Everyday Coercion: An Exploration of Young Adults' Negotiations of Heterosexual Sex, Consent, and Normalised Male-Enacted Sexualised Violence

Abstract

Sexual coercion has been used to describe tactics ranging from subtle, manipulative pressure to violent physical force, with more scholarly attention on the latter. This thesis shifts the focus to non-physically violent tactics of sexual coercion, normalised in heteronormative interactions by cultural narratives of lust and seduction. It examines ‘everyday’ experiences of hetero sex to identify the role male-enacted sexual coercion plays in sexualised interactions and intimacy. Globalised outcries, predominantly in western contexts, about the extensive reach of male-enacted sexual coercion and its role in rape contextualise this research in a broader social movement (e.g. #MeToo). Twenty young adults (thirteen women, seven men) were engaged in in-depth, qualitative interviews using a semi-structured, conversational approach to obtain empirical knowledge about how participants negotiated sexual activity, enacted or experienced nonphysically violent coercion, and understood consent. An arts-based methodology then transformed participants’ experiential data into creative non-fiction, connecting readers with the emotional dimension in the findings. Within this research, both men and women demonstrated experiential knowledge of verbal, non-verbal, direct and indirect communication of consent (willingness) and non-consent (unwillingness), consistent with previous scholarship. This research substantiates previous research showing that non-instigating people not only employ refusals within normal conversational patterns, but regularly prestate boundaries, and assertively resist pressure. Coercion is employed despite clear signs of refusal. Thus, men are not the bumbling mis-communicators previous research has suggested; instead they are highly skilled communicators who employ a suite of effective tactics to manipulate and coerce all the while keeping within the bounds of normalised gender roles and sexual scripts. Suggestions that women should ‘just say no’ overlook the fact that men use coercion past the point of refusals. Refusing (whether verbally or non-verbally) is only effective if the instigator accepts it, indicating problematic attitudes and beliefs about gender and sex, rather than communication issues. In exploring everyday coercion through the lens of consent as free and willing participation, rather than compliance or coerced agreement, this research understands rape as acts that occur past a point of non-consent. While this may sound straightforward in definition, participant responses highlighted that viewing an absence of affirmative consent as rape can be confronting and challenges their understanding of both ‘normal sex’ and ‘real rape’. Rape culture myths and victim-blaming narratives have normalised male-enacted pressure and persistence to a point that rape, particularly when enacted through tactics of everyday coercion, often goes unacknowledged. This research found that men are aware of the tactics they use to coerce women and some shared motives for using everyday coercion, such as homosocial bonding and patriarchal socialisation. While some men drew on essentialised notions of gender to defend their use of coercion, or performed naivety, there was significant corroboration between how women experienced sexual coercion and how men recall enacting it. The thesis concludes that prevention of normalised sexualised violence must focus on the dismantling of patriarchal and binarised structures of gender, rape culture, and male entitlement alongside education about consent as willingness affirmatively given, free from coercion. This thesis promotes a sexual landscape in which women are understood as equally agentic within sexual exchanges and men, comfortable in their own masculinity and sexuality, are not encouraged to coerce unwanted sexual activity to assert patriarchal manhood. In this landscape people acknowledge and value both verbal and non-verbal refusals, genuinely invite communication about sexual boundaries, women and non-men’s pleasure is focused on in a way that decentralises penetration as the ‘main event’, and unwillingness to have sex is not responded to with coercion.