If a man lies to you to get laid. If he pretends to be somebody he’s not (with this I mean pretending to have a different personality), or if he pretends to have an interest in you beyond just having sex when it’s not true, shouldn’t this be considered sexual trauma? I’ve become very untrustworthy because of this. I can’t enjoy my sex life anymore partly because of this. It has made me so wary of them that I can’t fully relax and enjoy like I used to. I feel as if they’ve somehow stolen my sexuality from me because I’ve felt used and lied to many times. I think they’re so f*cking selfish and unreliable that I’m starting to deeply resent them. And it’s not just about me, I see this has happened to many women around me. Isn’t this another kind of sexual trauma?
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Totally get where you’re coming from and tbh, I’d say it’s a form of manipulation for sure. Guys lying to get in bed is so damn gross. It can defo mess with your peace of mind and trust issues. Not cool at all. It’s high time we start calling bs on this sort of behavior. Be real or be gone, no time for fakes in any form. Stay strong, sis!
absolutely agree, it’s definitely a form of trauma. so many women experience this, and it’s rarely acknowledged. we need to address the way society allows men to manipulate and deceive women without consequence. it’s a huge part of gender inequality. more awareness and a strong feminist movement are key to changing this. you deserve to feel safe and respected in all aspects of your life. stay strong and take care.
I don’t like the idea of calling this a sexual trauma in the same sense that rape and assault are. But it can still be a hit to you emotionally and trust wise. But in terms of like calling this actually traumatic? Like definition wise? I don’t agree.
Just because it erodes your trust in future partners doesn’t mean it’s traumatic.
Hot take: It’s rape via deception
People say it’s ridiculous to say that because most men have done this so saying it’s a form of rape makes nearly every man a rapist, so people get angry when it’s said, but it’s absolutely a form of rape.
I hear ya. It’s particularly sad when you are in an actual relationship for some considerable time, and you are invested and believe they are too. Then, like the flip of a switch they just become a totally different person, Jekyll and Hyde style, and either vanish, go nuts on you, or both. It’s traumatizing.
Edit: Typo
emotional manipulation in relationships is absolutely a form of trauma. it disrupts trust, intimacy, and self-worth. healing requires validation, support, and often professional guidance. you’re not alone.
It feels so awful because the guy completely faked his entire persona just to have sex with you. Then, once he got what he wanted, he showed his true self and left. But you’re not “allowed” to feel used, because technically, you consented.
What people don’t understand is that the consent was given based on who you thought he was, someone he pretended to be. He lied, manipulated you, and gained your trust under false pretenses.
No one seems to get it. Instead, they blame you.
It should be illegal to pretend to be someone else just to get laid. Because we wouldn’t have consented if not for their made up persona!
> shouldn’t this be considered sexual trama
No it shouldn’t and it’s offensive to sexual assault and rape victims to call it like it. It’s shitty and deceiving, sure. But words have a meaning and when they get diluted to the point of being thrown around for little to no reason, they lose their significance.
Yes, totally agree. I’d also say that this is a form of ‘assault’ (I’m not sure if this is the right word choice, I’m not a native English speaker). Sexual coercion, deceptive consent or rape by deception. There are words for this. We’re just discouraged from using them, because giving things a name is… dangerous to those who benefitted from people not having the words to speak about it.
Sex is only truly consensual when it is informed consent. Informed consent should include things like circumstances, intentions, someone’s relationship status, whether they have HIV or something like that etc. …
Someone who lies to get you into bed them isn’t having consensual sex with you.
They lie because they KNOW that under the given circumstances you wouldn’t want to sleep with them.
They know that technically speaking it’s not consensual, but they don’t see it as a problem since it’s so normalised in society. Even rewarded.
For a lot of people having sex isn’t about morality or fairness or consent but about conquest. Getting the woman you want with all means necessary. They don’t view sex as ‘sex’, or even as a form of intimacy. Many people view sex as something they measure themselves in. A guy who sleeps with many women has a higher social ranking than ‘the virgin’ (which is even used as a derogatory term).
They don’t want intimacy. They want proof of their own ‘worth’, their ‘masculinity’, they want to conquer, they want trophies.
Of course they’ll lie. And it’s endorsed by society. A part of our culture. A rape culture.
They don’t have sex with you. They take sex from you. It’s something they take and keep, in a way. They gain something, you lose something. It’s about getting something, not sharing an experience. They get sex the way pickpocketers get money. And that’s not freely given, not a consensual ‘donation’.
Just look at How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson. He’s a predator. But he’s praised for it.
