When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. Leah is not her real name. With her college boyfriend, the sex was rough from the beginning. When she was with other people, she found herself explaining away bruises and other marks on her body as the results of accidents.
Her boyfriend was popular on campus. But, in private, she saw glimpses of a darker sideβstray comments barbed with cruelty, a certain cunning. He never drank, and, though in public he cited vague life-style reasons, in private he told her that he loved being fully in control around other people as they unravelled, grew messy, came undone. Girls, especially.
In these moments, she would feel overwhelmed by a self-protective impulse that drove her out of bed, naked and crying, to shut herself in the bathroom. Maybe you should see someone. It emerged that this girl had gone to the same high school as her ex, and when Leah asked if she knew him the girl looked horrified.
Leah had never heard anyone speak about him like this. Some of what she described sounded eerily familiar. Leah went back to her dorm room and lay in bed for almost two days straight.
She kept revisiting memories from the relationship, understanding them in a new way. In the past decade, the word and the concept have come to saturate the public sphere. The popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm. But what are the implications of diagnosing it everywhere?
