Woman shared disturbing reality of one year ‘casually sleeping with men’
Warning: This article contains discussion of rape which some readers may find distressing.
A woman who vowed to 'stop being so precious about who she had sex with' for a year said she was left with anxiety and PTSD after completing the challenge.
After losing her virginity at 22, Kitty Ruskin was inspired by Sex and the City character Samantha Jones to go on a journey of sexual awakening.
“I decided to have sex with as many people as I wanted to,” Ruskin wrote, as per an exclusive published by the Daily Mail. “No more guilt. No more self-loathing. No more self-limitation. I was liberated and fearless. I was Samantha.”
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Across the year, Ruskin would sleep with 10 different men, but also tragically revealed the traumatic experiences she was sometimes forcibly put through.
Kitty told BBC's Woman's Hour: "Men do have this capability to go and discover themselves sexually without the fear of being in danger. That can be really great for finding who you are as a person and who you are in relationships with people.
"I think that women really deserve that as well. The current way things are: it was dangerous, but it shouldn’t be."
'Far too drunk to consent'
Her first experience saw her go out with a male model, but when things became intimate on the second date, he allegedly used bondage equipment on her, which quickly put her off seeing him again.
A similarly uncomfortable moment followed when she was on another date with a PhD student who first tried to convince her to join his new religion, before then choking her without her consent on a later date, which left her feeling 'fragmented and nauseous and confused'.
While Kitty said there were times when she felt 'very powerful and felt really empowered' having sex, which was sometimes 'pure and intimate and quite sweet', she was subjected to some horrifying violations.
On one occasion, she suspected she was spiked by an unnamed man at a bar, who took her to his house despite her being 'far too drunk to consent', before having 'unprotected sex with her'.
“My mind was slow to accept that my body had been raped because of self-defence,” she admitted. “After something traumatic happens, you don’t want to acknowledge that it’s happened. You don’t feel ready to face it, or capable of admitting it.”
"Unacceptable how apathetic we are"
Despite the awful encounters she had gone through, Ruskin was determined to see the year through, but was left with 'an almost unbearable weight of grief' after she says she was raped for the second time in a short time span.
In her book, she admits that she might have been better seeking sex within a relationship, as it might have left her 'feeling more satisfied' and 'more empowered'.
She told Woman's Hour: "In this year, I was sexually assaulted, I was raped, and it was all in the pursuit of wanting to feel like this liberated, modern woman who could have casual sex without the fear of stigma or sexual assault.
"The fact that it happened so much and that it had such a deep impact on my mental health... I thought this is so unacceptable how apathetic we are as a society."
Her book Ten Men: A Year of Casual Sex now sheds a light on the 'burden' that women are forced to carry with them in today's society, where men's violence and coercion against women in the bedroom can sadly often go unpunished.
If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article and wish to speak to someone in confidence, contact the Rape Crisis England and Wales helpline on 0808 500 222, available 24/7. If you are currently in danger or need urgent medical attention, you should call 999.
Topics: Mental Health
James Moorhouse