Emily Atack has opened up about her ‘uncomfortable’ sexual experiences, reflecting on drunken encounters that she views as rape.
The Inbetweeners star, 34, weighed in on the subject of consent as she revealed she’s fronting an ‘affirmative consent’ campaign, which seeks to change the law so that ‘the two parties that are involved in the sexual act have to confirm that they want to go ahead with it’.
During a discussion on Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast she explained that she could count on one hand the times she’s enjoyed sex and that there were many occasions she couldn’t remember sleeping with someone.
She explained that she had been reflecting on past encounters that she now views in a different light because women are conditioned to ‘repress’ their feelings about sex and believe that having sex while too drunk to consent is ‘normal’.
Emily shared: ‘My situations have only been uncomfortable – yeah, literally. Honestly, I can only count on one hand probably where I’ve actually enjoyed sex.
‘Growing up, I’m sorry, as a teenager it was awful. There were no barriers, there were no boundaries. Boys didn’t know how to be with girls, girls didn’t know how to deal with those situations. It was a mess.’
Emily continued: ‘I went through life thinking if you wake up after a night out and something has happened but you don’t really remember it, you just have to suck it up and get on with it.
‘It’s like there’s no way anyone’s going to….it’s just not worth going down that road of ‘but I don’t remember, I don’t remember any of that’.
‘Yeah, awful, I’ve woken up so many times and been like “I definitely didn’t say yes to that’.’
The actress, who stars in the new Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, added that men are ‘getting away’ with having sex with drunk women.
Asked if any of her sexual experiences made her feel shameful, upset, or angry, she said: ‘Yeah, you do, but it’s been so repressed for so long, we were taught for such a long time that that was kind of a normal way to have sex – that you wake up after a party and go “Ooh, Jesus Christ, I don’t really remember that, anyway.” And then you just kind of carry on.
‘We’re taught that that was like normal.
‘The problem is now, now we’re all having the conversation more, people are coming out and going “Oh right, well, I was raped then.” And it’s very difficult to have to admit it to you.
‘But also the reason why it’s difficult as well for the men, men are getting angry because they’re scared, because so many men will listen to this sort of thing and go “I’ve done that before”.
‘There’ll be men that are getting their kids uniform ready for school and they will listen to something like this and stop in their tracks and go “Oh f**k, I’ve done that before.”
‘And they probably regret it and feel really terrible about it, but to be told now that that was wrong, and that actually that’s now seen as rape, that’s hard for people to digest because they know that they’ve done that somewhere in their lives a lot of people, loads of people.
‘That’s why it’s so difficult to go there.’
Emily has fronted a campaign created by CPB London calling for a change in the laws on rape and sexual assault
The petition, which reached 10,000 signatures in five days, reads: ‘Current laws on rape and sexual assault allow “implied consent” and considers the perpetrator’s “reasonable beliefs”.
‘An affirmative consent model addresses these points by requiring explicit agreement at every stage of the interaction, preventing misunderstandings. The Sexual Offences Act is 20 years old.
‘We believe the consent model should be re-evaluated in light of international change and to better protect survivors in court, shifting focus from an absence of ‘no’ to the presence of ‘yes’.’
Emily, commenting on men sending obscene messages to women, said: ‘I didn’t ask for them, I don’t want them – but that doesn’t matter.
‘In fact, that’s the point. It got me thinking: Consent, or the lack of it is at the heart of so much sexual harassment and violence that women and girls experience, yet the current law still fails to protect those who don’t say the word ‘no’ outright. It’s time to make things simple – only a Yes should mean Yes.
‘That simple messaging would certainly help inspire more open and clearer communications.’
The actress previously explored the alarming rise in online sexual harassment for new BBC2 documentary Emily Atack: Asking For It after experiencing repeated daily abuse across her Instagram and TikTok accounts.
In June this year, Emily welcomed her first child, son Barney, with scientist Alistair Garner, who she grew up with and has known for over 30 years.
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