Why are so many people, regardless of gender and sexual orientation, having sex they don’t want to have?
I was twelve years old, spending the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, and I had my first boyfriend. We walked to the end of the dock, sat down, and started kissing. It felt good, until it didn’t. My neck was getting tired, then painful, from the position I was holding. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t think I had a choice if I wanted him to like me.
This pattern occurred many times over in my life. And I ended up agreeing to a lot of sexual exchanges I didn’t want to have. My experience is not abnormal. It is far more common than we admit.
Why Do People Agree to Sex They Don't Want?
In my private practice, where I work with both couples and individuals, I have yet to meet someone who has not had a sexual exchange they did not want at some point in their lives.
In a 2023 Finnish study of nearly 1,500 people, 65% of women said they had gone along with sex they didn’t desire at least once in their current or most recent relationship.
In a 2018 study, “‘Going with the Flow’: How College Men’s Experiences of Unwanted Sex Are Produced by Gendered Interactional Pressures,” sociologist Jessie Ford found that men were going along with sex they didn’t want because of pressure to perform masculinity.
“I think it’s an undercurrent to my thought-making… that guys are supposed to enjoy sexual intercourse under any circumstances,” said one student.
“There is this social pressure that men like sex a lot and women can choose yes or no,” explained another. “So, I guess it makes you unmanly if you don’t want to have sex.”
Others went along with it to protect the other person’s feelings. When asked why he didn’t stop, one man said, “She might think I was a little strange… Like she got rejected… I think she would feel weird or surprised.”
Women describe the same pull. In an interview with Fatherly, Ford explained that women report going along with unwanted sex because stopping felt awkward, because it was easier than making a big deal of it, or simply because it was the fastest way to end the date and go home. They also feared being seen as a prude, or as someone who leads men on.
Women and men alike, she noted, are managing gendered expectations and awkwardness at the same time.
And many people are also managing the impacts of trauma. I was often afraid that I would make the person angry, and that didn’t feel safe.
Why We Fear Saying No to Sex
In all of these moments, the person having a sexual exchange they don’t want is tracking something outside of themselves rather than their own feelings and desires. They are tracking the social pressure to fit a particular gender role in order to be accepted, to be good, to belong. And they are tracking the person in front of them. How will they feel? Hurt, rejected, angry? Will they see me as not man enough? As a prude? Will they no longer desire me?
They are responding to a perceived threat: of being cast out, of losing belonging, of losing connection, of losing being desired, of losing love.
We have been raised in a culture that teaches us we must be desirable to be lovable. And many of us confuse being desired with being loved.
Many of us were humiliated or shamed growing up for not being man enough, for leading men on, for being a prude or a slut. Those experiences can make the possibility of it happening again feel genuinely dangerous.
The Fawn Response During Sex: When People-Pleasing Looks Like Consent
Not every yes without desire is a betrayal of the self. Sometimes we choose, freely and from a settled place, to give. But fawning is something else. It isn’t a choice so much as a reflex. And thats what was happening to me on that dock in Martha’s Vineyard.
When the nervous system perceives danger, it can respond in ways we don’t control. Psychotherapist Pete Walker named one of these responses fawning: seeking safety by pleasing.
On the surface, everything can look consensual, but the body is in a survival response. You might feel anxious to please, tracking your partner’s every reaction while losing track of your own. Your decisions, your actions, your performance are all shaped by a perceived threat.
That threat could be the fear of disappointing your lover or making them angry. At its core, it is the fear of losing connection or staying alive. And it can reach beyond the two of you, into larger forces like gender roles and the need to belong.
It might look like pressuring yourself to get erect so you appear capable and desirable, when your body simply isn’t in the mood. It might look like allowing penetration before your body is fully aroused, because you don’t feel you have the right to slow down or say no.
Often it starts with not wanting to ruin the moment. Instead of pausing to speak about why your body isn’t a full yes, or what it would need to become one, you go along to keep the peace.
Meanwhile, your body feels abandoned.
How to Reconnect With Your Body and Desires During Sex
In my hands-on sexuality work as a sexological bodyworker, I see how going against the body’s wishes, over time, dulls sensation, arousal, and pleasure.
But I also see how the body comes alive again.
When you slow down, when you allow pauses, a shift in position, a request for something softer or slower, your body begins to speak. And when you follow its guidance, it opens. By honoring what your body is feeling and wanting, you develop a felt sense of safety within yourself. And it begins to feel more.
More sensation. More pleasure. More desire. And overtime, you can build your capacity to attune to your desires and communicate them in a sexual exchange.
What’s Next?
If you recognized yourself in this, the tracking, the pleasing, the yes your body didn’t mean, the way back begins with practice. Your body learns by doing, and that takes repetition.
Fawning is a reflex built in relationship. Practicing alone, with no one to perform for, no one to track but yourself, is the clearest way to start hearing your body’s yes and no again.
My free guide, Your Guide to Sex Magic, is a solo ritual built for exactly this. It invites you to slow down and stay with whatever arises: pleasure, numbness, grief, the urge to rush. It includes the Eight Pillars of Intimacy™ as your compass, and guidance for meeting freeze and numbness when they come.
Download Your Free Ritual Guide
If you’d like support with someone beside you, I work one-on-one through Eros Alchemy containers. Together we tend to your nervous system, the patterns of pleasing you learned to survive, the stories you inherited, and your body’s way back to sensation and pleasure.
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