How I F*ck as a Sexual Assault Survivor (Transcript)

NATALIE RIVERA: Hello, my name is Natalie Rivera and this is “How I F*ck,” a podcast about how we have sex, sponsored by Fembot Magazine. How i F*ck is a podcast that obviously asks people how they have sex, but also asks them where they believe their sexual interests and needs come from. What makes their sexuality different from the person next to them? What lengths do they have to go to to feel pleasure? Things to expect from this podcast: Graphic sexual details, some profanity, and unfortunately, every now and then, stories that might be hard for some listeners. Which brings me to this episode: How I F*ck as a Sexual Assault Survivor.  Someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every 73 seconds, but the trauma that comes after can last a lifetime. What is it like having sex after experiencing sexual abuse ? Does it shape the way you look at sex? Does it make you want less of it? Does it make you want sex more? Also, a reminder that I am not a sex expert. I am just a journalist whose curious how people navigate their sex lives. In this episode, I speak with Ashley Manta, a woman who went through a lot before finding a sexual rhythm that works for her. Trigger warning: This episode includes some graphic details about sexual assault. I’ll make sure to give a warning before we get to the detailed part of this episode. I’ll also advise you how far into the episode you should skip. Take care of yourself, people.

NR: Ashley is a full-time cannasexual. 

ASHLEY MANTA: I am definitely a full-time cannasexual. Cannasexual has really become a lifestyle brand and it's my life.

NR: And what is cannasexual?

AM: Cannasexual is a word that I made up and subsequently trademarked, and it refers to anyone who mindfully and deliberately combines sex and cannabis to deepen intimacy and enhance pleasure, whether solo or partnered.

NR: Ashley came up with the term cannasexual in 2014. Since then she’s professionally consulted people who are in need of sex or relationship advice. Her services include speaking engagements, workshops, and one-on-one phone calls. From how to make your own   weed-infused lube to how much weed you should smoke before having sex, Ashley is the person you need to speak to if you want to know how to have high sex the right way. 

AM: I've written about 150 articles on sex and cannabis in the last four years, and it's been everything from using cannabis to combat chronic pain or acute pain, to mitigate anxiety, to connect more deeply with yourself and to really develop a robust self-love practice, to integrate trauma in a really intentional way. 

NR: And so while you are mostly known for coining this term and for being…is it safe to say cannabis sex coach, is that-

AM: Yes, absolutely.

NR: Yeah. okay. So while you are mostly known for that, we aren't here to necessarily talk about that, but we're actually here to talk about one of the things you just listed, which is cannabis and how it can help people who have experienced some assault or some trauma.

AM: Yes.

NR: Ashley has been sexually assaulted multiple times in her life. She’s very open about these experiences which makes sense when you meet her. She’s pretty much an open book, especially when it comes to sex. Her fascination with sex started when she was young. Like, really young. 

AM: I definitely have always sort of been a sexual creature. I remember masturbating early and I remember like despite being raised in a very catholic household, like both of my parents had pretty progressive views on masturbation. My dad tells a story about finding me in the bathtub when I was five years old with a turkey baster going to town. Who would've taught me to do that at five? I don't know.

NR: Did he stop you or did he let you finish?

AM: He kind of walked in and was like, "Oh,” and then turned around and walked right out. For that, I am grateful, although I am less grateful that he chooses to tell that story every Thanksgiving.

NR: But while masturbation wasn’t outwardly frowned upon, premarital sex was a different story. 

AM: I had really intended to— before I understood that virginity was a social construct—I intended to stay a virgin until I was married. That was the plan. and that kind of went out the window.

NR: Ashley was in middle school when she was assaulted by a boy in high school. She had dated this person for a week not that long before the incident. She was 13. He was 16. he was her first of many things. First person to put their hand down her pants. To go down on her. Ashley described to us her assault. The details are graphic so if this is something you’re not comfortable with hearing I advise you skip the next 65 seconds.

AM: We were in the basement and he started wrestling my clothes off and he gave me the choice between losing my shirt or losing my pants. And even now it's been, what, 19 years, I can still remember what I was wearing that day. I was wearing khakis and a pastel striped shirt and tweety panties. And so I gave up my shirt because I didn't want to lose my pants and then he took my pants off anyway and we got down on the ground and he was fingering me and all of a sudden there was something that was like not a finger inside of me, and my eyes got real big and like I sat up and I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't want to lose my virginity,” like, "that's not what I want." And he's like, "Yeah.. you just did." I remember just like being kind of dumbstruck by that and I just flopped back down on the ground and I completely dissociated and he put on a condom and finished. 

NR: He was also high during the assault. Ashley didn’t know too much about weed at that age, just what she was told by her family who were very anti-weed, so obviously not great things.

