Sometimes you have to face hard truths by stating the painful facts baldly. I am 33, I have never been kissed, and the only guy who ever wanted to hold hands with me was killing time while he tried to find someone hot enough to date. I know this because that’s what he told my housemate when he hit on her.

To the best of my knowledge, no one who has seen me in person has ever been attracted to me. I’m not catcalled or harassed. The only relationships I’ve had have been online. The only boyfriend who met me offline would not do more than give me a hug. I have met potential partners from the Internet, only to watch the interest in their eyes die when they see me.

I often feel like the only woman on the face of the planet who no one is attracted to. And I am ashamed — in part because this is something no one ever talks about.

I often feel like the only woman on the face of the planet who no one is attracted to.
Click To Tweet

We turn virginity into a punchline — a sign of misplaced religious conviction, physical grotesqueness, or social ineptitude. We try to escape the reality that sex is a choice that some are never offered, and ignore the fact that trumpeting sexual freedom also has the power to wound deeply. The sexually inexperienced (especially those with no choice in the matter) feel a strong urge to hide this fact, in order to let people assume a common level of sexual history. It’s a lot easier than trying to explain the truth, and it hurts less, too.

I’ve sat through countless conversations with groups of women, praying that the conversation wouldn’t turn to sex, cringing inwardly when it inevitably did, and trying to laugh with the others until the topic changed and I could relax again, my secret safe. For now.

When I was growing up, the conversation was always about how to say “no,” how to not be pressured into sex, how to turn down a date honestly and fairly. My educators, ministers, and youth group leaders never told me what to do when I wasn’t pressured, when I wasn’t asked out on dates. Teenage me was practically quivering with excitement over my first chance to say “no,” because even “no” contained the possibility that I could choose to say “yes.” But the question never came.

I thought that, perhaps, things would get better in college. Surely, the smart guys would at least be attracted to my intellect. Instead, while I made friends with lots of great guys who I’m still close with, I was never once asked on a date. No one ever tried to cop a feel at an event or in the movie theater. There was never the hint of a hookup. Perhaps, if my upbringing hadn’t been so conservative, or if I’d had a few dates in high school, I would have had the courage to ask someone out for myself instead of waiting, but that was unthinkable to me.

I was so confused. This wasn’t how the movies went. This wasn’t how the novels ended. Most of my friends got married right out of college, and those that didn’t at least had dates. I sat down to take inventory: Why wasn’t anyone interested? Was it my appearance? I’ve always been on the large side of curvy, but I knew plenty of girls my size and larger who had found happy relationships. Was it my face? I’ve never been pretty, but again, I knew women who were objectively less “pretty” than me who had found love. Was it my personality? I’m shy and reserved (unless you bring up Star Wars or Dune, then good luck getting me to shut up), but I’m comfortable talking to friends. I was part of several active social groups, and enjoyed spending time with friends. I couldn’t find a persuasive reason why no one was interested in me. And in the decade or so since college, as the disinterest has persisted, I still haven’t.

I was so confused. This wasn’t how the movies went. This wasn’t how the novels ended.
Click To Tweet

Over the past few years, I’ve made a certain amount of peace with being single. It took some time, especially since I could find very little to help me. The books I found on being single were almost exclusively geared toward “being single until you get married because of course you will.” The singles activities at my church were rare, and everyone in them was a good 40 years older than me. I eventually realized that I could not rely on a guide to help me; I had to find out what the single life meant for me. I had to build a life of my own, instead of waiting to find my “other half.”

It’s not my preferred choice, but I’m not going to fling myself at someone out of desperation. This sense of acceptance comes and goes. There are days when I’m tempted to run outside and proposition the first man I can find. But most days, I just accept that this is my reality right now, and change will not happen quickly or easily. Regardless, the frustration lingers: I would have liked it to be a real choice, not a matter of mere acceptance.

I’ve tried talking about my story a few times. I’ve pushed back when people assume that certain levels of romantic history are universal; when people make offhand remarks that assume that, given my age, I’ve had several intimate relationships, I correct them. I try to remind people that “virgin” is not an insult, and that sex isn’t the guarantor of adulthood. The rare times I’ve brought up this pain, I’ve been told that I simply didn’t notice guys who were interested, or that I just needed to “be myself” and admirers would miraculously appear.

That’s what hurts the worst: the absolute refusal of others to believe me when I talk about my experience. The insistence that I don’t know my own life. The appropriation of my narrative to turn it into a more palatable story for the comfort of others. I’ve tried to understand why my story makes others uncomfortable. It’s possible that it’s because it introduces an element of uncertainty into all relationships: What if a lot of it comes down to luck? If there’s no real reason behind my lack of relationships, maybe it’s just a coincidence, an accident of chance. And that means they found their partners due to chance as well, and their lives might have been like mine if a few things had gone differently. And so they rationalize and explain my story; if it’s due to something I’m not doing, then they are safe in their relationships. They didn’t make my mistakes.

Female friends try to assure me that I am attractive, but have no explanation for why men don’t seem to agree. They don’t understand why I rebuff their compliments, assuming that I’m only operating from a foundation of low self-esteem, when in actuality I’m just trying to keep my grip on reality. If it were true that I were attractive, then at some point, someone would have acted on said attraction. No one has, and my narrative accounts for the truth better than their perspective does.

That’s what hurts the worst: the absolute refusal of others to believe me when I talk about my experience.
Click To Tweet

And yet, my friends seem to think my rejection of their narrative is a personal rebuff; I spend my energy protecting their feelings from the truth of mine. I laugh away the pain that runs deep so they won’t feel sorry for me. I go to their bridal showers, their weddings, and I’m genuinely happy for them. I enjoy dinners at their houses, trying not to be jealous of the cookware that they received when they married. No one throws showers for single women; all my cookware comes from the thrift store or the cheap aisle at the grocery store.

I wish I could talk more about others who have shared this experience. But the truth is, I don’t know of any others within my personal circles. I have many single friends, but all of them have had their share of admirers. According to CDC research conducted a few years ago, 2% of women age 25–44 (and 3% of men in the same age range) have never had vaginal sex. Surely some of these millions of virgins include those like me, who want physical intimacy but have never been offered it.

But we hide our stories, afraid of being judged, laughed at, or worse, pitied. We miss out on the support of others with similar stories.

The question I find myself facing now is whether or not to keep trying. As L.M. Montgomery wrote in The Blue Castle, “Yes, I’m ‘still young’ — but that’s so different from young.” The reality is that if no one has wanted more than a hug from me by now, that’s not likely to change as I age. I don’t want to be single forever. I would very much like to be kissed at least once. Do I keep trying to find someone, or do I accept my situation for what it is, and direct my energies elsewhere? Will other people let me accept being unwillingly single, or will they keep pushing me to believe that I am somehow secretly attractive, in the face of all experiential evidence that suggests otherwise?

I may never stop wanting my story to change, but I will keep fighting to tell it my way. I intend to cling to the truth, even when it’s a painful one. I hope others with more normative experiences will start to understand, and find ways to include women like me in discussions about sex and love, without resorting to alienating comments about what “all women” experience.

We’re all women, we all have our stories, and we all want the chance to tell them with dignity and truth.

Most people I knew were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

I wasn’t trying to lie — not to outright deceive, anyway. I liked to think I was getting straight to the point. People were always asking questions that I already knew they didn’t want the real answers to. They wanted to be reassured and sent on their way. Like when my mom gave me the rest of her finely smoked bacon before she and my dad went on vacation. It was a way of thanking me for a ride to the airport. Though if they had ever looked in my refrigerator, they would have known I was trying to cut down on my meat consumption. If they paid attention to how I lived, they’d have asked for a ride a week in advance.

“So how was the bacon?” my mom asked a week later. They had dusted my backseat in a light layer of sand. I told her that it was great. It was fantastic. I knew it was, she had told me so herself. Its quality had not diminished because I left it on my counter overnight and did not want to eat afterwards. It wasn’t not great because I threw it away.

“Okay, good.” My mom nodded and we said nothing more about it.

“Well, that’s on you,” my ex-girlfriend, August, might say. She was the kind of woman who was always showing up for friends who sometimes got so worked up that they had to take space and not talk for months. She liked to encourage me to take some space myself or take up more space or create space — the space around me wasn’t right.

One night, August and I got drinks with some new friends of hers and when I dropped her off at home I said, “That was fun, thanks.”

