In addition to the well-known fight or flight stress response we have to acknowledge the other response to stress or immediate danger:
Freeze
And for this reason the victims of sexual abuse may experience tonic immobility where they become completely paralysed. And totally not because they are giving consent -- perceived by some jerks as "I take your silence as consent" or as 'by-standers' blatantly comment
"Well, if it's really sexual abuse, s/he could have screamed or even escaped or maybe......" well you know what comes next
And things get even more complicated because of this thing called arousal nonconcordance, to put it simply it's when your genital response does not match your internal experience. It's that thing when "Your lips say no but your body says yes".
Emily Nagosaki, a sex educator, in her book explained that when sex research is done with men measuring penile response to determine arousal in response to stimuli and comparing it to subjective arousal reported by the man, there is only about a 50% concordance between the two. And here's the catch: the same experiment in woman resulted to only 10% overlap between genital response and subjective arousal. She elaborated further that the genital responds simply to whether the stimuli is sexually relevant or not, it does not tell anything whether the stimuli is arousing or not (i.e. does not suggest wanting or enjoying).
This myth that genital response = wanting or enjoying is clearly dangerous because in some sexual abuse cases, the victims will be accused of lying and that the 'activity' was consensual from both sides, proven by the genital response from the victim. Or as Nagosaki pointed out:
This is when it is suggested that a woman’s genitals are giving the ‘truth’ about what is really turning them on and that women are either ‘in denial’, ‘out of touch with their bodies’, ‘lying’ or ‘completely repressed and not aware of their own deep desires.’ This myth is dangerous as it encourages men to push forward justifying this behaviour by saying the woman is not aware of her own desires – suggesting her genitals will highlight what is really true. The danger is obvious. If your genitals tell you the ‘truth’ about arousal and you lubricate when being sexually assaulted or become erect when being sexually assaulted then it means that you wanted or enjoyed the assault. This could not be further from the truth since genitals only signpost that something is sexually relevant not enjoyable or wanted
I guess more people have to be aware of these kinds of information, especially in this broken culture which, instead of providing help and support prefer to blame the victims.
