Rachel Thompson: Rough

Culture Sex Relationships

As we’ve covered recently in the episodes with Katherine Angel and Joy Townsend, the on-going journey to sexual subjectivity for women is often difficult and fraught with harms, violence, degrees of unwantedness, coercion, and a lack of consent. The narrow, legalistic, framework we have for understanding these harms are geared towards identifying (or perhaps not identifying) perpetrators. This often stifles the voices of survivors of violence. In a society where sex is still so stigmatised how do we find the spaces, and the vocabulary to talk about sex and make sense of our own experiences. Where we are given such strong messages about what sex is, who is allowed to have it, and who should do what to whom. How as individuals can we navigate sexual encounters when society unfairly distributes agency and gives us few tools to allow for the possibility of collective agency and joy. Rachel Thompson’s book Rough - How violence found its way into the bedroom and what we can do about it, is a timely and wide ranging survey of all of this. It’s thoroughly researched and does not offer simplistic explanations for why violence happens in bedrooms and in society more broadly. However it is a calm, unflinching, inquiry into what violences there are, with an intersectional lens on who experiences them, and a call to arms for how we might change the culture in which this happens. So here’s a content note ahead of the rest of this conversation. We are going to be talking about violence, in its many forms. However we will try to avoid detailed descriptions of any individual acts. Here’s more detail about Rachel’s excellent book https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/112/1120632/rough/9781529110388.html Here’s Rachel’s work for Mashable https://mashable.com/author/rachel-thompson Here’s Rachel’s twitter https://twitter.com/RVT9 And that article of mine where I talk about porn and causation and stuff is at my website for sex educators https://bishtraining.com/does-porn-harm-young-people/ And if you are new to my work and don’t know that I run bishuk.com (one of the leading sex ed websites for young people) go check it out! Justin