But people don’t want to admit to any of it, don’t want to think about it, because it would highlight just how rotten our system is, what we put up with, what we let pass and how we may have contributed to all this. So it’s easier to brush it off as normal or a joke or call those who talk about it ‘too sensitive’.
But it absolutely is a trauma. It changes how your brain works, it makes you hypervigilant, it changes how you move through the world, how you perceive yourself and the people around you. That is the definition of trauma.
For a clinical view of point, it wouldn’t meet the definition, and personally I don’t think it’s appropriate to put it in the same category as rape and child sexual abuse. It’s obviously an unpleasant experience that can be impactful but trauma is not just something upsetting or stressful, it’s experiences that cause intense fear and seriously compromise someone’s sense of safety in the world and their ability to cope. Something can be legitimately difficult and valid without it needing to be labelled as trauma, the word has become so overused it’s losing meaning.
This is also quite subjective, by which I mean our assessment of what type of person someone is, what their intentions and motivations are, why they do what they do etc. We have our interpretations of this which may or may not be the truth. I’m sure there are plenty of men out there who lie and put on an act deliberately to get laid, and they suck. I also think once someone has that narrative about their encounters, other experiences will be interpreted in light of it, when there’s other possibilities. Like sometimes feelings just change for another reason as you get to know someone more, or you’re not sexually compatible, or they happen to meet someone else, or we made assumptions without being explicit about what the situation is, and so on. I’m not saying that’s your experience, but as a general point I don’t think it’s always intentional manipulation when things don’t work out on the dating scene, and if we have experienced sexual trauma we can become hyper-vigilant and feel it’s happening repeatedly, it can be hard to disentangle all that.
Imagine all this PLUS he married you and had kids with you and he never even LIKED you
It certainly feels like it. The man I married and had 2 kids with wasn’t who he represented himself to be. I feel very violated by him. We separated 15 yrs ago, but he finally let me divorce him this year. He’s had numerous girlfriends since I left him. He even had another kid, with someone else. He’s even less involved in his daughter’s life than he is in my son’s lives. Everything he says or does to me feels like abuse.
“But if we didn’t lie, we wouldn’t get laid”
They freely admit it. And they don’t even feel bad about it. They actually laugh about it. It’s pathetic.
And it IS traumatic. It’s like they stole something from you.
I LOVE sex and I have a very high sex drive. But your example is reason #147 why I’m celibate.
I do not respect men. And I will not fuck them.
This was the harshest reality to face as a young woman. With men, everything seems to be transactional to their benefit. Once it stops, they’re outta there.
Once I realized this, I’ve been happily on my own for over 30+ years.
A line I’ve never forgotten:
“Falling in love is just nature’s way of tricking you into reproducing” -Callisto
The older I get the more the statement, “They only want one thing” is true. Also shitty is the guys that pretend to be your friend but they’re just pretending to get laid.
It’s also just realizing how much rape culture is built into the culture and how it informs dating. So much dating advice given to men teaches them to violate informed consent, step over women’s preferences (boundaries) and basically “do whatever you have to do to sexually access that women you feel entitled to”.
Lying about height “just to get matches”, lying about intentions just to get access to female reproductive organs. And it’s almost like for many men that very act of violating another is integral to their self worth and sexual pleasure. Without it they are bored.
A professional sex worker would meet his needs completely and well. But it’s very important that he manipulates the girl next door to get her guard down, play the long game, violate her, leave her confused. This is more meaningful and worthwhile to them.
And boundary pushing is always present. You cuddle, they start to kiss you. You offer oral they’ll push for vaginal. You give vaginal it needs to be rougher. After that they hold anal over you, then suddenly choking and violence is a requirement for his pleasure etc
It’s interesting how we do not speak about this specific aspect of rape culture and my theory is that patriarchal violence is always morphing and in modern times, violent abusive manipulative men thrive on “blurred lines” and plausible deniability. They are still their great grandfathers but just less overtly so.
They pull shit like this and then have the audacity to complain that women have stopped giving them a chance. It’s exhausting.
My (now ex) husband literally lied about his whole family (their jobs, education, where they’d lived – literally EVERYTHING when we met. He knew that I’d grown up with money and thought he had to upsell to get me.
I should have walked away then but I was 19 and already engaged to him and just walked by those bright red flags.
My “”body count”” is high because of this. Like I’m sorry the man who said he wanted to be my boyfriend (because I didn’t want to do anything outside of a solid relationship) was actually just lying to get in my pants
That is sex by coercion, which is technically the r-word. I think hardly anyone would agree with what most would view as an extreme statement, which is a huge cultural problem, but that’s what it is.
