A woman who spent a year having ‘casual sex’ with men has revealed the shocking results of her experience and the encounters that left her ‘traumatized’.
Recounting the year in her book Ten Men: A Year of Casual Sex, British author Kitty Ruskin warns women to approach casual sex with caution, arguing that a number of men’s expectations and behavior have been shaped in damaging ways by pornography.
In the memoir, published last year, Ruskin describes deliberately entering the world of casual dating after feeling she’d “missed out” on it, having lost her virginity at 22.
She explains that she wanted to stop treating sex as something reserved for only certain circumstances, hoping the experiment would make her feel freer and more confident.
She has said the idea was partly influenced by Sex and The City’s Samantha Jones, a character known for being sexually adventurous and unapologetic.
“No more guilt. No more self-loathing. No more self-limitation. I was liberated and fearless. I was Samantha,” Ruskin said.
“I decided to have sex with as many people as I wanted to,” she told the Daily Mail.
However, Ruskin writes that the year did not unfold as an empowering journey. Instead, she says it left her traumatized, including allegations that she was raped twice.
One of her earliest dates was with a male model, and she believed there was immediate chemistry. But when they met again, she says she was alarmed to find bondage equipment throughout his home.
She alleges that he “proceeded to use [them] on her without prior discussion.”
Uncomfortable with what she describes as a complete lack of consent and communication, she decided not to see him again.
Ruskin also describes a separate date with a PhD student that took an unsettling turn. After they slept together, she claims he tried to draw her into a “new religion” he said he was developing.
She further alleges he choked her without consent, which she says left her feeling “fragmented and nauseous and confused.”
“It probably only lasted a couple of seconds, but they felt agonizingly slow,” she recalled in her book, as per the outlet. “I couldn’t breathe, and my feet weren’t quite on the floor.”
Ruskin writes that another meeting escalated when she was spiked.
According to her account, the unnamed man brought her back to his home despite her being, as she describes it, too intoxicated to consent, and then had unprotected sex with her.
“My mind was slow to accept that my body had been raped because of self-defense,” she admitted. “After something traumatic happens, you don’t want to acknowledge that it’s happened. You don’t feel ready to face it, or capable of admitting it.”
Even after that experience, Ruskin says she chose to continue with her plan, though she adjusted what she was looking for.
She explains that she began prioritizing connections she believed would be emotionally safer.
“I liked the idea of having sex with someone who cared about me; someone who had regard for my feelings,” she wrote in the book.
“Perhaps sex within a relationship would leave me feeling more satisfied, more empowered.”
But she says those hopes weren’t met.
Ruskin describes another man pressuring her into unprotected sex and says he ignored her refusal.
“He didn’t stop,” she wrote.
She writes that the second alleged rape left her with “an almost unbearable weight of grief.’
By the end of the year, she says the cumulative impact of what happened left her feeling “broken up and disheveled.”
Ruskin has said her book is intended to highlight what she describes as the unequal risks and “burden” women can carry in casual dating.
“Men: let’s take the problem of rape culture off the back burner,” she said, advising men. “Let’s pull it down from the shelf and look at it, even though doing so might make you feel uncomfortable. Guilty, even.”
“It may make you feel uneasy, but women are tired of shouldering all this fear and trauma.”