Back in high school in the late 2000s, sex was taught to us like preparing for rainfall: On certain days, it will rain. On those days, you can use your raincoat, rain boots, and umbrella to stay comfortable. You should always keep a pair of rain boots at school, too, because you never know when you’ll need to go out in the mud.
The fact that we spoke about sex at all was considered significant in its “sex positivity” (as it would later be called). We learned about condoms, about the pill, about all the stuff men might try to do to make either of these things fail, and the consequences that could result if they were successful. This was in opposition to the “abstinence only” method, which is exactly what it sounds like: Don’t have sex until you’re married, and you’ll have absolutely nothing to worry about.
The former was feminist and progressive. The latter was overtly religious and conservative. But both were certain of one thing: It will rain. But as someone who viewed sex as quite possibly the worst thing that could realistically happen to me someday, I had no issue parroting the conservative-tinged viewpoint: If you don’t want any of the terrible things to happen to you that they talked to us about in school, just don’t have sex.
By the time I got to college four years later in the early 2010s, applying this view even if only to myself was wildly unpopular. Stating that it will never rain, understandably, sounds preposterous. Because while no one liked to say it out loud, everyone seemed to take this default view that sex - and about violence at large - is this thing that is done to women, perpetrated by men, whether they stepped outside willingly (with or without rain gear) or were ceremoniously pushed overboard into a hurricane. To state that I would simply avoid this fate was, in a sense, to claim that I could stop men from inflicting such acts upon me. It was to claim that I could stop the rain like I had some kind of divine power that other women did not. It was a claim that insulted people who perhaps didn’t even know why they felt insulted, because remember, no one was admitting that we were all operating from this same default viewpoint to begin with - a baseline acknowledgement of the seeming inevitability of male violence.
“What happens if you get raped?” a classmate asked me as a group of us sat in the dining hall, everyone’s eyebrows furrowed over the fact that I wasn’t on any form of birth control and hadn’t gotten the sequence of still somewhat controversial (largely just to the heavily Christian contingent) HPV shots… not that I had anything against these things, I simply did not want to become reliant on daily pills that can come with a laundry list of side effects and I was terrified of needles. The doctor telling me I just needed to get these shots either before I turned twenty-six or before I had sex immediately had me saying, “See you when I’m twenty-six, doc!”
“That would be terrible,” I say to my classmates. “But I’ve made my choices, so just like anyone, I’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
This would not be the first time someone would bring up the likelihood of men raping me. In fact, it would come up almost any time I gave any hint of my intention not to engage in sexual activities or my resulting lack of preparation for sex to happen to me unannounced. Don’t get me wrong, I know the statistics, I understand and am deeply concerned about the likelihood of ill-fated rainfall, but these sentiments felt very telling amidst the symphony of hookup culture and sex positive idealism that had overtaken my New York City progressive college environment.
Suddenly, we should not talk about sex like rainfall, this thing that men do to us. That is anti-feminist and sex negative. We should talk about it like this thing we take willingly for ourselves as often as possible with as many people as possible, because that’s what men do, and the more we mirror the sexual patterns of men who are not repressed, the more sexually liberated we will be amidst this landscape of puritanical, abstinence-only, anti-knowledge propaganda. We have our genitalia diagrams (highlight the clitoris!), we have our pills, we have our condoms, and now we will have our way. YOLO (“you only live once” for you younger folk).
All ran out into the open fields, spoke enthusiastically about their time jumping in puddles with their rain coats always at the ready. The dark clubs, the loud music, the narrow beds, the shower walls, the kitchen countertops, the sofas. All bodies are beautiful and will be consumed; all of us will dance gleefully in the rain, rolling in puddles. Because, yes, did you forget? It will rain. May as well just get it over with. Get ahead of it. Be in control. Unlike those other women with their Bibles, their promise rings, their inexperienced naivete. It’ll rain in their neighborhood, too. And they’ll wish they were us.
Me too.
I was surprised when someone finally said it. It felt as if we had all resolved to simply never talk about it, this elephant in the room that would glow bright red like Rudolph on Christmas Eve each time a concerned woman spoke to me about my future rape. I was surprised when women started pointing out not these hypothetical masked men in dark alleyways, but their friends, their bosses, their spiritual leaders, their family members, their partners. I was surprised when, all at once, women weren’t just idly scrolling through the weather forecast but instead started getting angry about it. Furious about it. Emboldened and taking to the streets.
But at that time, I was out of college, trying to scrape together a young career in the same industry that was commonly being called out for its perhaps higher-than-average rate of inclement conditions. I’d very nearly been caught in the rain a few times at that point, each instance the drops gaining on my heels. This most recent time, my canvas shoes got drenched in a puddle, and I was caving in on myself. Uncharacteristically, I was now afraid of the outside, hated the thought of looking at myself, hated that I didn’t see it coming.
Was it the clothes? Was it my voice? Was it my pretty (a compliment that always made me uncomfortable now made a habit of haunting me) face? What do I do? It has been days. Weeks. My shoes aren’t drying out, no matter how long I hide in here.
Pull yourself together.
I left the city. Got new shoes. Still canvas. Watched the conversation brew until it inevitably, predictably, disintegrated. Before I even really got a chance to appreciate that it existed in the first place, it got flipped on its head. And somehow it felt even worse than before. The plague hit. The women I knew, economically backed into corners, said yes to the rings offered, smiling(?) behind a mask arm in arm with their forever weathermen. By 2024, the forecast was sunny skies, but outside it was pouring and state governments were soon given the power to take umbrellas away.
The script has been flipped in other ways, too. Many young women are pointing out the pitfalls of the extent to which ideas of sex positivity steered feminism into a ditch. Perhaps those Evangelicals had a point? Even as a critic of aspects of that progressive attitude, I attempt not to sway where I’ve dug my feet into the sand trying to bring attention to the thing that we have all seemingly chosen to forget in favor of more aesthetic (tradwife utopia, top surgery escapism, brat summers, woman on a leash in a satirical sense, a manosphere renaissance) distractions.
It will rain. It’s raining somewhere right now. And I need us to get so collectively irate that we break through the clouds by any means necessary. That sounds far more liberating than willingly rolling in puddles or saving ourselves for the hurricane ever was. In some arenas, I do see it happening. Rumbles deep enough in the foundation of our world that have been creeping up under the radar of all these cultural shifts.
To many, our current predicament may seem bleak. But as I have ended so many writings before, I do feel we are at an important precipice. A razor’s (however dull) edge. And that’s why I started writing here in the open in the first place. I want to play even a minuscule part in tipping it, maybe reaching someone out there who would benefit from such perspectives and musings. Anything but being caught hiding inside again with my head in my hands.
Perhaps above the clouds, to finally end this long analogy, we can more widely understand what intimacy actually means.