Being called a tease as a slut in a cisheteropatriarchy

My partner calls me a tease – a fair and accurate description given my investment in finding the words that will make them achingly hard and think about fucking me. But I remember, every time they say it with a fond grin or a playful groan, that for every person who affectionately calls me a tease, there’ll be another who’ll throw the words cock tease at me as an insult, or a justification.

Content note for rape, sexual harassment, and misogyny. This is also slightly more gender-binary-y than I like my writing to be – sorry folks.

Let me be clear, I love it when my partner calls me a tease. In fact, there are a lot of people who can call me a tease and make me glow with pride and pleasure. I delight in being a tease: I’m still exploring my power as a filthy-minded perv who can make the people I’m into pay attention. If I want to make you want me, to make you lust after me, I (sometimes) can. Or – more accurately –  I am learning how to flirt and how to be playfully sexual, and it’s so much fun.

I embrace the word tease like a crown, a sign of the victories I have won over my anxiety. Today, I’m able to bring my strap-on harness on a first date, just in case I ask the cute human I asked out last night to blow me. I can be bratty, teasing you with an explicit photo and a reminder that it’s a whole week until you get to fuck me yourself. I can be dominant, teasing you with a reminder of what I’m going to do to you when I get you alone later. I am a filthy tease, and to say I’m proud is sometimes an understatement, if I’m honest: nothing makes me feel more powerful than someone I want to fuck calling me a tease.

My partner calls me a tease as a term of affection, when I’ve sent a suggestive photo or strung together a sentence that I know will make their dick hard. I wish I could forget, when they do, that the word is inexplicably linked to slut-shaming.

Slut. Bitch. Cock tease. She was leading him on. She was asking for it. 

Whenever I talk about sexual assault, I point out that I’m incredibly lucky: I have never been raped. Yes, the fact that I’m grateful that the worst sexual harassment I’ve experienced are shouted “compliments” and so-light-I-wonder-if-I’m-making-it-up touches is horrific. And yes, I know that every time I’m lucky, there’s almost certainly another person who isn’t as lucky. Rape culture is awful, and it’s perpetuated in the smallest and seemingly insignificant ways.

I’m scared of having the word tease levelled at me in someone’s justification of their sexual assault. Someone smiling at you – or flirting with you, or kissing you – does not give you the right to anything more, so why do so many (cis, straight) men assume that it does? The men in my DMs who assume I’m down to flirt because I post carefully curated tit pics on Twitter. The men who have been drinking and try to work out how old I am as I scurry past them, clutching my keys between my fingers. The men whose comments make me burn with shame and self-hatred and make me wonder if the clothes I wear running are somehow too sexy.

All of this gives me some complex feelings when my partner calls me a tease.

The key thing here is consent, of course. Someone whose dick I’ve been doing my best to make hard in a public place is completely within their rights to call me a tease. I have been teasing them, and being called out on that by someone I want to fuck later is playful flirting. Someone I don’t know shouting across the street that I’m a cock tease – assumedly because I’m wearing not-actually-that-short denim shorts – isn’t ok.

I’d like to think that’s obvious, but apparently the people who catcall me clearly don’t see it that way.

We live in a society where – despite our best efforts – the narrative that women “owe” men sex is annoyingly persistent. Until we dismantle that narrative, my split-second reaction to anyone calling me a tease will be laced with fear. Until then, I’ll be scared that my clothes, my smile, my behaviour will allow men to justify sexual violence against me. So we need to change that narrative. And it’s not like I need more reasons to dismantle the cisheteropatriarchy, but I do love being called a filthy little tease.

Want to encourage me to continue to be vulnerable and share more of my adventures in navigating the cisheteropatriarchy as an outspoken slut? Please show your love by buying me a coffee – I’ll raise a festive Starbucks in your honour! (Alternatively, if you want to tell me you’d rather I skip the feminism and stick to filth… well, I won’t do it, but I’ll be significantly less pissed if you do so after tipping me.)

Quinn Rhodes

Quinn Rhodes (he/him) is a queer, trans, disabled sex writer with vaginismus. He’s a slut and a sex nerd who writes about his adventures in trying to fuck without fucking up. Quinn can usually be found wearing stomp-on-the-patriarchy boots while falling in love every time he fucks.