“Was it?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was fun,” I said again. I meant it. We all sat around a cozy booth in a bar I liked and laughed and drank cheap beer and drew pictures of our young queer selves. I was charming and understanding and funny — because I knew that was what August had invited me there to be — and we really were an excellent team in that particular department. I enjoyed being those people together. But now with her pouting out the window, I wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know anything about you. I tell you everything about me and you never tell me anything. Why is that?” she asked.

I watched her head shake and I tried to imagine that several months ago, we had not sat in this same car, in this exact driveway, her head faced away from me in the exact same posture, while I cried because she was breaking my heart and she had asked me to stop because I was making her uncomfortable. That this kind of pressure on her was exactly why we were breaking up.

So, now, as we sat again in her driveway and she wondered aloud why I was not open and forthcoming with her, I told her what I thought a person without my painful memory of that driveway conversation might find helpful. “We have different ways of being friends,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie, it was absolutely true. But it wasn’t everything I was thinking right then, and I knew I was not taking up the requisite amount of space.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not mad or anything, I just want to know about you.”

“I know,” I said. “I really care about you.”

“I don’t just care about you, I love you a lot.” August said this with more than a hint of exasperation. She leaned over to give me one of those car hugs, where you hang half of your body over someone else and then pat each other. I felt simultaneously stupid and comforted by this because it was sharing myself with another person, but also more of a redistribution of weight than anything else.

I went home after that. I put on my t-shirt that featured a Mt. Rushmore configuration of adorable kittens. I watched Friday Night Lights and lusted after Tim Riggins and Tammy Taylor until that got boring. Then I tried to read an old New Yorker article about Jeb Bush and charter schools, but fell asleep instead. I woke up a little while later and the lights were still on. I considered that maybe in another version of my life, there could be a person who would know to turn the light off for me, and how nice it would be to let them do that.

“So what did you do last night?” my co-worker Ben asked me the next day. He popped his little head over the top of the wall between our cubicles.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d spent the evening working toward a productive friendship with my ex-girlfriend. So many of my friends tended to scoff at that idea. But then, most of my friends had an incredibly easy time finding people to turn their lights on and off for them, so I didn’t think we were operating with the same value system.

Ben seemed to notice that I was just standing there too long, fingers hovering over my keyboard. “Must have been some crazy nothing,” he said. “Mama’s a little slo-ho this morning.”

I sighed. “Mama did have some beers last night and then she didn’t sleep all that well.”

Ben shook his head. “Taking a page from Daddy, I see. Well the aspirin’s on my desk if you need it.”

This was the kind of lie that I didn’t feel terrible about because Ben knew I was not telling him everything and he didn’t mind. Ben also just wanted to get straight to the point.

“Okay,” he continued. “If you had to be stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with me or Allan, who would you choose?” He paused to adjust his glasses. “And remember that I’ll feel bad if you choose Allan, but that I would also understand because he is more handsome than me and I’d choose him because I’d hope he’d hold my head to his perfectly hairy chest and then fuck me.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Don’t worry, I like you better than Allan. If I were going to die on this raft, I’d want it to be with you.”

“Awww, thanks,” he said and reached his hand down from his giraffe height to pat my shoulder.

“But,” I added, “if there was any chance of a rescue — any at all — I’d better be with Allan, because Daddy would definitely do something stupid and get us killed.”

“It’s like I can’t even argue with that, because you’re so right,” Ben said. His voice betrayed his unreasonable gratefulness to me. “You’re so wise,” he murmured, and I heard him descend into his desk chair.

These were the kinds of truths that my friends applauded me for dispensing. I didn’t know what to do with the fact that I felt no ownership, no special relationship to these types of “truths” — that they were no more or less real to me than the greatness of the bacon or mine and August’s friendship. Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. There were just other peoples’ versions of reality that you could acknowledge and learn your way around and eventually find a reasonable place to stand within. That was what I meant when I said that I liked to get straight to the point. I wanted to find a good place to stand in other peoples’ lives, where I liked the scenery and felt that I was wearing appropriate shoes.

---

Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist.
Click To Tweet

---

In Ben’s case, he was far too logical to ever let me die in a raft. But we both carried the hope that his manic hysteria — which was the trademark of his nighttime alter-ego, Blackout Ben — would claim a greater part of his life and lead to his satisfaction one day. It was a familiar sentiment. I, too, hoped one day to become bold and satisfied. And so I pretended that we were. That was the short, sandy beach where our realities overlapped, and it was enough to make us feel united in the world.

There were other cases that weren’t as easy, but which I’d learned to navigate, all the same.

“Would you consider me to be high maintenance?” Goldie, my first love and now an exquisitely costumed drag king, texted me one evening. As if our relationship had not been born out of a shared obsession with Goldie. As if the question, itself, were not the answer. It was 10:30 pm in California, too late in New York City for unloaded banter.

“Ferraris are high maintenance,” I texted Goldie back. “They also feature high performance.”

“Thank you, that’s right,” came their prompt reply, and I heard nothing else for a week.

This was all well and good, though sometimes I lost track of the points I was trying to get to. With Goldie, it seemed that for more than a decade, the point had been to efficiently remind each other that we knew each other — that this prevented us from being entirely alone in the world. But it did occur to me that getting straight to the point left certain territories of our lives — namely the more recently developed, somewhat more mature portions — perfect mysteries to each other.

And it wasn’t just with Goldie. There were large swaths of my life that nobody knew about. This was absurd because I had so many people in my life and they all knew so much about me. Still, there were nights when I went out walking, just to let the sharp prick of the stars make me feel lonely.

Sometimes I went into a dark dive bar alone and ordered a whiskey soda. I drank it very slowly and closed my eyes to really listen to the music. I made up dishwashing challenges for myself. I stood in front of the mirror after I got dressed and told myself, “Girl, I don’t know what’s up with that thing your pants are doing, but damn, you look cute today.” I played the keyboard with my headphones on and recorded catchy tunes that got stuck in my head. My voice was so deep in the morning, so high and bright at night. I drank coffee on my tiny deck and imagined that the whoosh of the train passing by was the sound of the ocean. There was so much delicate beauty in my life.

And everybody had ruined it, just by being there. Though there was an exception.

“I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is,” was Sophie’s conclusion. This observation was not unlike one of the “truths” that I would dispense myself. This made Sophie the lone fixture on the lawn of my life. It didn’t matter where she stood, it was always reasonable and did not require shoes — that was my highest level of friendship. We both lived for the moments when the movie we were watching on Netflix paused to buffer and rendered an otherwise flawlessly beautiful woman, horrifying. We believed success was living in the eye of a storm — in absolute calm, but at the center of everything.

---

‘I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is.’
Click To Tweet

---

There was no direct point to get to with Sophie and so I never pretended anything. We wrote long meandering letters addressing every detail and turn of thought in preparing for and executing routine errands, like getting gas or going to the grocery store. When she came to visit me in the first apartment I’d ever lived in alone, she said, “It feels exactly like you, like home.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. But I understood that this sentiment was not even remotely available to anyone else. I had to consider that the series of direct points to which I’d been intent on adhering, had led me astray. Because I was 30 years old, and while I didn’t expect to fall into deranged love anymore, while I didn’t presume I’d be moved on a daily basis, I did hope that one day I would find others to contribute to the delicate beauty in my life. At least one person for whom the conflation of me and home would be natural. Which is to say, I still believed in an uncynical kind of romance. And if this wasn’t happening through my active social life, then maybe my writing would take me there. Either way, it hinged on my ability to share my most private of property.

So the only reasonable action, I supposed, was to leave the gate open, if you will. To let people wander where they would and give them the chance to try to find a good place to stand. I began with August, who, as a poet and my ex-girlfriend, was already familiar with the landscape. Even if she couldn’t contribute to the delicate beauty herself, I knew she would facilitate my own contributions.

“Let’s rent a cabin,” she emailed me one afternoon. I figured since she was the expert on space, I’d follow her advice. I chose a little place in Mendocino, in California, surrounded by trees and nothing else. I imagined I would reconfigure my space into a little donut, the hole of which would contain the final touches on the novel I’d been wrestling with for three years. Why not? Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. If we declared ourselves good friends, we were. If my novel sounded finished, it was. Afterward, in some other reality, these things would not be more or less true, but August would be there to remind me that I wanted them to be.