AM: I thought that i had a contact high, because I was really afraid of weed back then. I was raised in a very conservative, very quite honestly, racist and shitty area and so weed was bad and wrong and the people who did it were bad and wrong. And so the feeling of dissociation that I had, I attributed to being around cannabis instead of it being a very normal reaction to trauma. 

NR: Ashley went to school the next day. She told her friends in gym class, “I think I had sex yesterday.” It wasn’t until a year later that she realized what she experienced was actually rape.    

AM: I actually remember continuing to have sex with him, which is very common for survivors, and I later shamed myself because I didn't understand that. I was like, "Oh, well like it had to be consensual because I kept sleeping with him," and what I found as I studied trauma is that’s very common because it's how survivors can kind of normalize it to themselves. Even though the first time was not consensual, like I'm sort of reclaiming it and so now it's on my terms.

NR: Ashley’s right. It is isn’t unheard of for someone to remain in contact with their assaulter. Ashley had sex so she could reclaim her narrative, but she also had it so she could feel something again. So she could feel like herself before the assault. This wouldn’t be the last time Ashley used sex to heal.

AM: I spent as much time as I could with older boys because they didn't care about reputation. They just wanted a girl who was easy, and I was. I had no self esteem. I was absolutely willing to trade blowjobs for rides to school and-

NR: That's something you did?

AM: That's something I did only with one person, but still, not ideal. I was making all sorts of not ideal decisions.  It definitely impacted all of the relationships that I had. I was very fixated on sex.

NR: It was all of this sex that helped Ashley realize that something wasn’t right with how her body experienced intercourse. It turned out it wasn’t just her brain that remembered the abuse, but her body too.  

NR: You mentioned pain during penetration. When did you realize that that was a thing? That you felt pain during sex in that way?

AM: It kind of was present from the beginning, like from the first time on and so-

NR: And by first time on, do you mean—

AM: From the sexual assault when I was 13 on, and it was only [like that] for like the first couple minutes. And so early on, I was like, “Oh, like this is just what sex feels like. Or maybe I need to warm up more but they don't seem to care about me warming up. So I’m just going to grit my teeth and get through it,” because it would feel good after that first couple minutes. It was just this cringing for like 60 to 120 seconds.

NR: Do you think your sexual partners knew that it was painful in the beginning?

AM: Some of them did. Some of them didn't. Sometimes it would become less painful over time, as my body kind of got used to them, but it was always at least a little painful. And most of the time, I didn't even tell them. Like they were on top of me, so my face was next to their face when they were penetrating me and so they couldn't see the cringe face. And I didn't want to make them feel bad. Oh man, my priorities were so out of whack in my 20s. So in college when I was studying trauma and when I became a rape crisis counselor, I learned about vaginismus and vulvodynia.

NR: Vulvodynia is chronic pain or discomfort that happens around the opening of the vagina, or the vulva. Vaginismus is an involuntary spasm of the pelvic floor muscles. It’s like your pelvis clenching anytime something tries to go inside of you: a penis, tampon, finger. It’s your brain and body saying “fuck off.” 

AM: Your brain’s like shut it down. Shut it down right now. Nope, nope, nope, that's not safe. It's dangerous. Let's make that not happen. And it hurts. There are people who have it much more severely than even I did who couldn't get anything inside of them. Like I know people who need dilators to be able to put a tampon in, like it cleanses that much.

NR: While this didn’t affect her masturbation routine—Ashley doesn’t finger herself, she’s more about rubbing her clit—she was still determined to address this pain. 

AM: I was like okay, so what do i do about it? I tried warming up as much as I could. That helped a little. I tried using lube. That helped a little. I went to the doctor and they're like, “I don't know use lidocaine?” That didn't help at all. Having the pain with penetration was a really shitty thing to deal with. Having partners who would push on my boundaries. Even if they wouldn't completely disregard them, they would roll their eyes or they would whine about it or would make me feel bad. If I got triggered, they were annoyed. They felt like it was a burden or they were like, "Really god, can you just be like a normal girl."  

NR: This search for an answer to this pain was disrupted in grad school when she was sexually assaulted by a friend. It was this experience that made it especially hard for her to trust people again.

AM: Being assaulted by one of my best friends when I was in grad school was really painful, because he knew that I was a survivor. He got really drunk one night and I was also drinking and we stayed at a friend's house because we were being responsible and not driving and he ended up assaulting me and that sucked. That definitely fed into the complex PTSD and my ability to trust people and to trust myself, to discern who was trustworthy. That took a long time to work through. And so more therapy, more time, more trying to figure things out and cannabis helped a lot with the integration process. For years, I avoided cannabis like the plague and it wasn't until I was studying philosophy, because of course, that a bunch of people in my cohort and the professors all smoked weed. Then I was like, "Oh people with PhD’s, they're not losers. They're not degenerates. I'm confused. This is different than everything I've been told.” And I learned and my brain expanded.

