Non-consensual touch started young for me. I had to kiss or hug my uncles and aunties when I saw them… and, because ‘she meant well’ and ‘it’s how she is’, it was okay for my Italian neighbour to pinch my cheeks – hard! Fortunately for me, while those things were happening, I was also experiencing lots of positive consensual touch. Hugs from my parents and siblings. Innocent exploratory touch and play at the beginning of primary (elementary) school with a neighbourhood boy and in pre-pubescence, pleasurable intimate exploration with a girl who went to the same primary school as me.

In my early to mid-teens, I found and loved ice-skating around the time I started to feel differently about the boys I was hanging around with at the places I ice-skated. I reveled in that glorious giddy tingly feeling when I really liked a particular boy… sometimes they were the same age, sometimes a few years older. The holding hands while speeding around the rink, moving together, dodging and weaving through slower skaters, along with the exquisite sensation of the guy holding my hand tightly as he would fling me fast around the turn at the top of the rink. It was heady teenage stuff. It was the place I had my first kiss with a country lad visiting town. All delightfully delicious, all consensual.

My first sexual experience of non-consensual touch began with me willingly going into the privacy of the ‘boot room’ out the back at an ice-skating rink, with my latest crush. Let’s call him Mark. It was not until Mark and I were in the room, and I heard the door close, that I turned and saw that there were four other boys in the room too. Things happened fast from the moment the door closed. Someone turned out the lights. It was pitch black and my willing interest in kissing my crush started to turn into something unfamiliar and not so pleasant. I was being kissed and also touched all over. When, what I thought were two different sets of hands started moving under my top and fumbling their way to my breasts, deep in my gut I knew that it was too much for me and definitely not what I wanted.

I struggled to make sense of how exciting and increasingly awful the experience was at the same time. It took a confusing minute or two, as things got more frenetic, before I realised the other boys had oral or penetrative sex in mind. They were talking about it to each other. My heart started racing. I was beginning to panic. I wanted out. I started saying, ‘No, stop, no!’ and pushing them away. They continued. My requests to stop became more urgent, louder. It was with enormous relief when the lights came back on and Mark, taking responsibility for the situation getting out of control, took me by the hand and pulled me toward the door. It could have ended in gang rape. It could have ended with me being told that I asked for it because I had gone into the room with Mark willingly.

It was years later that I realised that the rink manager must’ve seen the boys following Mark and I into the boot room and was coming to see what was going on. But I didn’t know that at the time and I was scared and totally out of my depth. It was a valuable lesson, that I didn’t understand the importance of, until I started my connection with Bodysex while doing the Bodysex Experience – the Associate Course. My body is my body and only I get to choose who touches it – FULL STOP.

The Bodysex® course had me reflect on my different sexual experiences growing up. The ‘boot room experience’ taught me to be more wary; to trust my instincts and only do the things I wanted with the people I wanted. As I moved through my twenties and the decades beyond, I was way more careful about the potential that each and any situation involving men could evolve into sexually – to become non-consensual. I was still able to willingly step into the sexual encounters I wanted to, and got superbly good at removing myself from situations and people I didn’t want to be around or suspected would not be respectful of my wishes. Turning 60 this year, almost (I hope) passing through menopause, with less estrogen in my system, I remain the person who chooses and actively step in anywhere someone steps across a consensual line – for myself (it rarely happens these days) and for women who are friends, acquaintances or total strangers.

May all your touches – erotic or otherwise – always be consensual.

Jacqui is currently in training as a Bodysex Coach. 

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