This is why vetting your spouse first is so important, ladies. He may be willing to give himself away freely due to his mental illness. That doesn’t mean you should. Don’t gloss over the solution to your dating problems just because you consider them “trad” in your feminist group, as if we had a choice for long at all throughout history. This is women’s empowerment, and OP is the reason as to why we follow this rule.
When I was younger, a childhood friend of mine told me he was gay and would tell me about men he liked, it took a few years for me to come out because i’ve always been an anxious person, When I did come out I was met with him telling me that he had lied about all of that and that he he actually liked me the whole time, and that now he had no chance so he might as well tell me.*
It was especially hurtful back then because I was on the verge of crying and he practically laughed at that and just shifted the conversation to his romantic interest in me.
I’ve had other male friends act similar, platonic as hell but then they just distance themselves as soon as they find out I’m gay (or deduce that I have no interest), I find it weird because even with my own female friends, I don’t see women as sex objects, I myself am a woman so ig I just know how bad it is to be treated as one, but I tend to try and avoid media and other things that portray women like that.
I can’t help but wonder if men who do things like that do just view women as sex objects.
*This is not meant to be bi erasure or anything, he had specifically lied to me for years about it. A bi person is not lying about their interests like he was
ETA, I know I can’t fully understand this since I’m not straight, and i’ve never been in a relationship with a man who did also continue this long game until sex, so I hope this doesn’t sound bad. I just wish to empathize.
You have to put your interests first.
For love: wait for sex and only trust after 4 to 6 months. It filters out all the liars. They don’t have the patience.
For the rest. There are women who give sex transactionally for money or children.
So.
If you want children. What are the man’s financial means, how does he behave towards you, what kind of father would he make.
Otherwise it’s not worth it.
It’s fraud.
idk about how people label it but there is no doubt that being lied to is traumatizing. Especially when you are in a position where you took a risk by giving someone your trust.
It’s abusive and exploitative
it is absolutely trauma. sexual coercion in any form is deeply violating. i’m so sorry you’ve experienced this. i’ve also been lied to and it’s taken months of trauma therapy to even begin to feel like i’m healing. you’re not alone ❤️🩹
I hear what you are saying. It’s a shitty feeling to know that someone you trusted enough to be vulnerable with took that vulnerability as a que to “use you.” And I dont want to discount the fact that when this happens over and over, it affects women in a profound way.
But I hesitate to call it traumatic, let alone label it as a sexual trauma. Mostly because with trauma, there are no illusions. The person causing the (sexual) trauma knows what they are doing will hurt you. They just dont care how it affects you.
When it comes to this, i dont know how to explain it well, tbh so I will do my best. I’d say it’s a relational betrayal rather than a trauma. People who are dating each other and having sex before getting to know the person are doing just that… they are trying to find out while fucking around. And often, people are clumsy when it comes to ‘love’. What love is for you may be different for someone else. And unless your expectations are outright expressed, there will be LOTS of assumptions that will be worked off. You cant expect people to read minds.
This is withholding informed consent. I view that as sexual coercion at best and assault at worst. It’s also emotionally and psychologically abusive. It can absolutely cause real trauma, especially if someone you’ve bonded with suddenly rips their mask off. You aren’t alone. You can look into attachment theory, relational trauma, or “betrayal” trauma to dig a little deeper.
This is so real and it’s shitty how normalized it is
It absolutely is. And you are not alone.
There’s a Wikipedia article about it, although I don’t know if personality changes are covered anywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_deception
The article goes into some detail and may be graphic to some readers.
So many of them are narcissistic sex addicts. Sex is all they care about, and it is all they really have. It is sad and shallow, really.
I would call this psychological rape.
This is why loser cis men don’t like women over [arbitrary age] or with [arbitrary number of partners] – it doesn’t take many years of dating to interact with yucky, lying, frightening men. It’s also is unattractive to them that women are humans who enjoy sexual pleasure because that means they might have to know what they’re doing – I’m 38 and the vast majority of men regardless of age are going to be unable to even move the needle, let alone finish the assignment. They call it having “baggage” but what they mean is knowing too much about what not to tolerate or expect from them.
You are right; it’s so mundane and so destabilizing. They call it “post nut clarity” about how they liked you more before you degraded yourself by sleeping with them 👀. He seemed so funny and sweet and attentive and then after he was such a weirdo! Yep.
Casual has its place for this reason. Zero expectations. If you like a man and want a relationship don’t settle – he better be attentive and actually funny and smart (not just YOU being fun and smart and he’s there, also) and willing to show up looking presentable, responding in reasonable timeframes. Does this mean there’s only about 5% worthy of having relationships from women? Yes. That’s why they’re all threatening to kill themselves lol
I’m not saying that this isn’t a sexual trauma, but I think a lot of psychologists would call this Betrayal Trauma.