NR: Ashley finished grad school at 24 and eventually found herself working at the DA's office. It was during this period in her life that Ashley was sexually attacked again, this time by a cop. They both had attended the same event. There was some flirtation and even a kiss but that wasn’t enough for him. 

AM: I was like how does this keep happening? I guilted myself for a long time, because I was like, “Is it me?” Generally, we're not very kind to survivors, we blame people for what they were wearing or [say things] like, “What did you expect?” My mother, my own mother, after the second time I was assaulted was like, “Well, you were drinking, what did you think was going to happen?" One of the many reasons my mother and I don't talk anymore.

NR: Women assaulted multiple times in their life isn’t uncommon. In fact, 35% of women who were raped before the age of 18 were also later raped as an adult. That’s not to say that every person who experiences sexual assault as a child is guaranteed to be attacked again as an adult— it’s just that there is a higher chance if you did experience something similar in your childhood. This was one of many revelations Ashley had in her 20s, and it was one that made a lot more sense to her during a therapy session one day. Trigger warning: The next 90 seconds explores childhood sexual abuse. You see, Ashley has always had a distaste for semen, but it’s more than a swallow or spit debate, we’re talking nausea. 

AM: Guys were mad about the fact that I didn't want cum in my mouth. Guy after guy after guy [were like] "Oh, what the hell man, like I feel like you're rejecting me as a person." I'm like, "That's not how that works."

NR: It doesn't taste that great.

AM: It really doesn't. Listen, if you are a cum guzzling fan, like god bless you, by all means, do that shit, but for me, totally grosses me out. And so I wouldn't say it like that to them. I would just be like, "This is a boundary and i just need you to give me a little courtesy tap if you're getting close and I will vacate the area and you can cum wherever else you want just not in my mouth." And a lot of guys took that as a personal affront. And so I was doing an EMDR session with the therapist, and I was like, "I just want to kind of dial into this a little bit and see what's there because I feel like there's something there's got to be a reason." There actually doesn't have to be a reason, some people can just not like that, but turns out I knew myself even subconsciously and there was a reason and so through EMDR we realized that when I was somewhere between three or four, my parents had a 18-year-old guy babysit me, which always seems like a bad idea. Not to say that cis guy babysitters are all potential child molesters, but that happened to me. 

NR: Ashley believes her teenage male babysitter abused her in her family’s basement when she was only four years old. Her and her therapist believe this is probably the reason why she can’t have semen in her mouth without feeling like she’s going to vomit.

AM: Realizing that and realizing that that was my very first introduction into any kind of sexuality, was being violated by someone who was in a position of authority, it made everything else make a lot more sense.

NR: In 2015, Ashley made the brave decision of naming the person who abused her in middle school. Her blog post got tens of thousands of hits, some from women who were also abused by Ashley’s assaulter. Revisiting this and hearing other stories of abuse triggered Ashley. Her PTSD flared up, and Ashley was desperate for anything that could help manage it. The answer? Weed.    

AM: I felt like I had to start all over again and cannabis was the only thing that allowed me to eat. It was the only thing that allowed me to get sleep. It was the only thing that allowed me to function.

NR: I'm sure you see the irony…

AM: Yeah. the irony is not lost on me that I became the sex and cannabis queen.

NR: Recovery isn’t easy and it definitely isn’t something that can happen overnight. It’s a lot of trial and error and finding things that reclaim your narrative. It can mean reshaping your sex life entirely. It can mean developing certain interests.

AM: I needed to start to rebuild myself sexually after having that scab ripped off so intensely. In 2014 I found this company called Foria that makes this infused oil, cannabis infused oil for sex and pleasure. And that was the thing that allowed me to have penetrative sex without pain for the first time, and that was a game changer for me. I was like, "Holy fucking shit. Wow, what a difference." And it was like night and day because all of those years of gritting my teeth and not being able to enjoy sex from the very beginning, like it altered the way that I experienced it. And so being able to start from a place of “Hell yes,” was like, "Oh, this is excellent."

NR: What was your relationship to porn?

AM: I have never been super into porn. I'm not a visual arousal person. I am an auditory and verbal person, so I would read erotica and when I was little, I would sneak romance novels and read the sexy parts. And once the internet happened, I would go into chat rooms and have cybersex.

NR: So you didn't feel like the experiences that you had influenced the erotica that you were reading? Say you maybe… I don't know, stayed away from reading something about consent being violated?

AM: No, on the contrary actually, what I found out, because I shamed myself for this for a long time too, it is really common for survivors to have rape fantasies, and I do. And it's because it's a way to, again, normalize it in your brain and to make it something that you can control, and that you can have on your terms, because you are choosing to read it. You're choosing what you want to read. If you're role playing it, you have a safe word at any point. 

