She lets out a garbled underwater moan. She can hear people in the room snickering, making jokes about how bold she is to fuck in front of them like this.

The woman is woken up the next morning by a large kind Irish man with curly ginger hair who works with her at the hostel. He is driving her to the bus stop where she will travel eight hours up the Australian coast to Rainbow Beach, then another 20 hours to Cairns. She gets on the bus in a daze.

“That was not fun sex,” she thinks to herself.

“I wonder if we used a condom.” 

Then, later. “I better not be pregnant.” 

She chugs a bottle of water and walks to the bathroom in the back of the moving bus. She holds onto the grimy blue fabric of the empty headrests she passes. In the bathroom, everything is made of gray and blue plastic. She sits on the damp toilet seat. She prays that she is somehow peeing away whatever is inside of her. She runs a wad of toilet paper under the slow stream of the tap and wipes herself over and over again.

With her head vibrating against the bus window, she pieces together her night. She woke up without her skirt on, but could not remember the struggle of getting it off. She recalls her heavy arms slipping and sloshing against his chest. She also distinctly remembers when his dick was inside of her she felt a rise, a kind of swelling from her vagina. It was a hot mounting sensation that rode up the base of her spine and made her ribs contract and her hips arch. She pushes the memory down and far away. 

The woman left Australia a month later but could not orgasm for four years. She ground against hard dicks in skinny jeans and felt the same mounting swelling sensation but could not go any deeper into her own pleasure. She actively dissuaded men from trying to get her to cum. She told them diplomatically, 

“It’s very hard for me to get there so please don’t focus on trying. I’ll enjoy myself regardless.”

Sometimes she spun this into a kind of Gone Girl “Cool Girl” thing. She could fuck and fuck and fuck and the men never really needed to please her. She thought this was subversive somehow, like she was rebelling against something she could not name. Some men accepted this without question. Others took it as a challenge. They’d go down on her with a thin performance of seduction. She’d watch their pathetic licking mouths try to prove a point about manhood or feminism but with half their face hidden in her cunt she thought they looked like toddlers playing hide and seek. Others fingered her with vigor and asked earnest questions about what she liked that she did not know how to answer. The more genuine they were, the worse it was.

Later, in 2016 at 22, during the burgeoning #MeToo movement she learned the actual meaning of the word “rape.” Before this, the word had been associated with bloody horror movie plots when, in reality, rape was more often quiet, insidious, and unreported. The woman felt validated, she paraded the word around like a small kitten she had personally rescued. She shared it with her girlfriends in a breathless deluge over drinks (“And then I realized it wasn’t just bad sex. I was raped!”) while they looked on with pity and shock. They did not know if they should congratulate her for having this meaningful epiphany or console her in the face of this very sad thing. The woman solemnly placed it on the bed next to every new guy she slept with for the next year (“There’s nothing you need to do but I just want you to know that I was raped when I was 18”) — after her monologue the men tried to delicately, respectfully move on but it was like having sex with a pet watching, you just felt sort of bad. Oblivious to all this, the woman felt it was immensely freeing to have a shorthand that explained her hesitancy and that made sense of her occasional dissociation.

In the years since the woman built a trust in her body to tell her what it wanted and, therefore, what she wanted — in that order. There were, of course, speedbumps. Like when she ignored a 15cm ovarian cyst till it ruptured because she could barely feel anything below her waist (luckily it was benign). But generally, she made progress.

As she reached her late 20s she grew to believe the kinks and contours of her desire arose from a primal part of her body that circumvented rational thought and were more honest and precious because of it. She felt it her responsibility, as part of some broader unarticulated project of self-actualization, to facilitate the continued exploration of her sexual proclivities like an archaeologist delicately yet doggedly excavating artifacts from the deep. And so, she honored each moment of newfound arousal or climax like a little act of visceral creativity, a stroke of carnal genius. All the while the memory of the raped orgasm jammed into her like a sharp stone in the sole of her foot. 

Even with all the repeated disclosures and personal growth, she did not mention it. It’s not that she chose not to, it’s that she couldn’t. She did not have the words to extricate it from her body. While she vaguely understood that it took her this long to learn how to enjoy sex as others did because of the rape, she had not yet parsed the orgasm from the whole. Nor acknowledged the deep distrust she had in her body for performing pleasure where pleasure was not meant to be found.

Over a decade after the rape, in May of 2024, the woman picked up the most recent issue of Richardson. In it, psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou described the way erotic experiences “bring us into contact with the opacity within [ourselves].” This black box Saketopoulou wrote, was a “sturdiness” within us “about which [we] can know very little other than know it through its effects.” She went on to argue that this was where affirmative consent fell short. That it failed to “carry the weight of encounters … which flood us with pleasure or with affect we didn’t see coming and which cannot be scripted ahead of time.”

The woman agreed with Saketopoulou wholeheartedly. To her, the self was fundamentally unknowable, and exploring one’s own mystery and the mystery of others was one of the wonders — if not the wonder — of being alive. But, she also felt her shameful memory flare up. Though the woman was now actively enjoying her sex life, the idea that her body could also betray her had never fully left. It was like she had a rescue dog whose temperament she came to know and love but, in the back of her mind, there were always those years she could not account for and therefore she could never completely trust it.

