The Revolution of Nonmonogamy

There's been a lot of talk about nonmonogamy recently, what with Laurie Penny's piece in the Guardian and this somewhat horrifying bit of commodification at Jezebel. As earnest and elegantly stated and nuanced as Penny's piece is, it still presents nonmonogamy in light of the heteronormative standard: "Just another way of organizing life, love, and who does the dishes" which replaces old relationship problems with new ones, of terminology and how to "make sure you're spending enough time with each of your partners."

Penny herself acknowledges that this isn't the point of nonmonogamous relationships: "The truth is that there is no magic set of rules for love, sex and home economics that works for everyone – and that's why it's so important that there are other options out there." Presenting nonmonogamy as just another set of rules to follow is severely limiting in its possibilities. "Polyamorists and monogamists alike," she notes, "fall prey to the delusion that their rules are the only proper way to organize relationships[.]"

The revolutionary nature of nonmonogamy comes not from being a new and exotic, esoteric set of rules to follow (because, let's face it, that's vaguely racist) but in the idea of creating your own rules. Creating your own rules *in concert with other people.* Creating rules that work mutually for both of you, so that everyone gets what they need. It's not about doing "whatever you want" because no one wants to hurt people that they care about. But it's never assuming the emotional state of someone else; it's always letting them tell you whether they're ok or whether they're hurt, and then listening to the answer. It's respecting the answer. It's working towards a better way of doing things if hurt happens. Between the two of you, to the benefit of both of you so that no one gets hurt and no one unintentionally hurts anyone else.

All of this sounds like some pretty standard, run-of-the-mill couples therapy stuff. Because I keep saying "the two of you" as if it is a couple, two people, and that's not nonmonogamy, right? As if relationships between just two people didn't exist in nonmonogamy. But that's not true. I say between the two of you because no matter how many people are in your relationship, or in a relationship with you, you have to think of them as just themselves, each one person, an individual being with thoughts and feelings and features unlike any other that are completely irreplaceable because this person is a person, a whole person, a single person.

(sidebar: You should view everyone this way, not just people you're sleeping with. Being sexually attracted to someone shouldn't be the deciding factory in whether that someone is a complete human being, because everyone is, regardless of whether you want to sleep with them.)
(secondary sidebar: You have to view yourself this way, too. You, also, are a unique and complete human being that deserves a complete life like any other, in ways that make you happy.)

If you start to falter in this unassailable belief that each of your partners is a whole person, a complete person, an individual human being with feelings and thoughts and dreams unlike any other, what happens is that you gradually cease to weigh their own feelings and pains equally with yours and then you end up "doing whatever you want" which (inevitably) causes pain and suffering for someone, usually not yourself the worst. You cease to care about your partner, because they're not a whole person, just a thing you use. And maybe you're sorry about that thing becoming worn because you're using it because it's not a person anymore, it's an it.

The thing about pre-made rules for interacting with people is they create whole systems that revolve around people not being people, not being individual and complete human beings.They replace individuals with characters, with scripts to follow. You're supposed to wait three days before calling. You're not supposed to talk about your dreams. Or your period. Be thin, white, symmetrical, of normal neuro-functionality, secure in your gender and seeking an opposite gender as if gender were binary. Find one mate to raise children with according to those nonexistent gender binaries. Make lots of money.

These are the rules, right? Those are the people that are held up as beacons of success, of stability, of doing-it-right-ness. This is the script. There are so many people that don't even *get to be in the play* because they're not thin or white or symmetrical or neurotypical or cis or hetero or rich. So, like, hey, even if you're thinking about nonmonogamy as a way to be all those things because you think it's possible to play out the script, that's cool. I guess. I'd sort of like to meet you, because it must be nice to never feel as if there are parts of yourself that just don't fit and that's got to be a weird experience because I don't think I know anyone that wouldn't cop to feeling like a square peg in a round hole sometimes no matter how wedged into their round holes they are.

But inevitably, some people don't follow the script. And rules mean that even when the script doesn't work for you, you're supposed to follow it instead of change it. Rules mean that when you're not in the script at all, you're not supposed to trod the stage of life, complete life, fully human life.

How terrible. Terrorizing.

So throw out the rules. Throw out the roles. Work out your own rules. Be nonmonogamous.

And then, when you've tried that for awhile, you can start to blow apart all your relationships. Monogamy and nonmonogamy are for sexual partners, specifically. But what are the other things we're supposed to be doing with sexual partners? Or not doing with them? Raising children, living together, working. Why should those be tied to who you sleep with? Why should you have to live with someone you're fucking? Why should you have to live with someone you're raising kids with? Why should you have to raise kids with the person you're fucking? Why shouldn't you work with a sexual partner? Does the kind of work matter? What about the rules for relationships between work and parenting? 

Pick all of your relationships apart and put them back together in the ways that work best for you. And demand a system that lets everyone do that. Pretty revolutionary, that.

Inadequacies and Judgments

You know what will make the sanest, most even-keeled person go a little bit insane? Sexual insecurity. Serious. Imagine this, for a moment: you're floating along with someone, hanging out, making out, having a good time, enjoying each other's company. You start to think, "Wow, this is really nice. Maybe I can trust this person!" And so you do, and the two of you have sex, and a week later you're getting the "I'm just not really available for any kind of relationship right now" line.

Punch. To the goddamn. Gut.

If you're reading this, and you know how to handle that kind of thing without going completely off the rails for a few days or a few weeks, please let me in on your secrets. I've never been able to deal other than being an ugly walking anger ball for a while, and I *really* don't like being an ugly walking anger ball, even if it's only for a few days.

The thing that makes sexually-based rejection so much harder to take than rejection based on other criteria is the specter of all the other issues raised by a rejection that is, at heart, physical.

I’m not right for you because I talk too much? Ok, well, I do shut up sometimes, but that’s cool, I’m just a talker and I probably always will be and if it really bothers you that much, well, then.

I’m not right for you because I’m a bleeding-heart? Fine. I can understand how it might be difficult to integrate orphan’s Christmas and an ever-shifting array of household guests into your life, but I’m not going to give up those things, so let’s part ways.

I’m not right for you because you don’t like how I have a tendency to put my life and my feelings out there for the world to read? Sigh. Yes, I get it. I can try like hell to respect your privacy and leave you unidentified, but I’m always going to want to write and say things and try to communicate, and if you’re really uncomfortable with that, then we’re not right. I don’t want to hurt you.

All of those things hurt. They do. Any rejection stings. But rejection based on some kind personal characteristic, no matter how much it stings, can be gotten over so long as you hold true to your conception of yourself.