She and I had dinner together one evening in a beautiful restaurant with a high wood beam ceiling and low, warm candlelight. It reminded me of a cabin. “I can’t wait to get away and just disappear into my book,” I told her.

“What if you could do that all the time?” she asked me. “You’ve been wanting to quit your job since I met you. You might want to get started on that sometime.”

“I might,” I said. Then, instead of going home and putting on my kitten shirt and looking for life advice from Friday Night Lights, I said to her, “I might also need to admit that if I haven’t quit yet, I lack the will and gumption to be a real writer. I fear I may not want it enough. Or maybe I fear that I do.”

August pushed the last of our chocolate torte at me and shrugged. “You might, you might not. Don’t you think just doing it is better than all of this navel-gazing? I, for one, believe in you.” She said this like it was no big deal, but in that moment, we’d finally found appropriate places to stand, and it nearly brought me to tears.

I had to admit that I was feeling emotional. Assessing the value of my life and its collection of lies and truths seemed urgent because I’d suddenly gotten accepted into a writing residency in Vermont. It was not an altogether life-changing situation. However, if I were getting straight to the point with myself, I had really wanted it to be. I’d applied to the program knowing it would make a graceful way to leave my job. If I were going to brashly dispense my own “truth,” the entire purpose of all of my private property — each delicate beauty — was to have a rich and endless abyss from which to pull threads for my writing. And the purpose of my writing was to create public pieces of my own private property, where myself and maybe others could feel that they’d come home.

Which wasn’t happening. Or at least it wasn’t happening at any rate that could propel me into the eye of any storm.

“I have to agree with August,” Sophie sighed. She didn’t like having to agree with anyone who had ever made me cry in a driveway. But she and I saved all of our letters so that when we became famous writers one day, the journey there would be preserved for any curious bystanders. There was no question about the point of our lives and yet, it had never seemed obvious how to get directly to it.

For the first time, I allowed myself to go around and ask for advice — not for validation, but for actual answers. “What do you think?” I asked everyone: the glitter-faced women with whom I sat around in Dolores Park on Pride, old friends who liked to make bread and cookies, new friends who liked tiki bars, my sunglass-clad art friends in LA and New York, my aunt who gave me the best gifts I had ever received. “Is it crazy and selfish to quit my job and run away with my writing? Am I just ungrateful? Will we all die alone anyway?”

“Hmmm,” they said. I think it was safe to say that everyone had been aware of my private property for some time and had wanted to look in without being intrusive. Now that my proverbial gate was unlatched, they all hesitated briefly. My internal landscape was more cluttered and hilly, less sunny than they’d imagined. Not everyone appreciated my brand of delicate beauty. Eventually, however, they offered me a collective, “You know, why not?”

When I asked Sophie what I should be doing with my life she said, “The hard part is that you’ve yet to fall into serious decline and so it could start at any time. But that’s okay because you already have such a beautiful life. You can always make that again.”

Sophie was leaving her job in a month. There was a new life stage ahead of her, in which her boyfriend was going to attempt to become a lawyer in New York City and they were likely going to become a family — the kind that included children and a home, maybe even a legal contract. It didn’t change the point of Sophie’s life now, but I didn’t see how it couldn’t eventually have an effect on where we would stand. I told her as much, of course.

She had answered my phone call while riding her bicycle and I heard the click of her chain and the rush of her breathing while she considered this. “I don’t know who I’ll become yet, but if all else fails, I think I’d like the option to be happy,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, maybe,” I replied.

I was generally all-in or all-out. I wasn’t sure I knew how to maintain a back-up plan like that. I saw friends most nights of the week, felt fleetingly alive and then went home to put on my kitten shirt and then watch TV or write or cry or read until I fell asleep with the light on. There was a certain beauty in that. It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness. It did keep my mind and my heart in constant motion, but it wasn’t bold and it wasn’t satisfying.

---

It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness.
Click To Tweet

---

I understood, then, why my parents wanted me to have their high-quality bacon in the first place. And why — when I told my dad that I was going to Vermont and quitting my job, too — he looked crazed and said to me, “Do you want to be poor and helpless at 50, is that what you want? What you’re supposed to do is support yourself and maybe have a good time doing it!”

“You can’t be like Elizabeth,” my mom added sternly. Elizabeth, her massage therapist, who unequivocally gave the best massages my mom had ever received. Elizabeth, who purportedly couldn’t get her cavity drilled because she had no dental insurance.

My parents wanted my reality to be like theirs. Everyone who loved me did, too. Most people I knew and even some I didn’t, were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

It was so much easier to construct half-truths and direct points that we could use to skirt around the real issue. Happiness, theirs or mine, was not the point of my life, exactly. It sounded melodramatic and inflammatory when spoken aloud. It sounded a lot like a lie.

Because I was well-known for my pool floatie collection, for colorful nights out, my love for pizza, personalized gifts and peaceful weekend getaways. I was incredibly fun. My private property, however, was something else. It was my place for exploring my unproductive tangles and knots. It was where I kept all of the people I was and might become and knew and resented and loved and missed and would lose — I hung around with lovely ghosts who left me with the same perfect ache as a loose tooth.

Together we wallowed and navel-gazed, were wistful and nostalgic, occasionally hopeful and forever incomplete. That was where my writing and I wanted to bask. It was life at its most gorgeous. And maybe that was selfish and irresponsible. I’m not saying there wasn’t more to do with a person’s life — with mine specifically. I certainly wasn’t sure who could be expected to find a good place to stand, let alone a home in that. But this was my reality and I didn’t have to keep it a secret. It was no more or less valuable than anyone else’s. If the point was to keep company for my fluttering heart and its garden of sweet misery, there was no reason to make it private.

“It’s like, what is happiness, even?” Ben had asked me on one of the quiet, dull days in our office. “It’s basically just a social construction.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t really. It was what August and Sophie had been telling me the whole time. I was allowed to make the people in my life acknowledge my private property, to spend as much time as I wanted wrapped up in its nuances — that was one version of what it meant to be bold and satisfied.

And I could live there if I wanted.

Whatever mutations social media undergoes in my lifetime, I will always associate it with porn.

Let’s start at the beginning. From 2007 to 2011, I was an independent contractor in a Bay Area BDSM house; imagine a kinky version of Miss Mona’s in the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. For me — a scruffy young punk with a very dirty mind — it was kind of like a femme finishing school.

My fellow pro-dommes (and pro-subs, and pro-switches) inspired in me a newfound gusto for all the things I had never liked about being a girl during my adolescence. And while I’ll admit that the context of performance and the reward of cold hard cash were my first motivations in constructing a feminine persona of grace and charm, I eventually amplified my sexual id through the gleaming sound system of this new persona.

I called her Tina Horn (after fictional teenage temptress Audrey Horn of Twin Peaks, and soul survivor Tina Turner). Sex work permitted me to invent a fantasy character I could embody, and it was thrilling. I became well known for my intelligence and my healthy ass, and I was very successful.

The house had a simple website, and some presence on an online forum for sex work. With a couple of fetish gear pictures and a few hundred seductive words, I advertised time with Tina Horn to the world. I emailed with a few of my clients to arrange appointments, but mostly we booked over the phone.

It never would have occurred to me in a million years to give Tina Horn a Facebook page, or even to keep a blog. Rather, I created an ironclad persona that dematerialized and rematerialized at the discretion of my clients. This was part of the sustainability of this work. Intimacy with the Real Me was not on the menu.

Including fallibility. Many tools of the sex trade that I learned in that house have stuck with me for life. One that really stands out? “Mistresses don’t get sick.”

The house had a rule. If your coworker was ill, and you had to cancel her appointments for her, you never told her client the true reason. We made excuses: the house had accidentally double booked her, or, “We’re so sorry, but unfortunately she has unexpected, important business to attend to.”

Our boss had decided — around the time she started the house in the mid-nineties — that it was important to maintain the mystique of the Mistresses. Our clients didn’t need to know we were fallible. (Or that we were grossly snotty.)

Let’s Dismantle The False Dichotomy Between Porn And Erotica

This made complete emotional sense to me. Tina Horn did not exist outside of the walls of the house. I was safe to explore dangerous zones because it all happened within a very structured and heavily boundary-ed system.

