Sexual miscommunication? Untangling assumptions about sexual communication between casual sex partners

Abstract

Miscommunication theory suggests that many incidents of heterosexual sexual violence or coercion are the result of a miscommunication between men and women. Two most commonly cited forms of miscommunication include men overestimating women's interest in sex and women giving token resistance to sex. The current study is a thematic analysis of the ways that young women and men talked about their casual sex experiences with particular attention to the presence or absence of miscommunication in their descriptions. Both women and men used a combination of three themes to describe their communication with their casual partners: (1) tacit knowing, (2) refusing sex and (3) active participation. Women and men described similar communication mechanisms and reported communicating and understanding their partners' communication whether this involved acceptance or rejection of a sexual invitation. Both men and women demonstrated literacy in the same communicative tools, thus suggesting the absence of miscommunication.