100% this is small t trauma. And if not sexual trauma it’s trauma women experience due to the patriarchy.
After dating app experiences were super fucky I started only dating real life men who were know to me in the community. Three times in a row I had very hurtful and weird situations.
One guy pretended he was interested in a relationship, specifically said so, was sleeping with me then stopped asking me out. When I asked him what the deal was he was genuinely surprised and said, “I didn’t think we were going to have this conversation so soon.” He told me, “he was uncertain about the long term compatibility.” Basically he would have kept sleeping with me if I hadn’t said anything.
Just gross, immature behavior with no integrity.
Yes. It is.
Cheating is also abusive, and sexual assault. men don’t want to hear it, but if you do anything to coerce someone to have sex with you, then it’s SA. This includes lying that you’re sleeping with someone else, becuase that means your partner wouldn’t be giving you an enthusiastic yes if they knew.
Yeeep. I sure think it counts as that. I mean obviously, you’re traumatized!
Sigh.
It blows my mind that anyone could be doing that. I mean I know we all kind of do it a little bit in public and around new people and stuff anyway but not like a totally different person, and not like lying to get sex 😡
this is shitty yeah but i agree with the comments saying you don’t need to call it sexual trauma for it to be shitty. it’s manipulative yeah but i do agree with the people saying that some victims would feel offended by diluting this term
I don’t mean to be rude but i think the OP’s outlook is very myopic. Many men certainly lie to get what they want with women, but no more than women lie to get what they want from men. Any one would feel cheated and outraged by such a manipulation. This isn’t a mens only issue, it is a societal one.
this. they always love to complain about these supposed gold diggers everywhere when the majority of them have no gold to dig. the reality is that the majority of women have experienced this, being conned into physical intimacy under false pretenses. and then they all say, “well, you should have known. you should have waited longer. you should have had your psychic mind-reading, future-seeing, time travelling hat calibrated better.” it’s honestly a form of r*pe.
Yes of course it is. Don’t confuse “it’s not illegal” for “it’s not traumatic”.
If I remember correctly some forms of deception to get sex ARE illegal in some areas. And even if not illegal having your trust betrayed is traumatic.
what is it called when they don’t even sleep with you but only want to know if they could have you?
This. Yes! My enjoyment of sex has been stolen from me by manipulation. Partner’s who are such liars and in denial about it. Not capable of being ‘real’ men.
We need to talk about this more because it’s non-consensual.
I consider it traumatic. Most men, however, don’t. Since I was sober and didn’t say no while, he was love bombing and manipulating me. I didn’t even realize he’d manipulated me for over a year.
I want to take all the autistic one’s in a room and have a conversation with them. So come on in if you fit that description.
Hello everyone! I know that this change of plan might be upsetting, but I have soft lighting and good spoons. Lots of things to drink, I already found your favorite snack and it’s over there. Please find the most comfortable seat and listen up.
This post especially applies to you. Do not trust people before they’ve given you a reason to do so. Respect is one thing.
We, as a community, are magnets for narcissists and abusers. 90% Of us will experience partner abuse in our lifetime. I hope that I have skewed the statistics, personally, in a way that helps relieve some of that for you.
We are extremely easy to gaslight. We are used to our experience being seen as different and we want to give people the respect they deserve and benefit of the doubt when they replay the situation back to us. We want to believe that they might be remembering things differently and not doing it intentionally.
Wonderful things can happen to us as far as finding the right people to love us. But if you feel like something is wrong, it is wrong. Our intuitions have been so jacked up by society. I wish I could save anybody through the horrific things I’ve seen as an undiagnosed person wandering the Earth until finally at 41 I was able to access an assessment and everything made sense. The things that I’ve learned.
I mean this with so much Love guys. I know we were all different and some of us might not fall for it, but all of my autistic friends have at one point.
I was crying with my bestie over the phone because of this exactly. I told her how much regret I feel because I gave him my body!
he lied and faked his whole personality, I thought he was a good guy, but he wasn’t. His true colors showed in 5 months, so I left. But I still mourn being involved with him sexually!
Now iam celibate and I don’t think I will have sex again before getting engaged at least.
Yes it is. You deeply mentioned what I’ve been through for 3 years. I’ve been lied to and I feel used. No one was trustworthy enough. They never give enough and they thought they were entitled to good, often time sex which I don’t want to. I don’t trust them anymore. I can’t even initiate any sexual stuff, I stay away and if someone does anything sexual, I feel shy. A guy was after me for 3 years, only to find out that he only wants sex and not something serious. That was really disappointing. Even people who want to have something serious want sex fast like it is a delivered food.