NR: Safe words and a space where you have full control. Where there is communication as to what you want and what you definitely want to avoid. It was a space that Ashley was learning to create for herself, and it was a huge reason why Ashley started exploring BDSM. In those spaces, she could be whatever she wanted to be and what she wanted was not to be dominant, but submissive.

AM: Submissive space or sub space is almost a trance state for folks, and some people get there through impact play, being flogged or caned, or just spanked. Some people get there through being tied up, some people get there through role play, you know, everybody's a little bit different. But for me, lying on the bed motionless, like completely limp, staring at the ceiling while my partner goes to town on me in whatever ways feel best for him, totally puts me in this very trance-like state, where my sensations are massively heightened, but my whole job is to stay still and breathe. I don't have to be pleasing, I don't have to perform, I just have to stay still. And so it's like a meditation almost, and that has been fucking fantastic for me. And that's a dynamic I never imagined exploring with someone else, but if I hadn't found the kink world, if I hadn't found BDSM, I never would have even thought to try it.

NR: Ashley needed to explore BDSM and kink with someone she trusted completely, of course, which is what made B’s arrival so much more perfect.

AM: In June of 2015 is when I met my lover B who I've talked about sort of all over the internet over the last four years, and that was really the first like amazingly empowered sexual experience I had. When I met B things changed. That was really the first time that I ever had someone that I'd had such incredible sexual experiences with and that I love so much be able to hold that kind of space for me, and that was transformative. At various points, like I would have a panic attack or something would set me off and I would get stuck in my head. He would be like, "Okay, I'm right here. Can you breathe with me? Let's do some breathing,” and he would lay on top of me and put weight on my central nervous system and help me calm down that way. Even at the times where I felt so unlovable, where I felt completely unattractive, and like, "Why are you putting up with this? Why are you dealing with this? This is so much," and he was like, "This doesn't scare me. I’m here for this."And so B was the first one that I ever had that just like, "I can't get enough of you, like I want your naked body on or around me all the time." And he was the first person that I ever went away for a weekend with and we just like, f*cked all weekend. It was so good. Oh my god, it was so good. We still, now four and a half years of knowing each other, we still do that, we still escape on our weekends away where we're just going to like go through all the condoms. I think our record is 18 condoms in a weekend.

NR: That's great.

AM: Yeah. safer sex for the win.

NR: There isn’t a set list of ingredients or steps that a survivor needs to follow in their journey to recovery. These are things that worked and continue to work for Ashley: Weed. Erotica. BDSM. Being a submissive. B. Weed also helped Ashley be more in tune with her body and mind during sex. It also helped her connect with her partners better. Mindfully combining weed and sex...that’s “cannasexuality.” It’s why people call Ashley the cannasexual.

AM: I love myself more than I ever have in my life. I'm surrounded by people who treat me with respect who honor my no’s and who celebrate my boundaries in ways I never imagined were possible. And so that's part of why I do what I do because I have survived some f*cking horrific shit, and this is where I am now, on the cover of Sexual Health Magazine being proclaimed America’s High Priestess of Pleasure and getting write-ups in High Times, talking about sex magic, like it's possible. Healing is possible. If there's anything I've learned from all the great sex that I've had in the last four and a half years, it's slowing down and really being aware and thoughtful about your surroundings, creating a sexual sanctuary with music and a playlist and incense— if that's a thing that you like— or candles or soft fabrics, like creating a whole ecosystem to play in. And don't just half ass it. Use your whole ass, you know?

NR: I think that's a great point to leave this conversation.

AM: Awesome. Use your whole ass. The end.

NR: So Ashley, how can people find you, follow you?

AM: Great question. You can find me on my website, cannasexual.com. I highly recommend signing up for my email list, that's the best way to stay in touch with me. You can also find me on Instagram @cannasexual or on Twitter @ashleymanta, and if you want to take some of my online courses, which are super fun and exciting, you can find those at elevatedintimacy.com.

NR: Thank you, Ashley.

AM: Thank you.

NR: So that was our episode. This podcast was produced by me, Natalie Rivera. I am also the host and creator. Ben Quiles is our audio engineer. Shyanne Lopez did copy and fact check. Music is by Miguel Gutierrez. You can find more of his music online under his artist name MAGH. Chelsea Kwoka is our vocal coach. Our marketing team includes Gabriela Sanchez and Alissa Medina. Mouna Coulibaly is our sponsorship manager. Also, check out our sponsor Fembot Magazine. Also, if you like this podcast so far please tell everyone you know. Word of mouth goes a long way. Liking, subscribing, and rating this podcast also helps us enormously. Thank you and stay tuned for our next episode.