The original “Tina Horn” was like a robot. You put a coin in her slot, so to speak, and she powered up to perform a custom dance for you. She was clever, she was naked, and she tied you up. You could spank her and she would squeal with delight. She would totally kiss other robots. She cared about your problems and she had a penetrating gaze that looked deep into your soul. When you left the house satisfied and several pounds lighter, Tina Horn powered down. Which meant that I could eat a sandwich, giggle with the other girls, count my money, do my paperwork, change into my bike shorts, and leave the house.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.

After a few years of working in this house, I started performing in porn. Filmmakers such as Shine Louise Houston and Madison Young hired me for video projects just like my clients had hired me for private BDSM services. I kept the name Tina Horn. But the way I related to Shine and Madison was not the way I related to my clients — the camera was now the proxy for the client.

One of the defining characteristics of the queer porn genre is the behind-the-scenes performer interviews. The directors who were hiring me expected me to answer tons of questions about my personal sexuality on camera. In fact, it often felt that those documentary interviews about gender, desire, identity, and community were as much, if not more, the actual point of the films, rather than the hardcore sex.

This was around 2010, and people were starting to get really serious about Twitter. I thought Twitter was fucking stupid. It felt like a short-form promotional tool that I didn’t think I needed.

Please remind me to put “hermetically sealed humiliating seduction revenge scenes” on my list of services #JessicaJones

???@tinahornsass

It seemed “social” in the worst kind of way — a distillation of fair weather friendships designed as a vehicle for narcissism. Then some porn friends tricked me into joining it by creating an account for my ass. They shared the password with one another. The first tweets of @TinaHornsAss were collective jokes. My friends knew I would use the tool once there was an ironic distance.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.
Click To Tweet

How could anything I said ever be truly serious, when it was couched within the raunchy concept of tweets emerging from my butt hole? And they were right. Eventually, I took over the account and started tweeting in earnest. Now that I understand the essential role that Twitter plays in being a public figure — now that I’m a journalist, writer, media-maker, and modern prankster — @TinaHornsAss is still the account I use.

And the irony remains that even after almost five years, Twitter and I still don’t really jive. It still feels like an unpaid obligation. I can’t ever seem to find my voice. I struggle to balance ethics and mediate my own love of attention. I agonize over 140 characters: concision is not exactly my forte.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me. In a room, I feed off the sexual energy of another person. Without that nervous system interaction, I grow exhausted and burn out quickly. Twitter makes me feel that way, too. It doesn’t give me anything I want. Sometimes my followers and I interact, but at this moment I have 7,781 followers, and I interact with maybe 50 of them — mostly colleagues — and occasionally fans. Unlike a client in the BDSM house, I can’t look them up and down and read them. I don’t know how to be Tina Horn to them.

Like sometimes you gotta drink that much whiskey and wear that much leather and frown that hard to be a fucking woman in this world

???@tinahornsass

In Program or Be Programmed, Douglas Rushkov reminds us that the point of all Internet activity is to be social. In my concept of her, Tina Horn doesn’t socialize. Or rather, she does in controlled environments. When I socialize with another queer porn performer, I do so as The Real Me. But when @TinaHornsAss talks to, say, @AndreShakti, we are interacting with the knowledge that our fans can voyeur, and that this interaction is good for business. But that doesn’t give me the social satisfaction of human connection — it makes me feel like I’m putting on a promotional show. I’ve yet to be convinced that this is good for business, or that it’s meant to satisfy anything other than my ego.

But I learned to use Twitter. I learned to give out the information I wanted people to know. I basically tweeted any time I felt “on” as Tina Horn — when I was shooting a scene, or attending an event “as” Tina.

An artist friend teased me that I only tweeted when I was in public at porn events. I looked at her and blinked. “That’s the only time Tina Horn exists!”

Nobody else seemed to think this was reasonable. They were tweeting their impulses, their dark emotions, their vitriol, when they were going to sleep. The closest intimacy I felt comfortable sharing was how I liked my coffee.

But Twitter wanted more from me. Twitter wanted to know as soon I was set up at my desk in the morning. It wanted to know what I was eating. It wanted my funny observations, my insight. It wanted quotes from what I was reading. It definitely wanted my vacations.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me.
Click To Tweet

Everything became potential fodder to contribute to the public character development of Tina Horn. I felt I wasn’t permitted to be The Real Me — even during my most cherished private moments, like while reading a book or masturbating or working out. Those un-Tina Horn moments needed to contribute to the Tina Horn brand, to keep me relevant, to keep people wanting to work with me and hire me.

 

I tried to teach myself to get pleasure from it. Like the occasional dopamine rush of seeing my work retweeted by someone I admire. Once I posted a dream I had about Samuel Delaney, and he responded with a story about Tim Curry. That felt magical, like a real connection with a distant icon.

Trying to find pleasure in social media kind of felt like trying to develop a taste for cigarettes even though they made me nauseous. As we all know, cigarettes make you cool and help you relate to others. And some people really take to them. But there’s probably a reason they make me nauseous. I’m not built for cigarettes, and I’m not suited to Twitter, and I don’t really understand why I should condition myself to need something that feels bad for me.

I am aware that my aversion may simply be a defense mechanism. It is possible that I have convinced myself that if Tina Horn doesn’t have an inner life, I am protected from the horrible things society tells me will happen to me because I’m a whore. That my father will be disappointed in me, that I will be shut out of the jobs I want, that I will lose my ability to have intimate orgasms, that I was just doing it for the attention.

literallyme

???@tinahornsass

On one hand, I’ll admit that it’s incredible for people who enjoy my sex performance to see what I have to say — about sex, or coffee, or music, or an article. But on the other, sometimes I get the impression that people feel entitled to it because of what I am — which is a whore — and what I do‚ which is making money by working hard at the words and sex I love. I feel as if the world expects me to outsource my imagination, and every ounce of my gut screams at me to stop. After all, my imagination is my livelihood.

And yet I tweet on, because I still believe in the potential, and because I am afraid of becoming obsolete. But I long for the time when I was allowed my simple private moments; when I could count my $20 bills, put on my street clothes, and just go home.

Warning: graphic sexual assault content

I picked up on something in his text messages and emails — they were demanding, bossy, and paternalistic. This was a client who had been attempting to contact me since October, but I decided to ignore him. The client kept contacting me. He was persistent. I’m a sex worker, and as such, I confront decisions regarding safety and sanity and money on a fairly frequent basis. The client’s vibe was just too weird, even for me, a veteran in the field of absurdity, social outcasts, and patriarchs desperately reaching for the touch of a young girl. Unsure how to placate his aggressive energy, I finally told him that I had left the business.

But he found my advertisements online. “Everywhere,” he wrote to me in a text message three months later. “It’s clear that you’ve returned to the industry.” In the lull of the Christmas season, clients were feeling broke and weighing familial obligations — with the holiday season’s moralism, I was left with an empty schedule and a hungry wallet. I agreed to meet with him.

The man was very old. How old, I couldn’t tell. He had crow’s feet in his eyes and a potbelly that threatened to pop the buttons of the Ralph Lauren polo that lurched over his waistline. Fine white tufts receded into his hairline; dandruff coated the shoulders of his black blazer.

He wrapped his arms around my waist on the suede sofa in front of the TV and offered me a glass of wine; he ran his fingers covetously between the small slice of space between my stockings and my naked upper thigh. As I drew closer to him, I smelled something rancid. His musky underarms combined with the smell of feet, urine, cum, a day of hard work at the office, and god knows what else.

In a feeble, but valiant attempt to hold back my disgust, I traced the surface of his crinkled khakis. He took my small hand in his, kneading it like the soft limb of a Raggedy Anne doll, and explained to me that he was a dominant. That I should call him sir. But that before we began, he would like to know what my limits were. I told him I was extremely open, but for now the most important thing for him to know was that I needed him to use a condom when we had sex.

“Well, as we explore the world of BDSM together, we’ll see what your limits really are and if I can convince you otherwise.” A chill went down my spine, but I left the hotel room that day in one piece, with several hundred dollars extra in my pocket.

On St. Patrick’s Day, he contacted me again. I remembered how unpleasant he had been. I had just spent an obscene amount on advertising, and in my unrealistic state of financial mania, I agreed to meet with him. I had survived once. I had survived a lot. I had seen a lot. No one had fucked with me yet. “You can handle this,” I told myself.