But, “You’re bad in bed; I’m out” is so much more hurtful. For me, at least, it raises all my unsettled intellectual insecurities. To be rejected for something physical means that what is most important is my physical being. It means my value to this person lies in my body, not my mind. It turns me into arm candy. Or, that’s what it feels like, and that’s what makes me crazy. The idea that I decided to trust someone who doesn’t give a flying fart what’s between my ears, only between my legs, and that that’s not even good enough, makes me question my judgment. And questioning my judgment makes me de-value my intelligence even further on my own until I arrive, finally, at the rock bottom conclusion that I am, in fact, nothing but arm candy and spend a few days crying silently, afraid to raise my voice or my head.

I’m not the most even-keeled person to begin with, please keep that in mind.

After I’ve hit that point, I usually rebound enough to think at least marginally critically about the whole thing. Often it turns out that I’ve been basing the whole assumption of rejection based on sexual inadequacy on something specious, and there are (in fact) myriad possible reasons for the rejection. Because there usually are. Hurt makes us jump to conclusions that are insupportable in the calm light of reason. Passion is a beautiful thing, it really is, but like any beautiful thing it can blind you if you stare at it too long. Then it’s a matter of talking myself through the other rejection-scenario and pep talking myself up to a point where I’m more or less functioning again, although fragility remains, always, a little more brittle, a little less able to withstand.

Rejection always, always hurts. There’s no way around that. Or at least, no way that I’ve found that leaves my basic empathy responses intact. There’s no way to feel for the world without feeling the world, and that means that you are going to get hurt.

Alternatively, I manage to work myself into a state of righteous indignation long enough to cut the person loose because it really *is* true that they only think of me as arm candy and I don’t need people like that in my life.

That’s a cop-out on my part, if you didn’t notice the hypocrisy I just exposed. When it comes down to it, everyone has the right to be happy and it would be awesome if we did that without hurting anyone else ever but that’s a pipe dream. And if the sex really doesn’t work for you, that’s as valid a reason for ending a relationship as any other. I recommend giving it more than one shot, but hey, some people make decisions quickly, who am I to judge. Saying that appearances don’t matter is naïve; denying that the physical self has as much reality as the mind is ignorant. We aren’t just brains. We’re bodies, too, and our bodies matter. Someday I’ll have to get as comfortable being judged for mine as I am with being judged for my ideas.

I’ll take any tips you got that on that, too.

The Saddest, Most Infuriating Troll This Month: Newsweek and Katie Roiphe

Like much of the internet, particularly the lady-oriented bits of it, I found myself reading Katie Roiphe's Newsweek cover story this morning. It was sort of like watching a train wreck, really: I couldn't STOP reading it. Now I can't stop reading reaction to it, which is also like watching a train wreck.

I know a lot of people don't like Roiphe. She's not my favorite person in the world, either, but she wrote a piece for Slate once titled "Does Everyone Think Single Mothers Are Actually Crazy?" that really resonated with me, so I am more apt to defend her (despite her history of dismissing date-rape as a thing that doesn't happen) than most people. That's a round-a-bout way of saying that I don't diss everything she writes out of hand the way some people do.

And this piece is no exception. Roiphe is really a pretty smart lady. There are more than a few good points made: Sexual desire is not beholden to political correctness; fantasies are generally about leaving behind the world you're living in. And, snob that I am, her jabs at the awful prose that is Fifty Shades of Grey make me snicker to myself. Because, honestly, it is awful writing. If you want literary female-submission porn, there are far, far better-written stories than Fifty Shades of Grey. REALLY. This shit is like Twilight all over again, and it offends me most as a writer, or someone who considers herself an aspiring writer. Or something. Bad prose is offensive, ok?

The basic problem with all of Roiphe's assertions can be summed up thusly: she's talking about modern women and their sexuality when she ought to be looking at modern life in general, and pressures on and fantasies of both sexes.

Fifty Shades of Grey is enormously popular! No one can deny it. It's become a bonafide sensation. There's a pretty good piece on Jezebel explaining why this particular piece of words strung together is perhaps not as culturally revealing as we would all like to think it is, because the rules of supply and demand and also the unspoken power of cache apply.

But ok, that would be boring, so let's run with the idea that this particular story, with its themes of submission and losing one's self, IS popular because it stirs up some latent need or desire in the collective unconscious. I'll bite that hook. I happen to think that the allure of sexual submission does, in fact, come from pretty much that exact set of desires: the desire to let go, to not be in control, and ultimately to not be responsible for whatever happens. Roiphe backs up this reading of our culture at large by referencing a scene from HBO's new comedy Girls in which one of the characters, waiting for an OB/GYN appointment, briefly fantasizes about having AIDS because such a diagnosis would free her from the responsibility of ambition and making something of herself.

I think we can all identify with that urge.

And that's where Roiphe goes wrong. We ALL can identify with that urge. Men, too. The urge to leave behind responsibility and just float for awhile is not uniquely female. And the fantasies that we engage in that run along this theme are not uniquely sexual: for all that it occurs in a gynecologist's office, the scene in Girls is not at heart a sexual fantasy. The desire to shed responsibility for a while comes up in even the most mundane daydream about going on vacation. Hell, I get excited about the prospect of my dad taking my kid to my sister's house for the day because it means that my walk home from work is conducted without the specter of responsibilities to be shouldered immediately upon returning home. It's an hour of time that is normally scheduled and deadlined which is suddenly, utterly, blissfully free, and that is SUCH a great feeling. But not in the least a sexual one.

By pegging this completely natural desire to leave it all behind as (one) only for women, (two) sexual in nature, (three) universal and (four) irrevocable, Roiphe has done a serious disservice to all of us. Men, in Roiphe's world, exist only to cater to the fantasies of women. They don't get to have any of their own. They don't get to want to indulge in the fantasy of giving it over and giving up control for a while. I would love to hear Roiphe explain the prevalence of the FemmeDomme in popular culture, if men don't even want to give up control. Women, in Roiphe's estimation, are all exactly the same, with exactly the same fantasies. The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey translates to an absolute universal: since a lot of women seem to enjoy reading this, all women want to experience this. And, like Freud before her, Roiphe assumes that everything can be reduced to sexuality, when the truth of human behavior is actually far more complex. And while I myself indulge in some pretty hefty abnegation-of-responsiblity fantasies, at the end of the day, I do enjoy my autonomy and personal-decision-making capacity, and I'd really like it a whole lot if the culture I lived in would acknowledge that I am both capable of and have the right to make all personal decisions for myself. This is why I am a feminist. Just because I, like everyone else, sometimes would like to not make any decisions, doesn't mean I never want to make any decisions. Submission fantasies do not mean that feminism, with it's basic demand that women be viewed at all levels as complete human beings, is wrong.

