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| I came into extreme, insistent sexual awareness at eleven, and
did not make sexual contact with another human being until I was
nineteen, and in my second year of college. I believe that these
facts, placed side by side, go a long way toward accounting for
my career as a writer. I have an overdeveloped imagination, and
overdeveloped muscles in my wrists, both of which have proved
useful in a life spent largely sitting in front of a keyboard,
capturing my inner vision. I have a lot of friends who proudly recount their years as dauntless high school sluts, and they have tended to assume that any woman who makes it into her late teens without having fucked at least the football team and a history teacher must have been a little prude with no sex drive to speak of. But I was in heat. I have wondered what might have happened if I had not also been a chubby girl with glasses and permanently messy hair, who maintained this facade with tender care. I wanted sex, badly, but I was pretty clear that the kind of sex I wanted wasn’t available to me right then. I was waiting. I lost myself in a decadent fantasy life, and a public contempt for anything male. I coped. I spent those eight years with permanently wet panties. I also spent most of them in an educational system that was officially committed to preserving my chastity through any scare tactics necessary. This was hardly needed. I was horny, but not horny enough to take the risks, emotional and physical, that would have been needed for me to sexually experiment in those years. But it made me terribly, terribly angry, going through that long time of wanting, and being told, by every awkward, mumbling sex ed teacher I had, that I did not want. Teenage girls, especially young teens, in this society, are told that their sexual desire simply doesn’t exist. I was explicitly informed in sex-ed classes, through books, and in every teen-oriented TV drama that tackled the virginity issue that I, a young girl, didn’t actually want sex. Boys wanted sex. I just wanted love, acceptance and popularity, and I thought that “going all the way” would give me that. Well, no. I spent my adolescence being lied to about my body, but I was pretty sure that menstrual cramps really did hurt like hell and were not the result of brainwashing, and that I really was experiencing lust, and not a desire for acceptance. I remember my fury, starting at twelve and continuing until the end of high school, every time this piece of drivel was trotted out. I wasn’t even thinking about having sex with anyone I knew, but I did want sex. I wanted a lot of sex, and I wanted it right then. I did not imagine this sex increasing my standing with the boys in my school--I was an intellectual snob and a loner from the age of eleven on, and I thought most of the boys in my school weren’t worth the space and air they took up. I didn’t want to have sex with them...I just wanted sex itself. Sweaty, sore, explicit, steamy sex, with the details borrowed from Harlequin Romances, Clan of the Cave Bear, and the back issues of Playboy stashed under my father’s desk. (The one time a friend showed me a copy of Playgirl I blushed neon pink and refused to look at it, but Playboy seemed good reading--lots of juicy details, and it was okay for the women to be naked since I had all those bits too. Just like changing into swimsuits at the JCC women’s locker room - only it was me and Miss October (34/26/36, turn-ons: cats, sunsets, and sincere men). I can understand now, a little more of what was being said when we were told, in those mixed-gender sex-ed classes, that girls had no sex drive to speak of, at least not until they were grown-up women. We were being taught safety, and we were being taught to regard men’s sexuality as a force of nature, and our own as a dangerous delusion. I’m sure that the well-meaning gym teachers who tried to scare us into behaving with threats of pregnancy and AIDS believed what they were saying. But what they were saying was that men want sex, and women want love. And saying that is about as helpful as saying that if you smoke pot you’ll be on crack in a year. If kids know what you’re saying is not true, they have no reason to trust your advice. Lucky for Ms. Franklin and Mr. Chin, my distrust was academic. No one wanted my virginity, not even me. The scene: sitting on my bed on a Saturday afternoon when I was fourteen, trying to locate my hymen. The clit, trumpeted as such a mystery was no problem, easily found with fingers or mirror, fairly announced its presence and whereabouts, but where was this essential virginity bit that all the romance novels discussed in such detail? And could I get rid of it? I remember inserting two fingers and cautiously spreading them, wondering if that twinge of pain was the hymen stretching. The books talked about it being “broken,” which I imagined was like a quick snap, followed by a bit of blood. This stretchiness was not discussed, and I was unsure if it was normal or not. The whole area seemed to be rather interconnected, and I couldn’t figure out if all of the layers of opening lips were just lips, or the removable piece. I wished, rather desperately for a muscular man with a suitable attachment who could take care of the whole thing for me, but I had no prospect of finding a suitable sexual partner, and no way to be sure if my hymen was still there, or how to remove it if it was. I slipped my fingers out, pulled my jeans back up, and went back to my book. It seemed unfair. Sex was a full time obsession during the time I think of as my virginity -- the eight long years between the beginning of lust and my first kiss--received when I was far too old and cynical to think of it as a “French kiss.” I was nineteen when that kiss came, and bar a lot of strenuous masturbation I was as pure as some convent-bred French aristocrat bound for dangerous liasons. Why on earth did I wait so long? I don’t remember a time when I imagined that I would wait for marriage, that wasn’t a concept the white girls in my school had any truck with. I assumed, from a very young age that my life would include a lot of lovers before I settled down -- my adult life has been bland in comparison with what I expected when I was ten or so. I sure wasn’t saving myself for someone special. I never ascribed any value to my virginity, not before I finally laid it down or afterwards. What led to the long years of masturbatory fever and inordinate purity with the opposite sex (or my own for that matter)? Bloody lack of opportunity. I was a city kid with watchful parents. I was awestruck, in college, by suburban friends whose parents had permitted them to stay out all night in high school, who had gone to parties and fucked in parents’ bedrooms like the kids in the movies. Astonishing. Not from my planet. I went to school with Asian kids who were, like me, waiting it out, and white kids with credit cards who got badly screwed up thinking they could have it all. I wasn’t stupid enough to do a thirty-year-old musician in the back of his van. I was just stupid enough to be silently, horribly jealous of anyone careless enough to let themselves do just that. I hated being a virgin. I flinched whenever anyone said the word. It was the epitome of vulnerability, ugliness, unwantedness. My friends who were high school sluts imagine that I hung out with the “good girls” and despised girls like them who “went all the way.” Not at my high school, baby. Sex was power. I had none. Virginity was like a wet sponge, daily rain on the parade of your life. When I finally, somewhat later than most of my peers, disposed of it, I tossed it with blessed relief. I don’t like saying that. I am just enough a product of mainstream culture and moon-circle sentimentality to want there to have been something special to me about my maidenhood. But what I remember is the horrendous feeling of powerlessness that haunted all my interactions with boys my age as a teenager, and the golden sense of invulnerable well-being that accompanied me the morning after I first dragged a computer-science major to bed. Purple hickeys on my throat, my very first, a white heat coming off me that seemed to glow through my jeans and sweatshirt. Serene. It didn’t matter that I wouldn’t get laid again for another two years, I had a vibrator by that time, and no worries. It wasn’t the getting of a man, it was the creation of a middle ground no one had wanted me to know about. Sex on my own terms, hinging on neither maturity, nor love, nor a relationship. Just sex. It, and I, could be done. |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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