He sent me a text message with his room number, and when I arrived, I rapped my cold knuckle against the door cautiously. He led me back to the suede couch where he had sat on my face months prior and we chatted, I’m not sure what about. I asked him vague questions about his business trip and how he had been. I giggled at the right times and smiled at others, trying to hold eye contact without collapsing like a house of cards. He said he had been to Tokyo and London. He said none of that mattered now, that this was his last stop, and that he had been looking forward to seeing me for months. He was so happy to see me. I couldn’t say the same.

I swallowed hard, clinked my glass to his, and said, “Well, cheers to that,” and opened my painted lips like a broken toy doll. It was the only thing I could think of to say. I held my breath to avoid inhaling too much of the scent that my memory had done such a good job of suppressing until now. He pushed the hair out of my face and informed me that we were going to the bedroom. I tried to push away my nausea. I thought about the money at the other end of this, grabbed his hand, and with put-on girlish excitement, skipped to the bedroom, his sloth-like body in tow.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

I quietly complied. Wordlessly I unbuckled the straps of my favorite sandals, shimmied out of my skirt, and took off my sweater. I paused when I got to my bra and panties. Staring like a hungry wolf, he sat opposite me, wet circles of sweat swelling beneath the armpits of his dress shirt. My eyes met his, his pupils dilated, his hairy arm snaked across the firm mattress, and with two stubby fingers he pushed my sternum backwards into the gilded Egyptian cotton.

As he fastened restraints onto my ankles and wrists, I inhaled deeply and meditated on all the possible violence that could occur at this moment. I made some jokes and made him laugh because I knew the show wasn’t anywhere near being over yet. He brought out a huge Hitachi magic wand and buzzed its circular surface up and down my pelvic bone, where he seemed to think my clit was located. I managed some soft whimpers and feigned arousal. “Oh, he’s getting excited now,” my client said, stroking the bulge buried in his gray boxer briefs.

Fair enough. Hopefully that meant we’d be done soon. I arched my back into the mattress and opened up my legs, scanning down my naked body to the bedside table, where I’d conveniently placed several condoms in varying sizes. He started humping me, holding my knees into my chest. I got breathy, hoping to eschew any opportunity to prolong the session. He thrust into me with all his force. His pinky-sized dick slid up and down the lips of my tragically wet pussy. With increasing aggression, he throttled my pelvic region, finally sliding his uncovered penis inside me.

I placed my feet on his soft chest and, with all the force I could muster, kicked him backwards. He stumbled back a few steps before falling to the ground. “That is not okay,” I said, breaking with my script. “This cannot happen without a condom.” I spoke as if I was scolding a small child.

“This is not a joke. It’s my safety. There are condoms right there. If you would like to have sex with me, you need to wear one. I have absolutely no problem leaving.”

He looked at me, and then down at the floor, saying nothing. He looked back at me and kissed me. Pulling on the canvas restraints that held my ankles to my wrists, he flipped me over onto my stomach. I tumbled onto a heap of butt plugs that he had bought just for the occasion. Then I felt him on top of me. The long, yellowing nails of his hobbit fingers gripped my waistline, pulling me closer to his body, dragging my back into his sweating, hog-like body in hollow claps of slapping flesh. I felt something in my asshole. Maybe a finger or a butt plug. Something — I just wasn’t sure what.

Then I realized he was inside me. I realized he was anally raping me. I lay there looking at my nail polish, red like cherries in the spring on the white sheets. I stared beyond the ends of my long lashes and felt my nose crunch into the down pillow. I wondered if I was right — was he really inside me? Was this really happening? How could he be doing this when literally seconds prior, I had specified that under no circumstances was he to enter me without a condom?

I knew that if I wanted to, I could kick from behind. I knew I could get him on his back and even probably choke him if necessary. I had been taking kickboxing and self-defense classes and knew that the right calculated slither from beneath him could foil the violent desire of his pinky-sized, but all-powerful, penis. Completely clearheaded, I envisioned the exact movement of my limbs that would render him powerless. I knew I could push him off the bed, choke him, and throw a fairly decent punch.

But if I resisted, I mused, what would happen? If I was going to get him off me, it might mean injuring him. What would happen to me, a young girl working in an illegal trade, if I hurt this man? Scratches or marks were courtroom collateral that could be held against me. If I fought, I would be leaving without compensation. If I fought, he could retaliate and rape again, or worse. If I fought and ran into the streets, soaked by green beer, I could be followed by civilians seeking to save me from sex-trafficking, or worse, vigilante justice seekers looking to avenge my John for his injuries.

If I fought, I could be arrested. New York state laws explicitly exclude prostitution from rape protection laws. I didn’t think today was a day I would lose my life, and had I been at real risk of being murdered, I thought to myself, the situation and the risks incurred by my potential resistance would carry a far different weight.

I remembered the expressions on the faces of the doormen as I entered. Everyone knows what it means when a beautiful young girl in a trench coat and red lips walks into an upscale hotel room for exactly one hour and then leaves. I remembered the silence of the middle-aged tourists in the elevator, how they had looked at me, the ambient tension brought to the surface by a whore’s presence.

I had no choice but to summon my most convincing performance of clueless high-school girl and as I emitted the perfectly crafted moans of fake pleasure, I prayed to whatever god does or does not exist that my client would cum quickly and that all of this would soon be over. It was only a few seconds before I felt his hot cum inside me. After his final gurgle of exhausted ecstasy, he rolled over beside me. The liquid trailed the inside of my ass, and slowly drizzled down my perineum.

Without pause I hopped off the bed and flew as quickly and gracefully as possible into the bathroom to wash myself off. “Wow, that felt great,” he exhaled into the comforter. I wondered if he was aware that he had just raped me. “I love fucking girls in the ass. It’s almost the same as the other way; it’s just a little bit tighter. I don’t have the right size dick that’s ideal for ass fucking, but I sure do love it.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah that felt really good,” I half yelled from the marble bathroom. I looked at my naked body in the mirror. What the fuck was happening? I didn’t have time to think about it. I only had time to make sure I came out of this alive. “Sweetie, can you bring me a hot towel, while you’re at it?” he called.

“Sure thing!” I pushed away his moldy bag of toiletries and turned the hot water on. I took a deep breath, putting the fluffy hand towel under the lukewarm water.

“Here you go,” I said, sweeping off the remaining cum from his crotch with the white linen. I smiled because I felt like I had no choice. I giggled girlishly when he asked me to lie down and snuggle. I looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. We still had 40 minutes left of session. I sighed and laid my head on his heaving body because I felt like that was what I had to do. I didn’t have anything to say and I wasn’t in a position to make pleasantries. I waited for him to speak. He pinched my nipples and told me about his wife. I tried to keep breathing.

He went off about how he likes to take girls to Atlantic City for long weekends. He told me he liked playing with me, and he would write a review of my services; he would take me out to dinner. “That sounds nice,” I said, sweetly, smiling and batting my eyelashes as if it was possible to speak to god through the performance of beauty and perceived feminine purity.

I have never felt so powerless as I did within this moment. I cannot explain to you how it feels to have all of your human rights and physical and emotional strength eclipsed by the existence of bureaucratic structures, which quite literally do not recognize your personhood. At some level, I’m not upset that this happened. I’m not fazed by the fact that sex workers get raped, and that this time, I was one of them. I know this happens. At some level, I expected it to happen to me at some point. For me as a sex worker, the prospect of rape is a fairly mundane factor in the extremely dangerous and illicit work I do.

I enter every room ready to be killed. I meet new clients and I imagine what they can do to me and how I am going to escape. I look at everything they do. I watch their grip on glasses of wine and the way their eyes flicker from my body to the bed. I think about every word they send me in text messages and emails. I look at the speed of their wrists when they unsnap my suspenders or unzip the flies on their pants. I listen to the tone they use when they answer the door and when they suggest that we “get more comfortable.”

I reach for their dicks when they are halfway inside me to make sure that they haven’t slipped the condom off. I do this even with my regulars who I see on a weekly basis. I do this with clients who have told me their whole life stories, who I know everything about, clients who I actually enjoy seeing. I want to trust them, but the sad reality is that, due to the systems in place, I can’t afford to relax into the illusion of trust and safety.

Sex workers are soldiers. We never, ever get to turn off. If you don’t understand this, then you are fundamentally misunderstanding what makes sex work “work” rather than play. Period.