This is where some of the feminist criticism of Roiphe, and of BDSM in general, breaks down, for the record. They take the opposite position, and they're equally wrong: feminism does not mean that submission fantasies are bad. If feminism is the struggle to gain credence to that women are people, then the ultimate feminist goal is a completely humanistic view of all people. And that means that women, as much as men, have the right to daydream about being free from pressure now and again, and even to achieve that feeling through whatever means they deem fit.

Of course, the larger context of this piece of Roiphe's matters. It's a Newsweek cover story. The headline reads "The Fantasy Lives of Working Women" and the accompanying image is of a naked, blindfolded women with suggestively parted, perfectly painted red lips and perfectly sculpted coiffure. She is slender to the point of emaciation through her neck and arms, but with hints of a generous, voluptuous bust. The image is titillating, and rife with the kind of impossible beauty standards we as a culture hold women to. The title plays on the language of "working girls" and delights in wallowing in the idea that women that own their sexual desires are sluts and prostitutes. Given Roiphe's own fascination with spanking, the association that women need to be punished for owning their sexuality is unavoidable.

The content of the article is sadly narrow. The context is utterly infuriating.

There Is Nothing Wrong With Sex

Social networks make political commentary ubiquitous, so when I see things my friends say, sometimes I laugh and sometimes I cringe and sometimes I do both. A comment like, "This from a climate-change denier who thinks the world is 6,000 years old and that making contraception available encourages sex" will elicit both a giggle and a cringe. I mean, it's funny because it's so ridiculous, but that last line makes my head hurt.  The lover in me immediately read that last bit, "making contraception available encourages sex" and went "WHOA, there, buddy! It doesn't matter if making contraception available does or does not encourage sex, because there's nothing wrong with sex."

And when I put that out there into the public sphere of the internet, I got this reply: "Might want to include 'consensual' and 'between adults.' " And my first reaction was something like, "Well, duh. Obviously." And I was just about to make some polite reply about a 140 character limit and all that noise, when I stopped. Because you know what?

Duh. Obviously.

"Non-consensual sex" is not a thing that exists, world. Non-consensual sex is RAPE. And rape is not sex. When did sex, as a word or an idea or an act, become so tainted that it has to be minutely distinguished from rape in public discourse? Is sex so dirty, so awful, and so much of a violation that it is inherently indistinguishable from rape? No. And it is both disturbing and deeply saddening to come to the realization that a lot of people might feel it so.

Sex is not bad. Sex is beautiful. There is nothing wrong with sex.

While I do think that at least some fear of sex stems from a deep-seated misogyny (you should read some of the things that Bukowski and Warhol had to say about sex and women, golly geez) I don't think it's a universal explanation. The woman that told me I ought to add "consensual and between adults" to my exhortation that there is nothing wrong with sex, for example: I don't think she hates women.

Rather, I think there's a strange modern conflation of love and sex, and also love and marriage, that ends up creating a bizarre triangle in which the points are love, sex, and marriage and everything becomes a tangled mess.

To wit, physical intimacy and emotional intimacy do go hand-in-hand. And it's not a purely female thing, as so many want to claim. Yes, women form attachments when they sleep with someone. So do men. Men are, in fact, capable of rich emotional lives. Sex is better, for both parties, when there's love involved, and trust, and respect. Anais Nin said, "Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy." And she was right.

Sex is often seen as proof of love, which is where things begin to become murky. "Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from." (Margaret Atwood) Feeling unloved really does feel an awful lot like dying, and because the connection between love and sex is so deeply instilled, the urge to go out and have a lot of sex to stave off that death, that desperation, that utter loneliness can be strong. Nothing in modern culture has captured the absolute soullessness of using sex as a bandaid like Steve McQueen's Shame. I was horrified to read reviews of that film talking about "normal human sexuality" and "unsexiness." The thing that makes Shame such a powerful film is that it is not about normal human sexuality, or sexiness, and yet its protaganist is still a sympathetic and poignant character. McQueen and Michael Fassbender together have created a space in which behavior that be would be considered depravity and degeneration in less capable hands is instead merely tragic. The moral judgment against sex itself is removed, and the obvious distress of the character is the moral grounding of the narrative.

Like everything else in the emotional landscape of a human being, there are greys and gradations in sex. If sex within love is ecstasy, and sex by self-destructive compulsion is tragedy, there are a million things in between those two extremes. All sex that occurs without the merging of hearts and bodies is not the desperate self-destructive behavior of Shame.

"Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good." - Woody Allen

That grey world is where most of us live. We neither find "true love" nor do we descend into addiction. And in that grey world, there is nothing wrong with sex. Sex without love might be meaningless, as Mr. Allen says, but not everything in life must be pregnant with meaning. Not every conversation must be weighted, not every book must be serious, not every film must be exposing social thought constructs, not every sexual experience must be Capital-E-Ecstasy. There is nothing so inherently wrong about sex that it cannot be lighthearted and fun.

“It would be perfect if everyone who makes love, is in love, but this is simply an unrealistic expectation. I'd say 75 percent of the population of people who make love, are not in love, this is simply the reality of the human race, and to be idealistic about this is to wait for the stars to aline and Jupiter to change color; for the Heavens to etch your names together in the sky before you make love to someone. But idealism is immaturity, and as a matter of fact, the stars may never aline, Jupiter may never change color, and the Heavens may never ever etch your names together in the sky for you to have the never-ending permission to make endless love to one another. And so the bottom line is, there really is no difference between doing something today, and doing something tomorrow, because today is what you have, and tomorrow may not turn out the way you expect it to. At the end of the day, sex is an animalistic, humanistic, passionate desire.”

― C. JoyBell C.

Which brings us to the other point of this triad, the other intersection tangled up in all this mess: the conflation of love and marriage. Let me be clear: I believe in love. I absolutely believe in love. And I believe in marriage. But they are not the same thing.

Love is a personal, emotional good. It is the thing that creates empathy in us, it is the thing that causes us to act against survival instincts and for a better world, it is the thing that allows us to see beyond the borders of our bodies and create meaningful connections in the external world. Marriage, on the other hand, is a purely social good. The benefit of marriage is the social stability it represents. But love is not marriage and marriage is not love. You do not have to get married if you love someone. And if you do get married, you do not necessarily love the person you marry.

