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Author: Imogen Butler-Cole
Genre: Memoir
At thirty-three, Imogen Butler-Cole has never thought of herself as a woman who was assaulted. Then a memory triggered by a news report from Steubenville, Ohio, about an unconscious girl at a party, lodges somewhere at the base of her spine and will not leave.
Over the next ten years seven memories come back, out of order and almost always through her body before her mind: on a therapist's table, in the garden, while reading another woman's testimony. Almost every man is someone she knew. A trusted friend. A boyfriend. A casual lover. And then, at the very moment she feels most free, a man who makes his living teaching other people about pleasure.
Asking For It is the story of a woman who wants sex and wants to be safe, and keeps finding out how rarely she has been allowed both. She goes looking for her own pleasure in rooms most of us never enter, and dances her rage in front of strangers. Then she writes to the men who hurt her, looking for repair rather than punishment. One of them sits across from her in a cocktail bar and admits everything, and lets her put his voice into the play that carries her into a community of other survivors.
And then, in love at last, she meets a memory that unsettles everything she thought she knew about harm.
This is a book about the sex women have and don't call assault, and what happens when they finally do.
For readers of Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah's The Sex Lives of African Women, Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, Chanel Miller's Know My Name and Roxane Gay's Hunger.
Author: Imogen Butler-Cole
Genre: Memoir
At thirty-three, Imogen Butler-Cole has never thought of herself as a woman who was assaulted. Then a memory triggered by a news report from Steubenville, Ohio, about an unconscious girl at a party, lodges somewhere at the base of her spine and will not leave.
Over the next ten years seven memories come back, out of order and almost always through her body before her mind: on a therapist's table, in the garden, while reading another woman's testimony. Almost every man is someone she knew. A trusted friend. A boyfriend. A casual lover. And then, at the very moment she feels most free, a man who makes his living teaching other people about pleasure.
Asking For It is the story of a woman who wants sex and wants to be safe, and keeps finding out how rarely she has been allowed both. She goes looking for her own pleasure in rooms most of us never enter, and dances her rage in front of strangers. Then she writes to the men who hurt her, looking for repair rather than punishment. One of them sits across from her in a cocktail bar and admits everything, and lets her put his voice into the play that carries her into a community of other survivors.
And then, in love at last, she meets a memory that unsettles everything she thought she knew about harm.
This is a book about the sex women have and don't call assault, and what happens when they finally do.
For readers of Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah's The Sex Lives of African Women, Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, Chanel Miller's Know My Name and Roxane Gay's Hunger.