I most certainly don’t show up to work thinking that I’m about to have a great time. I’m providing a service at my own risk. No one even has to say that to me for me to know it’s true that women get raped every second of every day, and that even those who aren’t sex workers have trouble achieving justice. From day one, women are told that there are good girls and bad girls, and bad girls have it coming to them. The parameters of our existence as femme-identified people and women are strictly policed with ambient threats of persistent violence

Though I am emotionally equipped for the plausibility and total likelihood that I will be raped or even murdered at work, there is no amount of conviction, physical strength, or intuitive savvy that can protect me as a person who leads a criminalized existence.

Because I am a sex worker, even though I am a fairly privileged sex worker, I do not have the basic rights that all human beings should. Yes, assault is assault and rape is rape, and the stakes are high for every single person who encounters abuse and assault. We can acknowledge that all women experience these things, but it’s simply not true that sex workers have the same experience with sexual violence that other women do.

The part of me that walks away from this rape scenario knowing that it was a matter of time is, yes, deeply fucked up. My stone-faced blasé-ness in the face of this violence is an internalized victim blaming. But more than that, it’s the result of systemic injustice that is applied to all victims of sexual violence, and especially to violence against sex workers.

I know too many women who have been hurt. There’s a serial killer who targets sex workers in Long Island, there’s a serial rapist who calls girls to his house in New Jersey to then rape them. I’ve heard stories of police actually laughing in the face of workers who report violence on the job. I’ve been to vigils full of crying women and trans people and LGBTQ providers, many of whom are acquaintances or friends of mine. This happens, and it happens fairly frequently. I see the stories in my email inbox, hear about it from my loved ones; I see it on the news. I know that it happens, but more importantly I know that, in the majority of cases, no one gives a fuck.

Why? Because we’re whores. Because everybody knows we had it coming. Because we could have chosen a less dangerous profession like a retail job or a waitress position in lieu of sex work. Because a whore is a woman who has plummeted from her celestial virgin state to the rock bottom, to the sewers of despicable human existence. A whore’s life is meaningless. She and the pain she carries are irrelevant, save for the moment when her soft lips cradle your hardening dick. These ideas are hundreds and hundreds of years old, and they need to change.

Serial rapists and murderers often target sex workers, with full knowledge that those workers are the most vulnerable due to their lack of protection under the law, before moving on to target other women. It’s almost impossible to get real statistics on the subject of sexual violence against workers due to the criminal nature of our work, but estimates say that those in the sex trade have a 45% to 75% chance of experiencing sexual violence on the job. There are numerous examples of murderers and rapists who target sex workers — but what’s troubling is that, more often than not, we don’t take this violence seriously when it is recounted by those who experience it first hand. What’s troubling is that we know this information and have known it for quite some time, yet the powers at large begrudgingly refuse to acknowledge that it is necessary for serious change to occur.

I don’t feel like I can afford to be silent. As a person with privilege, I worry about the hundreds and thousands of sex workers who will be murdered and raped in the remainder of 2016, and I know that we are very, very far from achieving justice — even if decriminalization happens, that does not compensate for the fact that I will be living with this for a long time.

I will be thinking about all the women I don’t know who will be meeting with this man. I will be wondering about all the other women he says he has met with and wondering if they were also raped. I will be wondering if he has killed anyone before. Even as I write this I wonder what the consequences are of speaking out — what happens when my mother googles my name and finds this? What happens if my rapist finds this? What happens if the police see this? What happens when I want to apply for some normal ass job and this article pops up? What happens when x y z?

I don’t have any answers or brilliant ideas. I can’t sit here and allow myself to get tangled in a web of criminal paranoia while other, less privileged members of my community get abused, threatened, killed, raped, and jailed. What I can do, however, is seek healing in telling you my story, and hope that within it, you see some refraction of humanity’s struggles and joys that are worth fighting for. I can hope that you will understand that I am a person whose pain is real, and that there are millions of others just like me, and that this will encourage you to re-examine your ideas about sex work and join us in the fight for our rights.

Pleasure has always been policed, in some way or another, in cultures across the world. That’s because pleasure is, in a way, a source of resistance.

In her book Vagina, Naomi Wolf argues that women have a special relationship with pleasure in that, when we have the right kind of it, we are feisty, powerful, and strong, and when we don’t, we can lose our will to stand up for ourselves. The way our pelvic nerves translate pleasure from our sexual experiences to our brains boosts the hormones that make us strong and connected and dampen our vulnerability to depression and lethargy.

Wolf argues that dopamine in particular is “the ultimate feminist chemical. If a woman has optimal levels of dopamine, she is difficult to direct against herself. She is hard to drive to self-destruction, to manipulate and control.” On the other hand, when dopamine is too low, which is a known effect of sexual violence, women tend to get depressed, stop fighting back, and become easier to subjugate.

Wolf argues, then, that there is a physiological reason why women have been suppressed for so many generations: the powers that be knew, probably from experience, that if you damage the vagina, essentially, you damage the brain. Mess with our dopamine flow and we’ll stop fighting back. Rape has always gone along with pillaging not (only) because colonizers are assholes, but because when you can quickly and easily shut down half the population, you cut your colonizing hours in half. They didn’t need a scientific study to prove what they could see with their own eyes: rape a woman and she’ll stop resisting.

There’s good news here, too, though, from Wolf’s perspective. The unique vagina-brain connection might also make people with vaginas more powerful. Wolf writes:

I don’t like any kind of feminism that sets one gender above another, so I do not mean this in any way as a value judgment. Neither gender is “better.” But one gender is theoretically able to get more of a certain kind of dopamine and opioid/endorphin activation during sex, which has a very specific effect on the brain and even the personality. We cannot escape what this math implies for female sexuality, in its unmediated, un-messed-up state: nature constructed a profound difference between the sexes, which places women in, potentially, a position of greater biochemical empowerment.

Great sex, Wolf explains, boosts women’s dopamine, endorphins, opioids, and testosterone. It makes us more willing to take creative risks, to give fewer fucks about what other people think of us. It makes us want to take over the world. And have more sex.

Wolf goes on, “So the fear that patriarchy always had—that if you let women have sex and know how to like it, it will make them both increasingly libidinous and increasingly ungovernable—is actually biologically true!” From this perspective, it makes sense that suppressing and policing female sexuality has always been an aspect of patriarchal society. Knowing our sexual bodies and being unafraid to use them might have made us so full of spunk and fire that our subjugation wouldn’t have been possible.

The patriarchal fear of female pleasure was perhaps most salient during the centuries of witch-hunting when mostly women were tortured (often sexually) and killed in brutal ways. The first trials started in the 14th century and hit a fever pitch in the 16th and 17th centuries. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English put the killings in perspective when they write in their book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses:

One writer has estimated the number of executions on an average of 600 a year for certain German cities—or two a day, ‘leaving out Sundays.’ Nine hundred witches were destroyed in a single year in the Wertzberg area, and 1000 were put to death in a day. In the Bishopric of Trier, in 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each.

Men were sometimes accused of witchcraft too, but the authors point out that “women made up some 85 percent of those executed.” It’s always been so interesting to me that when we hear the phrase “witch hunt” in our cultural lexicon, it’s usually coming from a white man feeling persecuted after he got caught abusing his power. Why don’t we talk more about the witch hunt era as what it was: a large scale, wide-reaching historical campaign of terror against women?

There’s no evidence witchcraft as a specific religion ever really existed, though as a young teen who would light candles and try to cast spells while blasting the angsty strains of Alanis Morissette, I still can’t help but yearn for a ritualistic practice that literally gave women power. Magic wasn’t really what was being hunted, though: it was any form of power that could belong to a woman, especially if it related to her reproductive abilities.

Before the witch hunts, women were bakers, ale-makers, schoolteachers, doctors, and surgeons. Gynecology was a mostly female profession, with c-sections being performed almost exclusively by women in the 14th century, until male-only universities started popping up to certify men and push the midwives and lay healers out of a job.

The lay healers were mostly women who would provide counsel and a few herbs while, by the 1800s, men were getting certified to perform superstitious rituals like bloodletting and treating leprosy with “a broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land among stones.” As Ehrenreich and English point out, a patient would be likelier to die by the hands of a certified male doctor’s bravura than with the “undoubtedly safer” gentle attentions of a female lay healer.