I think that a significant portion of the "sex in marriage" movement could really be more aptly defined as "sex in love" if we could all just recognize that love and marriage are not the same thing. Way back when marriages were arranged, it was clear to everyone involved that a marriage was a social contract and that love had nothing to do with it. I don't advocate returning to such a system, mostly because of the way it treated women as chattel. But that doesn't mean that we need to dismiss the idea of marriage as a social good. Rather, in a world like today when marriage is not the only basis of social stability, it is even more important that we remember that marriage is merely a social good. One singular one. It is not a magic bullet that will solve any and all problems, either personal or political. Getting married will not make your life suddenly better; if you weren't happy before, you won't be happy long-term after the novelty wears off. And falling marriage rates are not to blame for the plethora of social problems we face (ahem, Grothman/Santorum/et al.). There are other causes, because while marriage is a social good, it is not the social good.

There is nothing inherently wrong with sex, whether meaningful or meaningless. Sexual identity and appetite, in all their varied forms, are not evidence of some other problem. We all need love, yes. And sex is not love. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have sex. And we all want love. But that doesn't mean we should all get married right now.

Personhood

Two of fifty states have now codified government-mandated sexual assault. Texas and Oklahoma, I'm looking at you while my skin crawls and my internal organs quiver in fear. Virginia is on its way to becoming the third member of this misogynistic, utterly abhorrent club.

Because it is incredibly unhealthy to be a rageball all the time, I am working assiduously at setting aside my anger at the very idea that the government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure. But let me just say that one more time, so that it sinks in for all of you following along at home:

The government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure.

Why is this ok? I'm seriously asking. I want to know why this is ok.

I find some of the quotes from people defending these laws to be instructive as to the kind of mindset that makes things like this ok. For example, "They already chose to be vaginally penetrated." Again, setting aside the initial rush of rage, I can start to unpack that statement. Choosing to have sexual intercourse once makes anything that happens afterwards consensual. It's something like a chaste/virgin doctrine: once intercourse occurs (once the hymen is broken?) there is no protection for your ladybits. By breaking the seal (so to speak), you lose claim to any protections. Consent to sex is something that can only happen once, and it can never be revoked. Once you've lost virginity, you are ever-after "open for business" to anyone, including the government! It's the fallen-woman doctrine, gussied up for modern times.

Another came after a Virginia legislator was asked about exceptions for rape and incest. His response? "Sometimes incest is voluntary. The woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman."

First of all, I am not kidding.

Second, can someone please find me a breakdown of "voluntary" incestual relationships versus molestation and rape by a family member? I would like to know more about this voluntary incest.

Really, I don't think this guy defines "voluntary" in the way that you and I do. Voluntary sex is any sex that happens because you don't kill yourself rather than be defiled. And sex, itself, is always a defiling act. Sex is dirty.

And that's really what all this is about, isn't it? The deeply-seated belief of many people that there is something inherently, irrevocably wrong with sex. The body is dirty, because it is corporeal and not spiritual, and acts of pleasure for the body are naught but devilish distractions from the work of cleansing the soul.

It's a sad, tragic outlook. My well of compassion is almost emptied, thinking about all these people that think the pleasures of touch and give are evil. Women are by necessity nothing but uteruses, because to acknowledge the entirety of a woman would be to acknowledge desire.

Sex is not shameful. Corporeal joys are not lesser than spiritual ones.

And the government has absolutely no right to be enforcing such arcane and deeply personal beliefs. You may wish to hold onto your notion of sex as something that is capital-W WRONG, but you do not get to codify your beliefs. Mandating sexual assault and making birth control inaccessible are inexcusable abuses of power. Women are more then uteruses, and our uteruses are not yours to make decisions about. I get to decide who and what enters my vagina, not a legislature. I get to decide whether I have sex, and whether I want the possibility of progeny to come from that sex, not a legislature. Those are my decisions to make because I am a complete person, with the ability to reason and choose.

You want to talk about personhood? Let's start with the personhood of women.

I am tired of constantly having to defend the existence of my brain, my character, and my capacity for moral decision-making. Women are complete beings. Accept it. And stop treating us as if we are not.

Your First Time Is Never Any Good

This is a thing we tell teenagers, or young adults, about their first sexual experience. Maybe it's just girls we tell this to? I don't know.

It's totally true, though. Your first time is never any good. Mine sure wasn't. My first few times weren't very good. Possibly my first few hundred? It took a few years for me to get the hang of sex, and then I'm pretty sure it just happened on accident anyway. Now, I find myself at the ripe old age of 27, actively working at my sex life for the first time ever.

It's weird. The working at it is weird, I mean. I am not naturally a "worker." My natural state is much closer to "dilettantism." I am very good at doing nothing. I don't actually like to work at anything. That's probably why I flunked out of college (twice) and now have a mindless administrative job. So working at sex is something of an unnatural state of affairs for me, as my character is so unsuited to work in general, and that goes double for working at things that are supposed to be pleasurable.

I have been having better sex in the last year, though. So even I must concede that there must be something to this work thing.

A few months back, when I was riding high on some confidence-binge of unknown origins, I submitted a short story to a bonafide literary publication.

SCARY.

Almost immediately after hitting the "send" button, I wanted to take it back and be all like, "Oh, hai, can you just delete that? Don't bother reading it. Kthnx."

I didn't do that, of course, because that would have been stupid. Also, even though I knew I was setting myself up for rejection, I sort of wanted to see what happened. Expecting anything other than rejection on your first submission attempt is pretty much ego-suicide, and I know this. Much better, and much more deserving, writers than I have been rejected hundreds upon thousands of times.

But still, some part of me wondered if maybe I hadn't just stumbled into a good story, the way I accidentally stumbled into good sex.

I didn't. The expected (albeit VERY TARDY) rejection letter arrived in my inbox this afternoon.

And now I find myself in the distasteful position of having to work at something else. If I'm going to publish anything, clearly I have to clean up my act, write more, dedicate time to it, read about writing, all that nonsense that all those silly "get-published-quick" websites tell you to do.

How common. (I'm really a snob at heart. I don't pretend anything else, ok, so don't get all up in my business about it.)

Still, if your first try is never any good, and working at sex has made my sex better, maybe I'd better stoop to being common. Clearly I am not extraordinary, anyway, as the rejection letter in my inbox keeps yelling at me.

"Girl Land:" This Is What Sexual Trauma Looks Like

Author's note: As you'll see in the comments, I was mistaken about the publicly acknowledged magnitude of whatever happened to Caitlin Flanagan as a teenager. I still think that the essence of her admonitions and fears seem to spring from a place of trauma, but do please take my analysis with several grains of salt.

Some masochistic, curious-as-a-cat-with-only-one-life-left part of me really wants to read Caitlin Flanagan's Girl Land. Now, I'm sort of broke (well, when am I not sort of broke?) so I don't really think I can shell out $30 for a hardcover I will probably want to burn after reading, so I probably won't read it, at least not until it hits paperback.

I feel like most of the coverage I've read about this book ignores a very crucial piece of information. The book has been excoriated as reactionary, and dangerously nostalgic. Flanagan herself has been called a "cranky, (prematurely) old  church lady." There's an entertaining hour with her and Irin Carmon, resident feminist of Salon, on NPR's "On Point" that's been the fodder for quite a few blogs in recent days. In particular, the bit where Flanagan goes after Carmon for not having had a boyfriend in high school is almost laughable in its ridiculousness.

Basically, the condensed version of Flanagan's ideas and thesis (if you can call it a thesis?) is that adolescent girls today are being rushed out of their girlhoods by the Internet and pornography, and parents need to protect their girls from these pernicious and worldly influences so that they don't end up having a lot of sex with men who treat them badly. There's also a lot of discussion of "princess" ideals and tropes, which Flanagan adores. There's a lot of discussion out there that Flanagan's argument amounts to: (1) men only want sex; (2) women only want to be treated like princesses; (3) sex is dirty; (4) women have to use dirty sex to get men to treat them like princesses. There's an awful lot wrong with all of that, as I'm sure most of you will recognize. It leaves out any variation among female wants. It paints a pernicious and dangerous picture of men. It precludes the idea that men and women can ever be friends. It relies on gender stereotypes that are damaging to both men and women. And it straight-up calls sex something dirty.

All pretty reactionary, throwback, damaging ideas.

But in pretty much every piece I've read about this book, the incredibly salient fact of Flanagan's rape when she was a teenager is mentioned, and then glossed over in the analysis of her ideas.

So let me be the one to say it, I guess.

This is what sexual trama looks like.

Being forced out of one's girlhood by a violent act would leave someone with a pretty negative view of sex, don't you think? And in the culture of victim-blaming and rape-apology we live in, it's not hard to see how someone would fail to heal from that. It's not at all difficult to see how all that blame could be internalized into self-loathing.

OF COURSE Flanagan wants to protect girls; she wishes, I am certain, that someone had protected her. That her recipe for protection involves giving girls no tools for dealing with men and the world and the whirlpool of emotions that is sex is no surprise. She doesn't want to deal with any of those things.

Rape is a serious and incredibly damaging act. With every word I read about this woman, and with every harsh word I read about her prescriptions, I wince a little bit inside. When Carmon admonished Flanagan on "On Point" not to make this about her, or herself, I wanted to grab my radio and shake it. This book would seem to be about Flanagan, and her intensely personal wounds that have never healed. Please, please: make this conversation about her, because that's what it needs to be. Flanagan may be a social critic, but when her criticism and prescription come from such a place as I imagine they do, it must be understood that she's not talking about the world as it is, but the world as she understands it. And while it's always true that we each of us see the world through the prism of our experiences and unique perceptions, it's also likely true that Flanagan's perspective is far more skewed than most people's.

Stop piling on this poor woman. Yes, this may be exactly the thing that misogynists and zealots and morality legislators will hold up when they try to push agendas that curtail women's freedoms. And certainly Flanagan bears responsibility for her words. But still: I can't help but be overwhelmed with compassion every time I read anything about her.

Rape is trauma. And it should surprise no one that in a culture where Ben Roethlisberger makes millions in the NFL and Dominique Strauss-Kahn goes free and women are constantly told how to dress and act so that they will not be raped that Flanagan has a nostalgic longing for a time before she ever had to think about sex or worry about danger, and that she wants to keep girls in that safe space forever.

The Gender Politics of Internet Trolling

I can be pretty obnoxiously political. As a general rule, I've kept most of it off this particular venue of expression of mine and focused here on my personal experiences of things, but really. I can be pretty obnoxiously bleeding-heart, far-left political.

Mostly this comes through on Twitter, where it was the protests against Governor Scott Walker and his union-busting that made me truly appreciate the medium. I was looking at a picture of the court order re-opening our state Capitol an hour and twenty minutes before it hit any local news site. (And yeah, I timed it.) I have made some really wonderful friends while tweeting about politics. And had some fascinating discussions.

So when I tell you that I've never been trolled, not seriously, you should understand that I do go through pretty long jags of political commentary. It's not that I've never been trolled because I stay away from that sort of thing. But, back in March when I starting getting the first inklings, I definitely did circle my wagons and clam up for a few days. And that's a strategy that's worked very well for me ever since. I am obnoxiously political for (at maximum) five days, and then I go back to tweeting about my love life or clothes or food or something safely domestic for a period of time that is at least three days longer than however long I spent tweeting exclusively about politics and current events.

This has had the interesting (and hilarious) effect of getting me on some really interesting public lists. Like "Almost Worth Following." I laughed pretty hard at that one. There was another one that was simply titled Liberal/Retard/Spam/Troll, which I thought was an interesting grouping of things to be. I didn't laugh so much at that as I did wince.

But my strategy of just never going for too long without backing off and becoming nonthreateningly girly again seemed to work. Aside from the most glancing, easy to identify, and non-personal trolling that exists, I've never had to deal with vitriol from strangers.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine (one of those wonderful Twitter pals I met through politics and #wiunion) dropped a comment along the lines of "Remember when I didn't have my real name here and people thought I was a guy? That was fun."

And it made me think: I'm pretty obviously female, even on a gender-neutral platform like Twitter. My handle is "TheGirlOne" for crying out loud, and for a long while I had a picture of my actual face up there as an avatar, and I'm clearly female. What if the reason I never get trolled is less to do with my careful curated strategy, and more to do with my gender? A woman in politics isn't "worth" trolling?

I don't think that's seriously the case; I think it might be some combination of gender roles and my strategy, but after having read this piece, and this one, and this one, I am pretty convinced that my being a woman hasn't been the driving force in not being trolled, either on Twitter or here. Because there are, apparently, a lot of men out there, and a lot of people out there in general, that are willing to aim a lot of pent-up rage at women on the Internet.

And I think that the quote at the end of the Time article is intensely relevant to anyone that's about to tell me that it's *just* the Internet:

"This is 2011. It’s not “just” the Internet. It’s our culture. At this moment in time, you can work, socialize, date, learn, communicate and debate online. There is no longer a divide. What is happening online is happening in real life. This type of abuse reflects real-life attitudes, real-life misogyny and it’s prolific. It’s about time we started discussing it."

The Internet is, for better or worse, a part of the way we live these days. It is our culture. It's no longer a subculture, or an underground culture, or any other negating adjective you want to throw on it. The Internet is pop culture. We inhabit these spaces as surely as we do our bedrooms, apartments, cubicles, cars. And what happens here is real.

I've been lucky. Startling, beautifully, terrifyingly lucky. I have blogged about gender relations, and gender bending, and patriarchal political pundits, and my own sexual history. I have been, at times, uncomfortably personal. I have been, always, lucky that all of you that read this or have stumbled upon it have been kind and supportive.

I worked for a political office in Milwaukee for a year when I was in college. When the then-governor of our state, Jim Doyle, vetoed concealed carry legislation, a lot of people were understandably upset. Several of them called into the Mayor's office to express their disapproval. (Don't ask me why people upset with the governor were calling the mayor of a city. I don't know. People are dumb.)

One of the interns answering phones during that period was a lovely young woman, a friend of mine, and she took a call in which the man on the other end of the phone told her, after she tried to explain to him that the Mayor had no control over what the governor did and it wasn't under our purview, that he "hoped she got raped on her way home tonight, so [she'd] understand that carrying a gun is a good thing."

I cried when it was directed at her, and I certainly looked over my shoulder the entire walk from City Hall to my busstop, the whole bus ride home, the whole walk from that busstop to my apartment.

I have been (for me, anyway) remarkably open here, and I have been lucky. And I have been consistently supported in that. I hope that never changes. But I would be lying if I didn't tell you that putting this piece out there is taking slightly more courage than I probably have.

We should all be more compassionate. Telling that to a mysogynistic, scared little man in his basement spewing hate at all the women he can find on the Internet is probably a bit like spitting in the storm's eye, but I'll do it anyway. We should all be more compassionate. We should all be working to understand the ways in which we're all vulnerable and scared, and we should all be working to change those conditions. Life doesn't have to be nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. We can be better than that. So, let's be better than that.

And let's start by all being as civil to everyone as you've all been to me.

Slut-Shaming

Author's note: This whole thing is probably a classic case of too much information. Because it's a classic case of blogging-as-therapy (because I'm too poor to afford an actual therapist). So, SPOILER ALERT: I'm being pretty frank about my sexual history, and if you don't want to know for whatever reason, just stop reading, ok? This really is an exercise in purging for me, but I do need to make it public in order for that purging to be complete.

I'm sure my intimacy issues have many causes, but at least one of them is the general culture of fear and shame around sex. I say this as someone that didn't grow up in one of those crazy fundamentalist, abstinence, purity-pledges to your father kind of homes, either. No, I think we were pretty average on the topic of sexuality, which is to say that we just didn't talk about it. There wasn't any active effort to shame or instill fear, but there wasn't any discouragement of that, either. The broader culture was allowed to shape my opinion on sex without interference.

Yeah, explains a lot, doesn't it?

Because the culture we live in is downright bipolar about sex.

Do it, don't do it. Do it a LOT, do it with anyone you like, only do it with people you love, don't do it all. Masturbate! Don't masturbate. Experiment! Don't get yourself in situations you'll regret. Take responsibility for your own pleasure! It's all your responsibility! Even violence is your responsibility. It's your fault if you get raped, it's a man's fault for not being controlled enough. Everything about sex and the way we deal with it is dual: for every person proclaiming something from the rooftops, there is another person standing on the rooftop across the street yelling the exact opposite thing.

Seriously, guys? INFORMATION OVERLOAD. I can't handle it. Shut UP already.

The constant that my mind and soul and heart have always siezed on is the word "slut." The battle for the meaning of the word is apparently being waged in my flesh, because I'm fed up with both sides.

I probably am a slut. But unlike all those women out there working to reclaim the label, I cringe. I know it's meant to be hurtful. I know it's meant to be a cut on my moral character, and I know it's meant to characterize me as less than worthy. There's no reclaiming that. I don't know why anyone would bother trying. One side of our culture, despite its rampant sexualization, still cleaves to narrow strictures of acceptable behavior, and a girl or even a woman that has a lot of sex with a lot of people is a slut, and that is BAD. There is no way around the fact that word is meant to shame and demean and alter behavior back towards socially acceptable norms.

So let's just lay this out. Cold hard facts, cold comfort numbers. I've had intercourse with something like 30 men in my life. No, I don't remember the exact number. No, I don't remember all their names. No, I wasn't always as careful as I should have been, although I escaped STDs, and I do know that.

I've had sexual contact short of intercourse with an additional 15 or so men.

I have had four mutually committed, serious relationships in my life. So the greatest part of my sexual experience has had happened outside the bounds of a close or loving relationship.

I have had incredibly lopsided relationships, in which one person cares far more than the other, three times. I've been on both sides of that inequality.

So the majority of my sexual experience has been outside of any sort of relationship at all.

I have been pregnant twice, and I have one child.

I'm a slut.
Honestly, my experience has taught me that sleeping around and lots of random one-night stands are not very satisfying. I don't recommend it as a course of action or a lifestyle. But I don't know if I would have ever gotten to the point I'm at right now, of not merely desiring real intimacy, but of understanding what real intimacy actually is because I've experience the contrast. Some people can't learn from the mistakes of others; they have to make the mistakes themselves. I am very much one of those people. So, despite 10+ years of heartache and yearning, I'm glad to have had the experiences I've had.

On the other hand, the sex-positive messaging can become overbearing and oppressive. The attempt to reclaim "slut" has led to a bizarro world of opposite sexual pressures: to do as much as possible, and be proud of it, to experiment and try everything, and to enjoy it all. And I haven't done that.

For example, I don't really get masturbation. My fuzzy-headed spiritualist view of the world and relationships idealizes sex as an energy exchange between people, and the fulfillment (the orgasm) comes from that exchange. This is why all those one-night stands were so bad. I can't get off without another person, and another person that's open. So I don't masturbate. But I spent a lot of time, at one point in my life, being pretty ashamed and wondering what was wrong with me because the "sex-positive" message of self-love was so relentless.

I wasn't slutty enough for that side of the culture, because I didn't have a lot of orgasms to go along with all that sex I was having. In fact, I pretty much never really enjoyed myself at all. And it was my fault, completely, that I was failing to understand the physical needs of my body so much that I couldn't or wouldn't comunicate them. Because in the sex-positive world, orgasm is a purely physical event that should be able to be brought about by purely physical means. That's why masturbation is so important, because it shows you what you respond to physically. And that message, as powerful as it may indeed be to a lot of people, was intensely damaging to my own ideas about pleasure and intimacy and what I needed. I doubted myself, terribly doubted myself, for years. And I still do.

I'm ashamed of having been a slut. I'm ashamed for having not been slutty enough to bring myself to orgasm. Right now, I'm ashamed that I've written all this and I'm going to share it with the world, because it's so confused.

But I'm going to hit that publish button anyway, because the only way to stop being ashamed is to just deal with the reality. So here we go. REALITY.

Reckless Abandon

A friend of mine linked me to this picture, with the commentary "No one kisses like they did in World War II. And that is a shame."

She is totally right. No one kisses with this kind of reckless abandon anymore. No one dives out of train windows to lock lips.

Well, we don't really ride trains anymore, either, which is its own damn shame, but even without the train, you see what I mean. We don't go all out for anything as simple as a kiss anymore.

Kissing has become blase.

I shudder in horror at that sentence, because kissing is the best thing ever invented. Kissing is better than sex. Honestly. And maybe we don't kiss with such wild, impromptu passion because it's not World War II and everyone isn't in the Army and on their way over an ocean to fight Evil, but also, I think we don't kiss like this anymore because we're all too busy fucking, instead.

Stop that.

Start kissing. Enjoy the moment,. Enjoy the moment when it stops. Enjoy the anticipation and the possibility.

Kiss with reckless abandon. And if you dive out of a train window, please make sure someone is there to take a picture, and let me see it. I would really like to know that people still do this.

xo!

Family Weddings Are Giant Cliches.

So. It's a cliche, right? Hooking up with someone at a wedding. It's totally a cliche.

And I didn't do it. But the only reason I didn't do it is because it's a cliche. So it would be nice of everyone to tell me that it is a cliche, so that I don't feel like I threw away a perfectly decent chance to have really drunken sex for no good reason whatsoever.

I should start at the beginning. Not the middle. In media res, people. I am an ARTIST.

Family weddings are always a delicate situation. There's always a sense of wait, who are you again? And what that particular question ALWAYS means at a family wedding is "Who do you share DNA with? So I can know if I share DNA with you." This is particularly true in large families, that don't see each other often, that take extended family very seriously. I mean, the families of people that married into my father's family are regularly included at family gatherings. When my father's mother's family has reunions, there's a softball game: the Tschinkle's versus the "Out-laws." Everyone with Tschinkle blood is on one team. Everyone without is on the other.

No, seriously.

Anyway. There's this guy that is in much the same position that I am in when it comes to family: his siblings and cousins are all somewhere between 15 and 25 years older than he is because he's the product of a second marriage. Just like me. We're actually the same age. At one of these massive weddings back in the day when we were something like three and four, we were made to dance together. He was wearing a tiny tuxedo, I had flowers in my hair, it was a thing. There is a picture. It is famous. Everyone and their mama has a copy of it. And I mean that pretty literally, in this case. I have a copy, my mother has a copy, my grandmother has a copy, his mother has a copy, his brother's wives have copies, my aunt has a copy, and on and on.

FOR THE RECORD here, we aren't related. We worked shit out.

But he grew up pretty darn foxy, if you ask me. He's got a nice beard thing going on, likes skinny suits, is sort of nerdy with his cell phone tower job stuff. And really, really gorgeous hazel green eyes with that super Italian round-almond shape and incredibly great eyelashes. Holy shit, the eyes.

So we're at this wedding that includes a solid three days worth of events, and we're talking and laughing and drinking with both our generation (who are now all in their forties) and the older kids from the generation below us (who start at about 24 and range downward). Everyone's always in high spirits because, hey, it's a wedding. Also we haven't had a big family wedding in AGES. Also, this is the last of Uncle Dan's boys, so we won't have another one until the older kids start getting hitched.

And this guy and I, we're laughing and drinking and doing it up all right with everyone else, but we're also sort of scoping each other. I mean, he's cute. I look good in a dress. He's the right height for me in heels and we're both a little more awkward and a little shyer than most of the rest of the family. It works.

AND EVERYONE IS SUDDENLY TEASING US ABOUT THE PICTURE WHEN WE WERE TODDLERS.

Then we get to the actual wedding reception. Last night. It's a black tie affair. There are tuxes and evening gowns and a cocktail hour that goes on for two hours and more champagne toasts than you can shake a stick at. But when it comes to seating arrangements, they have put this guy and I together at a table with a bunch of the rest of our generation. Meaning, a bunch of 40-somethings. We are the only two under 30s at this table. Also the only two single people at this table. And OF COURSE my cousin Craig makes sure to ask me if I am actually single as we're sitting down to dinner. You know, in case I had a boyfriend stashed away in Wisconsin that just didn't come with me. And then makes sure to point out to me that the foxy guy that's not my cousin, but my cousins' childhood friend's younger brother is also single.

We roll our eyes at each other.

Dinner, a whole goddamn lot of merlot and cheap beer later, and we're dancing. There are no slow dances at this wedding reception. We do not recreate the sweet picture from our youth.

We end up in the hotel bar with a collection of other partiers after the reception. We proceed to drink more. We chat together. Ignoring everyone else. I tell myself to stop flirting. It does not work.

I could flow through the rest of the night, but it ends like this: we're kissing in his empty hotel room. He pulls back and tells me that there are at least 20 pairs of eyes on us at this moment. I tell him that's ridiculous because EVERYONE ELSE IS ASLEEP. (They totally are, for the record. Asleep or passed out in drunken stupors. Same thing.)

He says it's still weird. It's now like 3 in the morning and I tell him that I can always leave and he kind of stands there like a deer in the headlights and so I just kind of kiss him on the cheek and book it out of his room and into my own bed.

But what I realized standing there, after kissing him for five minutes or so, is (one) that he was WASTED and (two) that the whole thing was just so cliche. I mean, I hadn't seen it because I was genuinely interested in him for his beard and his eyes and his awkwardness and his mixed up Long Island/South Florida accent and his nerdiness about cell phone towers.

But I'm pretty sure he was just all like: "It's a wedding. People hook up at weddings. She's my age and she looks nice in a dress. Good enough."

So, probably walking away was a great decision. I mean, for my heart and all, given how fucked up I already am.

But then I think that I haven't gotten laid in what seems like FOREVER and I think to myself, "You've got stop not being willing to settle a little bit for a simple one-night stand, Ryan. Not everything must or even should be grand passion."

Because getting laid would be really nice. Serious.

Celibacy Sounds Great.

My life is a struggle of opposing forces. That sounds so dramatic. What I mean is that I am constantly living in the tension between conflicting impulses: between optimism and despair, between ecstasy and depression, between heat and cold. I mean that last one literally: it was 95 degrees yesterday and today it is 60.

But you could say that the temperatures apply to my personality just as easily. I'm a hot tamale or an ice princess and rarely anything in between. I promise: it is not as much as fun for me as you think it is. In fact, I know you have to deal with me through it all, but I still guarantee that I like it even less than you do. Serious.

But I do. I live in this world of diametrically opposed forces. This is the only way my brain knows how to construct a reasonable story of the world: by making things absolute. My happiness is the absolute epitomy of happiness, and my sadness sends me spiraling into mild-altering substances faster than most people can blink. I am not dysfunctional in the true meaning of the word; I function quite well in the world. But that doesn't mean that I'm not dysfunctional in the colloquial sense of the word, and really, I'm sure many people will be more than eager to attest to my dysfunctional behaviors if pressed.

For example, I have a habit of falling into bed with men without fully intending to do so. I may even have some sort of vague notion that ending up in bed would probably be detrimental. But it still happens. I can't help it. Or, they can't help it? I'm not sure.

Either way, it would seem that I cannot innocently climb into anyone's bed (even while decently clothed) without ending up an object of lust.

This upsets me, somewhat. Particularly when it causes a previously, dearly held opinion to be infinitesmally altered. There are so few people in general, and in particular so few personally known men, that I really look up to as instances of exemplary human behavior that having one knocked down a peg is a traumatic experience. I have (in my optimistic moments) an intense and unyielding desire to think the best of people, always. I have a yen to believe that human beings are wonderful and can be wonderful to each other, and can learn and behave with sensitivity and empathy when they are shown that they will not be eviscerated for doing so. In philosophical terms, I reject a Hobbesian vision of the world. Life is not "nasty, brutish and short." Life is beautiful, fantastic, long and filled with warmth and love. We can be people such as that.


But in other moments, I am firmly committed to this Hobbesian vision of the world, and I despair that I cannot see my clear of it. When one of my exemplars slips, it becomes ever harder to maintain the optimistic idea that we are all good people at root. Every time my heart is prodded and left to bleed, I lose some small measure of my ability to heal myself, to buck up, to readjust my vision so that I can again see the gloriously light-filled vistas of the human landscape instead of the long, dark shadows.

Every time I encounter indifference where my wildly optimistic soul dearly desired to encounter only love, I shed tears. Tears cannot be unshed; they have dripped now, for ever, from my soul and fell upon the world, and what happens when I can't cry anymore, and I'm all dead and dry inside?

These are things I worry about. How many disappointments can I stand? I face so many, every day, because of my great propensity for believing in the absolute best. Dr. Pangloss has nothing on me, but I fear that I can't maintain his spirit as well as Voltaire could. My Dr. Pangloss requires some small measure of vindication, some small sign that the best is real and possible, and when my best hopes for it are left in a bed that I never consciously desired to make for myself, what do I do?

More awareness would leave me bitter. Less awareness will leave me broken.

I live in the spaces between opposites. I live in the space, the ever-shortening space, between the Immovable Object and the Irresistable Force. I fold myself ever smaller to fit into these ideas of the world that I cannot shake away from my mind.

I still want to believe the best, desperately, but indifference makes it impossible. Still, indifference is not malevolence, and so I cannot believe the worst, either. I cannot believe anything. All I have left are hopes, so little understood, and hurts, so little attended to.

Slut.

I was eleven the first time I was called a slut. Sixth grade. I rode a big yellow school bus to school, and it was a long ride, sometimes 45 minutes. There were a group of us that were attending this school that was on the other side of the city, and we were the first ones picked up and the last ones dropped off.

There was a boy on the bus, an eighth grader. Jesse. He was beautiful, and counter-culture, and really, really smart. I was pretty much in love with him from day one. Sometime during that year, he noticed me. And we started to sit together on the bus, bumping legs while we lurched over streets riddled with potholes and talking about everything that an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old can possibly think of to talk about.

One afternoon, we were sitting a bit farther back in the bus than usual; it must have been the first available open seat. About halfway through the ride, everyone left on the bus was sitting in front of us. This girl, I don't even remember her name, came and planted herself in the seat in front of us and started asking questions about our relationship. Were we going steady? Was he my boyfriend?

I had no idea what to say. I had barely even thought about kissing this boy. I just really liked the way he looked, and the way he smelled, and the things we talked about and the confidence with which he made his pronouncements. It was a very quiet confidence. I think he was taken aback, as well, because he also didn't know what to say. He deflected. She would not be deterred.

After five minutes of badgering or so, she reached into our seat, picked up his hand, and put it on my breast.

No, really. We both kind of looked at it there. Neither one of us felt much about it, so after a few seconds, he moved it away, back to his lap.

But this girl whose name I can't remember started screaming and hollering about how I'd let Jesse feel me up in the back of the bus.

By the time I got to school the next day, I was that girl. That girl that let boys feel her up in the back of the bus. I got called a slut a lot that year, and the next.

When I was fourteen, I went on a chaperoned trip to Australia and New Zealand with 40 other kids. The chaperones were four schoolteachers. The senior chaperone was a woman named Mrs. Sphar, and Mrs. Sphar had very definite ideas about how children should behave. I did not conform to her ideas, although by most any objective measure, I was a good kid. I got good grades, I hadn't yet tried any drugs nor had I even gotten drunk. I was a free-spirited little thing, and I had a sharp tongue and a distaste for authority, but I was a good kid.

I dyed my hair on that trip, something I'd done for the first time a year earlier with the blessing and help of my mother. (I have always felt it a travesty of genetics that my hair does not naturally have much red tint.)

Mrs. Sphar did not like the new hair color.

She told me I looked like a street walker, and demanded that I remain in my hotel room, washing my hair, until the dye washed out.

When I was eighteen, I met a man that I married less than a year later who liked to call me a whore when I smiled at grocery clerks and gas stations attendants. He never did forgive me for not being a virgin when we met, and was convinced that I was going to sleep with anything that moved because I was already spoiled, anyway.

Those are just the highlights.

I have difficult time, still, with having my sexual appetites and choices derided. "Whore" will as often as not reduce me to tears; "slut" makes me turn red and shaky with shame and rage.

I know that it's all the rage these days to reclaim these labels that have been placed on women that have taken their sexual lives into their own hands and make them positives. Women are supposed to wear these insults with pride, like precious pearl necklaces bedecking their throats, like pins of platinum pinioned on lapels.

I call bullshit.

The words are meant to be insults. You can tell me not to internalize them as often as you like, and maybe I should hear it, but don't tell me that I'm supposed to like being called a slut. It's meant to cut. It's meant to demean. It's meant to tell me that my worth lies between my legs and every time I let someone in there, I'm demeaning myself and lowering my worth.

So don't use those words. Don't play with them. They are not playful words; they are weapons. And most certainly, don't tell me that I'm supposed to like being bludgeoned with them.