She knew intellectually Saketopoulou was not writing about rape — she said so explicitly in her essay and her book, Sexuality Beyond Consent, from which the Richardson essay was partially excerpted, “... let me also be clear that what I am describing involves the bending of one’s own will, not the other’s, which would amount to sheer violence and which is not related to my project.” But the woman could not help but connect the writer’s ideas back to her own unspeakable experience as she grasped to quell her re-awakended trauma. 

“What about this, huh!” she imagined herself saying. Was orgasming while being raped not also a mystery of some kind? An opacity within herself? 

She knew she could not go on like this. 

On a Thursday night in early June, the woman sat at her dining table in front of her laptop with a Tupperware full of the previous night’s spaghetti and a full bottle of San Pellegrino. Rain was lightly falling outside her window. She quickly and officiously typed “arousal during rape reddit” into the search bar. She wanted to seem aloof and non-committal as though the keyboard could register her temperament and augment the results accordingly. Even now she could not admit that she was Googling for herself. Within nanoseconds, the woman was faced with almost her exact question in a Reddit post,

“I was raped and I orgasmed multiple times during it, does it mean that I actually wanted or liked it?” The woman felt hot and embarrassed. She almost closed the tab. How had it taken her so long to face this? The post continued,

“I was raped by a guy that I talked to at a party […] He assaulted me on the bed while covering my mouth and I orgasmed multiple times as he penetrated me. I hateeeee that I moaned and came during it more than anything. He said that I must have enjoyed it and that I wanted it. I never wanted to die or have felt more embarrassed, could I have actually liked what happened or actually did want it even though I said no? This will keep me up for many nights.”

Under the post were 109 comments. The woman absentmindedly dredged the cold spaghetti around her fork into her mouth. 

“I worked for a rape crisis center and this was actually a common enough response that it was covered in my training,” read the top comment. “An orgasm is a physiological response to stimulation of the clitoris and surrounding erogenous areas. It is a completely natural response that your body was designed to do. It does not mean that you enjoyed being raped - and yes, it was still rape.” 

Every comment reinforced this sentiment in one way or another. The woman felt surprised. It was one thing for her to vaguely understand this to be sort of true — that orgasm during rape was not pleasure, that it was something out of her control — and it was another for 109 people to be unanimously and vehemently certain of this and argue for it openly. Outside, the rain turned into a downpour.

“Consent is a very front-of-mind thing,” wrote one user, “sex is a very base instinct. You can’t control getting a boner or orgasming.”

“If someone forcibly tickles you and you laugh, it does not mean you are enjoying it. Same same,” wrote another.

There were lots of comments like these, too, drawing analogies to other automatic physiological processes. The woman looked through all of them. An orgasm during rape was, her pseudonymous Reddit support group explained to her, like laughing despite not wanting to be tickled, yawning, swallowing, shivering, getting goosebumps, or, oddly, like having chocolate icecream thrown into your face but still enjoying the taste of it. 

She was near the end of the comments now.

“Don’t let it keep you up at night feeling guilty that you were asking for it sis!” a user pleaded. “Push that out of mind and MARVEL at the biological mercy your body was trying to give you to help you get through that scary experience. Thank and trust your mind & body!”

By the time the woman had finished reading this post and others like it, the sun had gone down and the glow of her laptop was the only thing illuminating her apartment. The condensation from the untouched San Pellegrino created a dark brown ring on its cork coaster. The woman leaned back in her chair. She felt still and slack, like an ocean whose tide was neither coming in nor going out. 

At some point, the rain must have stopped. All she heard now was the hum of her fridge and the faint bassline from a car on the other side of her block. She heaved her stiff body out of her chair and padded barefoot through her apartment. She put on a thin wool cardigan, slid on her clogs, and slipped out the front door silently, as though she did not want to wake herself. 

It was 9’olock, her street was quiet. The rain pushed everyone indoors. She walked slowly down her stoop and then onto the sidewalk. She held her arms out straight above her head and took the first deep inhale she had taken in a while. Her thoughts arrived to her slowly and gently like a shy crowd during the early hours of a party. 

It occurred to her that there was nothing mysterious or opaque at all about an orgasm during rape. That it was the most obvious, raw, artless thing in the world. As mechanical and straightforward as math or gravity. It was, in fact, quite the opposite of sensuality and surprise — it was well-documented, agreed upon, and rigorously clinically known. This thought freed her. She took another deep inhale of fresh, post-rain air. 

She continued walking down her block and the next one and the one after that inspecting the newly humbled leaves and branches on the sidewalk that were shaken off the trees during the storm. The woman felt the mystery of herself was returned to her. She felt both lighter and murkier, unknown to herself again and almost aroused by the sense of possibility. She looked into the road. The yellow-green cast of the streetlight reflected on the windshields and puddles making it look like there was an alien moon.

A few weeks later the woman was at a dance class. During the warm-up the teacher, a kind of scary beautiful muscular mixed woman with no eyebrows, got everyone to lie on their backs on the hard ground of the studio. 

“Hold your hands above your face. One hand is a cup, the other is a fist. Put the fist in the cup,” she instructed. “Now stir yourself up.” 

The woman alternated pressing her fist into her palm then her palm into her first to vigorously stir her hands from left to right. With her hands at face height, the motion flopped her head and neck from side to side. She continued stirring as she brought her hands down to her chest. If she held her body stiff the motion from her hands rocked her body back and forth like a dish, but if she let go of any tightness her ribcage, waist, and hips would roll from side to side with ease in opposite time with her stirring like a leaf falling. This sensation, though foreign, was pleasant and reassuring, like a trust fall into herself. A reminder that any movement she started also ended with her.

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.