Women were especially targeted if they had any medical knowledge about reproduction or contraception. In her book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts were a necessary strategy to transition from feudalism into the capitalist era. Women’s bodies were needed to create more laborers for the new economy, so reproduction had to be carefully monitored.

“The criminalization of women’s control over procreation is a phenomenon whose importance cannot be overemphasized,” Federici writes, “both from the viewpoint of its effects on women and its consequences for the capitalist organization of work.”

If Wolf’s argument that targeting women sexually is an age-old strategy of war, the witch hunts make no exception. “In community after community,” Wolf writes, “the women identified by inquisitors or by their fellow villagers as ‘witches’ were often those who were seen as too sexual, or too free. And forms of torture were focused on their sexuality,” such as with devices placed in the vagina or with vaginal mutilation.

When women were shamed for their sexuality and even tortured at their genital source, the theory goes, they would indeed be willing to step back and relinquish their rights. It is interesting, however, that this subjugation and control of women in the service of capitalism took almost 400 years. We obviously haven’t been that easy to subjugate.  

Echoes of this sexual suppression and torture continue on today in communities where girl’s clitorises are cut out or burned, ostensibly for religious reasons. Clitoridectomies are hardly an invention of some other land, however, lest we think we Westerners are somehow more civilized. In 1858, the English doctor Isaac Baker Brown introduced the practice that, Wolf explains, made him “famous and sought after for his ‘cure,’ which took argumentative, fiery girls, and, after he had excised their clitorises, returned them to their families in a state of docility, meekness, and obedience.” Even Western doctors, it seems, understood that damaging a girl’s clitoris would somehow amputate her will to rebel.

Then, of course, there’s our old buddy Sigmund Freud. The (in)famous founder of psychoanalysis has a hidden story that is, in my reading, about his betrayal of womankind. In the last decades of the 19th century, Freud and his contemporaries were greatly interested in hysteria—which was, basically, a catch-all term for women’s psychological problems vaguely associated with the uterus (hystera in Greek).

In his earnest attempt to understand this common affliction, Freud sat down with women and listened to them. Jean-Martin Charcot and Joseph Breuer, Freud’s contemporaries, were similarly focused on the problem. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman points out that “For a brief decade men of science listened to women with a devotion and a respect unparalleled before or since.

All this listening bore fruit for Freud, at least at first. He discovered that women suffering from hysteria pretty much always had a history of childhood sexual abuse. Freud wrote a triumphant paper called The Aetiology of Hysteria clearly explaining the root of the problem. Instead of being lauded for his discovery, however, he was met with the academic version of an uncomfortable silence. “Hysteria was so common among women,” Herman explains,

that if his patient’s stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice.

That meant that sexual abuse was a systemic issue, a problem of violence against girl children that defied class. Freud’s society was not ready to consider such an earth-shattering possibility, so his theory was rejected. In order to maintain his prestigious position in society, he recanted. Herman goes on,

By the first decade of the twentieth century, without ever offering any clinical documentation of false complaints, Freud had concluded that his hysterical patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse were untrue: ‘I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction has never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.’

Betrayal! Freud’s psychoanalysis went on to create a theory of neurosis that did not match women’s actual experience of reality. He insisted that women lie often and that their fantasies were the source of their problems. He came up with the concept of penis envy, that old canard that little girls hate their mothers forever for not giving them a penis. Not to mention his insulting (and evidence-free) idea that women who can’t achieve orgasms from penetration alone are somehow immature, a concept that caused sexual insecurity and an epidemic of sexually frustrated women that still persists to this day.

Women have inherited quite a history of sexual shame, terror, and torture from our ancestral grandmothers, even if we have no history of it in our own lives. It’s no wonder feeling sexual pleasure is so fraught in our time—not only have we not always felt the right to experience pleasure in the ways that work for us (thanks Freud!), but we have echoes of intergenerational trauma from a history of being tortured, murdered, and violated, at worst, and silenced, at best.

For these reasons and more, feeling pleasure isn’t just a little thing we should try to make more time for in our busy lives because it’s fun. It’s a radical act of resistance against a history of suppression and pain. Taking pleasure, whether by enjoying great sex, going dancing, eating good food, or simply having a hot cup of tea on a cool day, is an act of self-determination and choice. Our pleasure is a tool of resistance against our own oppression and suppression. Our pleasure matters.

On January 10th, 2019 at 5:59pm, I received a text from home: “Where are you?”

“Just got on the bus.”

The moment I hit send, I felt karma lurking around the corner. I always believed that lying was an unforgivable sin. But, had my mother known I was with a boy in an empty parking lot, she would denounce me.

Adjusting the driver’s seat for the fifth time, Kevin asked, “So, were you serious about the whole kiss thing?”

Three nights ago, I’d texted Kevin that I wanted to kiss him—a meaningless kiss. We were close friends who had previously discussed our lack of feelings for each other, his failed relationships, and my childlike innocence. He responded with “lol,” unable to fathom that I, having never seen or done anything remotely sexual in my life, would’ve wanted a meaningless first kiss.

Had my mother known I was with a boy in an empty parking lot, she would denounce me.
Click To Tweet

The trigger of my courageous inquiry was when talk about sex entered my Hindu-Canadian household for the first time, several months previously. In September 2018, India lifted the ban on homosexual acts, liberating many to legally explore their sexuality. Rainbow flags danced across our TV screen and Indians celebrated in the streets with loud music and faces full of happy tears. My mom came out of the kitchen at the sound of excitement.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Other people can do what they want. It doesn’t affect us,” she replied, concluding the conversation.

I couldn’t argue with that. My family was convinced that somehow, someday I would confidently marry some Indian man and create a happy little Indian-Canadian family of my own. But this idea began to scare me. How would I know what satisfied me if I’d never experienced anything at all?

Needing to know the full story, I sat alone in my room, going through the news on the gay-sex legislation in India.

“What happens after decriminalization? What happens after marriage? How do we shift to culture, to acceptance as opposed to tolerance?” said Helen Kennedy, the executive director of Egale Canada in a CTV interview.

Acceptance isn’t possible if we’re constantly worrying about saving face—the concept of upholding a clean reputation by avoiding humiliation. To keep their children away from “unacceptable” sexual exploration, Indian parents change the channel on onscreen romance, take control of their children’s dating life regardless of age, and establish strict rules on going out with friends.

A phone conversation with a friend led to the topic of family and relationships.

“There is so much mistrust even when I wanted to go out to dinner with my girl friends. Didn’t hear the end of it for days,” said Hruti, whispering through the phone. “Sometimes it’s hard to leave the room, you know?”

How would I know what satisfied me if I’d never experienced anything at all?
Click To Tweet

I recalled a few times where my mother suspected I had a boyfriend. She’d nearly cry, take my hand upon her head, and make me swear that I wasn’t seeing anyone. Hindus believe that lying under oath is deadly. When I’d confidently sworn to her that I was single, she’d sit in silence, waiting for some impending doom.

“So, how do you manage your friends-with-benefit situation?” I asked her.

“Well, during university I lived on campus, so it wasn’t a problem. Now I just make time after work. Luckily, I have my own car.”

She said lying was easy for her and recalled someone who’d said, “those with strict parents become the best liars.”

“But how do you deal with the guilt and the anxiety that comes with lying?” I asked, wondering if I was the only one who felt it.

“As long as I don’t get caught, I don’t care. It’s the only way to experience life.”

This was hard for me to digest. As a Hindu, we create our own set of beliefs, abiding to a core framework called “dharma” which in the simplest terms means to do the right thing. Personally, doing the “right thing” meant abiding by the values I learned growing up: respect, honesty, and having a positive mindset. This meant focusing on school and saving face, which in my case included not being seen with the opposite sex in public unless you were planning to marry them. “Don’t engage with boys and focus on school” was a famous motto in most Indian households—and my mom’s favorite saying.

After conversing with Hruti, I began to wonder how much a rule was able to stretch before it was considered broken. If I remained a virgin and didn’t date until I was permitted to, I believed that kissing in private couldn’t ruin my family’s reputation.

When I was with Kevin in the car that evening, I felt that was my one and only chance. With an untainted internet search history, a body less explored than the Mariana Trench, and a mind full of dramatic Bollywood dance sequences, I knew I had to start somewhere.

“Yes, I was serious about the kiss,” I said.

