“After a period in which we had thrilling, incredible sex, he supposedly lost interest and stopped initiating. When I tried to initiate, he did not respond. When I touched him, he recoiled. Sometimes he even got out of bed and went to the living room. He told me this had never happened to him with anyone else, that he felt I simply could not satisfy him.”
With an abusive partner, sex is not a mutual experience. It is not a way to build or deepen intimacy, closeness and trust. Sexuality has one purpose: control, and the takeover of the victim’s body and mind until total submission. The bed becomes a microcosm of the entire relationship.
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The abusive lover can feel irresistible, until sex becomes control
(Photo: Shutterstock)
Studies have linked high levels of psychopathy with greater interest in casual sex, sex without prior acquaintance or commitment, and sadomasochistic sex. For the abuser, sexuality is both an end and a means. Alongside physical satisfaction and pleasure, he seeks to weaken the victim, blur her boundaries and bind her to him.
Sex becomes another form of abuse inside the relationship.
Many victims say the abuser was the best lover they ever had. That is not surprising. He is an illusionist. The bed, too, is a stage on which he performs.
At the beginning of the relationship, he plays the most attentive and exciting lover you can imagine. This is a conscious choice. A strategic one. He uses the sexual, intimate arena to accelerate and deepen attachment, so it is important to him that you enjoy yourself, feel satisfied, become addicted to his touch and recognize his extraordinary abilities in bed.
As long as he is pursuing you passionately, you will meet only the perfect lover: selfless, devoted and focused entirely on your pleasure. Once the honeymoon phase ends, the perfect lover turns into a pumpkin, and the sexual arena becomes a field of power and control.
You have never experienced anything like it. You are shaken, dizzy and, most importantly from his point of view, waiting, maybe already needing more.
The ability to manipulate you, pressure you and subdue you satisfies him more than any orgasm. To understand abusive sexuality, you must let go of everything you know about normative sexuality.
Sex as a trap: The love-bombing stage
The abuser is the perfect lover. He will compliment you and marvel at you, worship your body and devote himself entirely to pleasuring you. He will learn your preferences and needs: what you like, what you need. He will seemingly forget himself and invest all his efforts in satisfying you.
He knows that sensory pleasure and the sex hormones released afterward play an important role in forming attachment, intimacy and closeness.
This is the sexual experience you did not even know you wanted: long foreplay, gentle and exploratory touch, intense eye contact throughout the act. He will whisper everything you wanted to hear into your ear. He will hug, stroke and cuddle afterward.
You feel protected and safe in a way you have never felt before, free to remove all defenses and inhibitions, to reveal yourself and surrender. Did you need more proof that this is the love of your life? Here it is. Even your body is signaling to you: pay attention, something completely different is happening here. Something big. Stronger than you.
You have never experienced anything like it. You are overwhelmed, dizzy and, most importantly from his perspective, expecting, perhaps already needing more.
Sex as a weapon: The mask falls
When the abuser feels he is in control, his behavior changes. No more long hours of foreplay, soft whispers, caresses and cuddling. He no longer “forgets” himself in the effort to pleasure you. The sexual act becomes functional and cold. Often, he simply seeks his own satisfaction, and once he gets it, the contact ends.
This change happens gradually and subtly, and most often you will interpret it as the calming down that follows the stormy beginning of a relationship, as entering a “relationship routine.” That is what happens to everyone, right?
No. Not like this.
Hostility, aggression and forcefulness slowly seep into the sexual arena. Sex becomes a reward he grants you or a loyalty test you must pass.
Gentle touch may be replaced by crude contact, demands or more aggressive sexual acts. The man in love who worshipped every inch of your body will begin to make cruel comments about its flaws. You will enjoy sex less, but the frequency will not necessarily decline. On the contrary, the abuser will become more demanding.
The relationship’s unwritten and unspoken rules will now include sexual rules as well. For example, you are not allowed to say “no” when he wants sex, regardless of the circumstances, or you must cooperate with demands for extreme, unusual sexual acts or ones in which you have no interest.
“At first he was everything I could have asked for in a sexual partner. Attentive, sensitive, containing. It fit with everything I knew about him until then, with the perfect match between us. Slowly, it changed. Sex became technical. He focused only on his penetration, and it could go on for hours. It was burdensome and painful. When I tried to comment gently, he explained that it was hard for him to stop himself with me. How can you even respond to that? He suggested we film ourselves. I refused. He made me feel boring, pathetic and uptight. He explained that in a relationship we are supposed to fulfill our fantasies, that he constantly fulfills mine and that it hurts him that I am not willing to fulfill his. In the end, I found myself agreeing to more and more things I did not want to do, just to feel that I was a good partner.”
Sexual surveillance
It is hard to imagine a place where we are more exposed and vulnerable than the bedroom. The abuser knows how to exploit that vulnerability for his changing needs. He converts intimacy into power.
He may, for example, carry out an unusual sexual act and then threaten you, supposedly as a joke, with telling friends or family about the “secret.”
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Hostility, aggression and forcefulness slowly seep into the sexual arena
(Photo: Shutterstock)
“We were at my family’s house for Friday dinner, and suddenly he whispered in my ear: What do you think your father would say if he knew what you asked me to do to you yesterday? I froze. He smiled at me, but it was not funny. I think I understood at that moment that he really meant it, that he was capable of doing it.”
Many victims described a recurring demand: that they send him nude photos, photos of themselves masturbating or performing various sexual acts. Later, the abuser used those photos to extort and threaten them.
“After mediation between us failed, I received a letter from a lawyer by mail. In the letter, he laid out all the reasons that supposedly prevented me from being a good mother to my children and from receiving full custody, as I wanted. He claimed I was a woman suffering from a personality disorder and severe sexual deviance. He did not settle for detailed descriptions; the photos were attached to the letter as an appendix.”
Objectification
A study on sexual fantasies found that abusers showed a clear preference for specific fantasies: sex with multiple partners, anonymous sex or sex without commitment. The truly disturbing finding was that many participants also reported acting on those fantasies.
The power of fantasies often comes from the knowledge that they cannot be fully realized for various reasons. One of them is the understanding that, in real time, fulfilling them may come at a cost. Many people, for example, are deterred from fully acting out fantasies involving control, violence and pain, knowing they would struggle to cause suffering to their partner or see that partner in distress.
The abuser has no such inhibitions. For him, his sexual partner is an object. A thing. More than that, some abusers take pleasure in crossing the boundary itself, in causing mental or physical distress to the partner. Under these conditions, it is easy to fulfill any fantasy and turn it into reality.
When a normative person senses that his sexual behavior is met with resistance or lack of cooperation from the other side, he stops. That is not the case with the abuser. For him, resistance is an invitation to increase pressure and test boundaries.
The traits that characterize an abusive personality, hostility, impulsivity, lack of empathy and the need for excitement that is not regulated by social norms or conscience, are present even more forcefully in the bedroom.
The abuser’s difficulty forming emotional attachment and seeing his partner as a whole person with rights and desires translates into expressions of cruelty, open or concealed, in the sex life. Many victims describe coerced sex, whether through physical force or gaslighting; crude, insulting or degrading sex accompanied by cruel and humiliating comments; and the open withholding of sex.
Breaking boundaries and destroying the self
Part of the pleasure abusers derive from sex comes from breaking boundaries and undermining the conventions of trust and reciprocity in an interpersonal relationship. Often, the abuser will urge you to try new things, not because he wants to enrich your sex life, but because what excites him, far more than the act itself, is making you do something you did not want to do.
The more you refuse, the more he insists and refuses to let go until he gets what he wants. Then he will also make you believe that you not only agreed, but wanted it, even pushed for it.
This stands out especially in the stories of religious victims, who described the violation of the prohibition on sexual contact during niddah, the demand for sexual contact that contradicted the faith and values on which they had been raised all their lives, even when the abuser himself wore a kippah.
Cooperating with acts that arouse reservation or even revulsion comes at a heavy emotional cost. You grow weaker, and the abuser uses that weakness to break more and more boundaries, to apply more manipulations and emotional blackmail: “You don’t love me enough”; “You should have told me you were frigid”; “I don’t understand why you’re angry, you’re the one who wanted it like this.”
He uses sex to destroy you.
“At the beginning of the relationship he encouraged me to express my sexual fantasies. I don’t think I was really aware of those fantasies until he began pressing me to think about them and voice them. I felt this was a level of intimacy I had never experienced with others. I don’t know today whether it really turned him on or whether he pretended it did, but after I shared those fantasies with him, he began using them. Every time we argued, he would say to me: ‘Oh, I’m the one who’s wrong? Maybe we should talk about your perverted fantasies?’ Of course, I believed him that something was wrong with me. I was so ashamed that I even thought about such things.”
Punishment
The abuser uses sex as currency. Whenever he does something for you or responds to your needs, he will expect repayment in the form of sex. Sometimes, that sex will include aggressive or humiliating acts.
Sex can also become a form of revenge. Many victims told a similar story: After they came home happy and excited following a promotion at work, some achievement or even a successful social gathering, the abuser led them into humiliating and threatening sexual contact that reminded them who was really powerful.
Withholding and body shaming
When the abuser feels secure enough in the relationship, he begins criticizing and ridiculing your body, your weight, the way you behave, move or speak during sex. He drops cruel hints about your preferences in bed and your sex life before him. He compares you to previous partners, all of whom, of course, were more beautiful and sexier than you, and with all of whom he had perfect sexual chemistry.
He withholds sex from you, just as he withholds affection, and explains that it is because of you, because something in your behavior or your body repels him. He takes an intimate moment between you and turns it into a joke, a story he has no problem sharing with strangers in your presence.
His goal remains consistent: to break, humiliate and subdue.
“The sex with him at the beginning of the relationship was probably the best sex I had ever had in my life. He understood something about my preferences, things I myself did not yet understand. Over time, the amazing sex disappeared. He told me something was wrong with me, that he had never encountered this in previous relationships. The creative games in bed became humiliations. I was tense, and my body simply refused to cooperate. It hurt. It was hard for me to surrender. He celebrated that. He threw hints and digs at me, even in front of my friends. He asked me, supposedly innocently, how I had managed to hide my problems from him. After we broke up, I discovered that while we were together, he had slept with my friend.”
Sadistic gratification
Sexual sadism allows expression of aggression and the perverse sexual drive: pleasure from the unusual, crude, norm-breaking sexual act. Abusers whose personalities are marked by high levels of sadism take pleasure in the victim’s suffering and humiliation. Under the guise of overwhelming desire, they hurt and humiliate their partner. If she dares to rebel, she will be accused of harming the relationship.
“He said to me: ‘And you’re still surprised I look at others? Say thank you that I’m only looking. Because of you, our sex is dry, boring. You’re the one pushing me out.’”
“He told me other women would kill to feel that a man wanted them like that, but that I was childish, and that it killed his desire. He pressured me for months to bring another woman in. I had never done anything like that, and honestly, the thought alone terrified me. But he insisted and pressured until I agreed. Just once, just for his birthday. In the moment, it was too much for me. I could not bear that there was another woman with us, I could not bear the way he touched her. I just waited for it to be over. After she left, he said to me: ‘See? That is what a woman who really knows how to enjoy herself looks like.’”
“I told him I had been sexually assaulted, that I was in treatment. I explained at length what my triggers were, what I could do and what I could not. He pretended to be the man who would heal me. In the first months he was even too considerate and cautious. Over time, that changed. He stopped respecting my requests to stop or pause. He claimed I was damaging our intimacy. I reached a point where I was lying on my back, gritting my teeth, experiencing all my trauma: the paralysis, the dissociation, the prayer for it to be over already.”
Exhaustion
Many victims described sleep deprivation through sex. They described sexual acts the abuser initiated late at night, waking them from sleep and dragging the acts deep into the night.
“It could go on for three or four hours. Long after I had already had enough, he would continue and continue. When I said I was tired and wanted to stop, he would say: ‘Come on, you know you’re enjoying it, I know you like it this way.’”
Sexual assault crisis centers provide support and assistance by phone, chat and WhatsApp, as well as guidance in filing complaints, legal proceedings and support groups. In Israel: 1202 for women, 1203 for men, and Kolmila by chat and WhatsApp.