A few months ago I got chatting to a guy on Tinder. He was an architect who came across as intelligent and polite, and we set a date to meet. We were getting on really well when he asked me to go back to his house and I thought, why not? Later on, sex began consensually. I wanted him to wear a condom and he did. During sex he asked if he could take the condom off and I told him no. A few minutes later he asked again; again I said no. Noticing me checking that the condom was still on, he turned me to face away from him. Immediately after sex I realised that he had removed it and ejaculated inside me.
“Stealthing” is the pop culture name to describe a “new sex trend” reported to be “on the rise”. It refers to the act of deliberately removing a condom during sex without your partner’s knowledge or consent. This catchy phrase doesn’t actually mean there’s a new trend but coins a new term for a kind of sexual assault. Following a landmark case in Switzerland where a man was given a 12-month suspended sentence for removing a condom without his partner’s knowledge or consent, and a recent report by Yale law graduate Alexandra Brodsky, stealthing is attracting more mainstream attention. But, despite this, no one has so far been found guilty of it in the UK.
On realising what had happened to me during my Tinder date, I rushed to get my things and leave his house. When I asked him if he had taken off the condom, he didn’t give a clear answer and appeared confused by my outrage and upset. I took a cab to a nearby friend’s flat and went straight to her shower, not even thinking that I was washing away evidence of an assault. I wasn’t aware a crime had been committed – I just felt violated, and my instinctive reaction was to wash it off.
My feelings of violation weren’t caused by the experience of unprotected sex itself, despite having been exposed to potential STIs and pregnancy; it was my perpetrator’s abuse of my boundaries and his perceived entitlement to my body. I didn’t realise I had been sexually assaulted until a nurse, giving me the morning-after pill, explained it to me.