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15th January 2018
05:35pm GMT

It's normal to invite a woman back to your house and assume that she's going to have sex with you, and it's normal for a man to repeatedly push a woman's hand to his penis.
It's normal for a man to try and coerce a woman into having sex even when she's giving non-verbal and sometimes verbal cues that she doesn't want to.
It's normal, and it happens, but that doesn't make it alright.
For many men, sex with women seems to be a challenge - something that they have managed to achieve in the face of adversity, regardless of the protestations or the discomfort or the clear lack of interest.
For these men, sex is not something that is enjoyed between two people. It's something that is going to happen, and it doesn't matter if you're into it or not.
There are plenty of reasons why many women don't, or can't, remove themselves from these kinds of situations.
You tell yourself you're fine, it's not that bad, it could be worse.
You think that if you just lie there, disinterested, he'll stop.
You rationalise that they'll get the message and that this is easier than saying no - a no that may not be possible, or one that will be potentially ignored anyway.
https://twitter.com/babedotnet/status/952551371433238528
In that moment, you're not somebody who may or may not decide that they want to have sex.
You're some girl who, for some incredible reason totally incomprehensible to these men, is just not that into it.
Later, they'll call you frigid. They'll tell people you were a shit ride and that you were wasting their time. They'll convince themselves that they're glad you two didn't get to have sex.
She was a bitch anyway, they'll say. Why bother?
Call them out and sometimes the best you can hope for is a tentative apology and the promise that they won't contact you again.
The worst is that nothing happens and that they continue on as normal - assuming that convincing women to sleep with them is just part of the game that all men must play.
Grace said that afterwards, she couldn't figure out whether what she had experienced was a typical bad date or a sexual assault.
The problem was that it had the potential to be both.
Women experience these kinds of "bad dates" all the time.
We recount them to our friends afterwards, honing in on the particularly uncomfortable details, agreeing that yeah, that guy was an asshole, listening to the responses that tend to begin: 'Oh that same thing happened to me a few weeks ago, let me tell you about it too.'
We take solace in the fact that we're not the only one who has been treated this way by a man we thought seemed like an alright kind of guy.
We're used to it.
Grace's story is a difficult read because it's so familiar.
It's one that so many of us have experienced and that so many of us could have written ourselves.
It happens but it shouldn't. It's normal but it's not.Explore more on these topics: