After hundreds of women disclosed instances of sexual harassment at high school parties in the petition launched by Chanel Contos, a friend and I discussed our high school experiences.

“He pushed my head down,” my friend said of her first sexual encounter. I nodded. Normal. Nothing new or shocking there.

“I was so afraid for some reason,” she continued, “that I gave him a blowjob, but then I was scared of him finishing in my mouth, so I stopped.”

This was not normal. You had to let the guy finish. I thought this instinctively. A historical, age-old part of my DNA that pulses underneath learnt logic made me feel she’d done wrong by the guy. The thought scared me.

“I know!” she said when I told her this. “Where did it come from? That belief we all had, that we had to please the guy no matter what? I don’t remember anyone telling me this, but I knew it all the same.”

She said she had felt guilty she stopped, ashamed of having let him down.

I know those feelings so well, I’m saddened to say they run through my sexual experiences still, although I’m now in my 30s. It’s hard to shake the tacit belief we grew up with that sex wasn’t ours. That it belonged to them, the boys.

It was their territory, and if we liked a guy it was our duty to perform as was appropriate for visitors to that territory. To feign pleasure when an inexperienced finger fumbled in our dry insides; to keep ourselves from wincing as a dirty nail scraped a sensitive wall.

It didn’t strike me until many years in that I had as much right to the act as they did – that sex should have equally belonged to me.

“Did you get them off?” A friend would ask as you walked home from the party, almost always feeling inadequate. Often, you were too ashamed to tell her of the fear you had done something wrong.

You’d lie awake that night desperately trying to bring to mind the displeased look that may have crept onto your face, the sounds you made or didn’t make; cringing about your own inexperienced hand, nervously thinking another girl could have done it better, that she could have had the skills to reassure the guy you liked that he was a man. Someone else, someone better, would have let him finish in the way he deserved.

Our grimaces at pain, shuffles at discomfort – they were never their mistake, they were ours.

Terms like “gender inequality” and “the patriarchy” get said so much these days they become buzz words men throw at you when you mention unfairness: “Oh, I suppose you think it’s the patriarchy.”

But when I tried to fathom the incalculable hours I spent taking care of someone else, believing it was their right and my responsibility, the words hit me with the force of their meaning.

I imagined the world flipped upside down. Girls believing sex was ours. Leading boys to an empty paddock, far away from a party, pushing their head down and letting them please us until we finished – ignoring their discomfort, because it was, after all, what we were entitled to. I imagined what it would feel like if the act was done when we were done.

I thought of packs of flushed, satisfied girls walking away from parties, leaving behind a trail of unfulfilled guilty men chewing their fingers at the thought they may have let us down somehow. I thought of the power of it. Us falling asleep soundly, with that blissful, undeniable post-orgasmic feeling that the world was ours.

When I imagine this, the injustice is obvious. I feel sorry for the boys kneeling awkwardly in paddocks, shamefully giving up their time, energy, to serve us. They would be like slaves, the poor men. It wouldn’t happen. Nobody would let it. We wouldn’t let it. It would all be too unfair.

We never gave ourselves the same consideration. We never let ourselves think of the profundity of the offence. We were too afraid of being called “frigid”, a “prude”, of being laughed at for “lying there like a starfish”.

We knew the girl who got the guy wasn’t the one who taught him how to please her, but the one who kept her face straight – expressed delight – when he didn’t. We didn’t feel sorry for that girl – we envied her.

While individual men must be held to account for instances of sexual abuse, we need to undo the social abuse of this conditioning; the atrocious lie that they, the boys, the men, own the glorious, wonderful feeling of sex.

I will always remember the first time I orgasmed with my high school boyfriend; my realisation this act could be mine too. That I could enjoy it as much as he could. I remember the elation of the discovery, along with the surprise I hadn’t discovered it in the countless sexual encounters that came before. And I will always be grateful to him for that.

Then I realise how demeaning that is, being grateful for someone giving me a right that was always mine. And it is mine, goddamn it – sex belongs to me, too. Still, I shudder to think how many times in my life I haven’t had the strength to fight the autopilot of conditioning that has me intuitively believing otherwise.