“So, do you want to?” he asked, shifting his eyes nervously.

“Sure.” I shrugged. After a few awkward seconds of listening to a Tim Horton’s ad play on the radio, I continued, “You’re going to have to start. I don’t know what to do.”

“Argh, I know. Don’t look away.”

We leaned in toward each other until our lips met. Then we made out for 40 minutes. Contrary to the romanticized descriptions of kisses in novels—of soft lips, gentle tongue, and an all around feel of magic and fireworks—his lips, tongue, and teeth only felt like lips, tongue, and teeth.

I began to wonder how much a rule was able to stretch before it was considered broken.
Click To Tweet

My focus shifted from one sense to another. The glowing orange streetlight above. The cars passing by in the distance. The stick-shift forming a bruise on my left knee. Ed Sheeran’s voice ringing clear through the radio, “When your legs don’t work like they used to before...” The roughness of Kevin’s beard under my fingers. I kept imagining what would happen if the police caught us. Were we even allowed to be in the empty parking lot?

Eventually, we stopped. As I rolled back onto the passenger’s seat, I heard a crunching sound under my waist. I’d completely forgot that I’d taken off my glasses during the kiss. Though my frame broke in a way that my glasses still functioned, karma still managed to take $300 for the experience.

We didn’t talk about the kiss as he dropped me off a block away from my house. I wished him a good night and exited the car. The air was cold, and my lips were dry. I rubbed my face to even out my ruined makeup. I didn’t feel excitement, or regret, or disgust, or guilt, or contentment. My body and soul felt empty. I was on autopilot until I got into bed and dropped into sleep.

I kept quiet about my glasses for the night, planning to tell my parents I fell asleep with them on in the morning. I remembered Hruti saying it was easy for children of strict parents to lie, like a survival instinct. It would hurt even more if I found out I was lying to myself—that I knew exactly what I was and what I wanted.

What if it was because we didn’t love each other? But I found him exceptionally attractive. That should’ve been enough. Should I try kissing a girl? There were countless boys I pined over since I was four. Maybe I’ve been mistaking my feelings for good-looking girls as a form of appreciation rather than attraction. A group of guys in sixth grade called me a lesbian while snickering. But what if they had figured out something that I didn’t even know about myself?

I didn’t feel excitement, or regret, or disgust, or guilt, or contentment.
Click To Tweet

I imagined all those Indians dancing on the streets, rainbows painted on their faces, knowing exactly who they were and what they fought for. Their fear of being disowned, of receiving death threats, and lying had a purpose. I wanted to know what it meant to feel contentment, disgust—anything besides empty. We Hindus are so caught up in the suppression of sexual discourse that finding where I belong would mean more lies, more sins.

Maybe this whole evening was karma’s well-written joke and nothingness was the ultimate punchline.

When I was 17, I developed an obsession with the actor Chris Evans — or, more accurately, with looking at him. I joined a Facebook group called Chris Evans Is Hot Shit just to let people know I was a subject who looked, not just an object men looked at. I felt power in this looking.

As I got older, requesting NSFW photos from partners became a rebellion of sorts. I knew this was considered too raunchy, too voyeuristic, too aggressive, too active to be “ladylike…and that’s what made it empowering to me. As a woman, I was constantly expected to provide visual pleasure, so it was only fair that I received it, too. But it wasn’t just a feminist statement; it genuinely turned me on.

Yet later, I started to get shamed for this, both overtly by people who didn’t share my taste and indirectly through all the public discourse surrounding NSFW photos, particularly dick pics. Rather than call out the fact that they’re often sent without consent, which is indeed worth calling out, critics claimed they were misguided because women aren’t visual and/or nobody enjoys looking at men. (Important note before I continue: Not all men’s bodies have penises, and not all bodies with penises belong to men. I’m writing about cis men because they’re typically the ones called out for sending dick pics, typically to cis women. But all sorts of people can enjoy them — or, as is frequently the case when they’re sent without consent, not enjoy them.)

As a woman, I was constantly expected to provide visual pleasure, so it was only fair that I received it, too.
Click To Tweet

“In terms of sexy, it’s just a rung below a picture of yourself committing domestic terrorism,” Ryan Reynolds declared of dick-pic-sharing in 2015. That same year, a viral video titled “Women React to Dick Pics” showed women responding to penis photos with comments like “hopefully he has a good personality.” Mic asserted that “the assumption that a penis photo is sexy reflects men’s total misunderstanding of women’s turn-ons,” and anthropologist Helen Fisher told The New York Observer, “A man wants to see a woman’s body and a woman may want to see a man in the picture with … a Rolex watch or a business suit or a pair of cool jeans.”

These responses suggested that women weren’t, in fact, visual subjects — that they were better suited to be objects. That women are designed to be looked at, while men are designed to look — or, more broadly, to do. Elaine summed up this attitude on Seinfeld: “the female body is a… work of art. The male body is utilitarian, it’s for gettin’ around, like a jeep.”

But many women do, in fact, enjoy looking — and, often, at men. Magic Mike, a movie centered on male strippers, raked in $170 million worldwide, and 82% of the audience was female. “Gay male” was also the second-most-viewed category among female Pornhub users in 2015. Research has shown that straight women experience vaginal lubrication in response to clips of gay men having sex (among other things), and even straight men’s eyes dilate in response to photos of men masturbating.

And, believe it or not, many women actively request dick pics. “I’m a very visual person,” says one 27-year-old preschool teacher in Boston, who asked to remain anonymous. “It is usually the videos that turn me on the most, but I do appreciate a sequence of photos. Like if he sends me one before he’s turned on and then sends me some of him touching himself until he’s turned on. I also enjoy a tasteful shot of a guy’s boner through his pants.”

Quinn Rhodes, a 22-year-old student and sex blogger in London, similarly enjoys “receiving [nude] shots from my partners, plus photos of their penises, new sex toys, photos of partners (of any gender) in lingerie, or of marks left on them from spankings/kink scenes, or when they’re tied up in beautiful rope bondage.”

Believe it or not, many women actively request dick pics.
Click To Tweet

“When I am attracted to someone, of course I want to see more of him,” says Taylor, a 31-year-old in LA. “If my partner and I are talking and I ask to see it, it’s very exciting.” She adds, “There is a dominant narrative that women are not as visual as men when it comes to sex, and it ends up erasing many other women’s experiences, or we end up feeling like our desires and fantasies are ‘unhealthy’ because they fall outside of the social norm. But plenty of us watch porn and sext with our partners, and we enjoy it because it’s visual.”

“There’s a lot of empowerment in having someone expose themself to you,” agrees CJ Stanford, a 26-year-old college student in Jacksonville, Florida. “I don’t just perform for his pleasure; he performs for mine.”

Why are perspectives like these so often buried? “A common sexual script is that men are more visual,” explains Kathryn Stamoulis, PhD, licensed mental health counselor and adjunct psychology professor at Hunter College. “This myth can be so ingrained that people don’t think to experiment with sexual activities like seeking dick pics because they don’t even consider it. Another sexual script is that men desire while women are to be desired. However, it could be potentially a win-win in straight couples for the man to feel like he is being desired in the request of nudes.”

Not all women are attracted to men, obviously, but the societal reluctance to depict men as sexual objects is connected to the denial of female desire. Most porn, movies, TV, and art highlight the perspective of a stereotypical straight man: cameras zooming in on women’s faces and chests; disproportionate female nudity; women almost exclusively touting hourglass figures and symmetrical features. That’s not necessarily what all straight men like to see, but it’s what they’re taught to approve of. Anything else is deemed unnatural.

Most porn, movies, TV, and art highlight the perspective of a stereotypical straight man.
Click To Tweet

If heterosexual men are indeed “more visual,” it’s probably because they’ve been bombarded with sexualized images of women their whole lives, explains Lisa Wade, PhD, associate professor of sociology at Occidental College. Similarly, if people view women as more aesthetically pleasing, it’s probably because we’ve all been surrounded by these same idealized images.

“We’ve made women into ornaments,” Wade explains. “We will put a naked woman in art, and she serves the same purpose as a flower or a design. We have come to see women as ornamental in a way we don’t think of men.”

That could also be why same-sex attraction is often more accepted when those involved are cis women. They’re directing their desire toward the objects society has taught us are natural. Not to mention, lesbians are easier to fetishize for the male gaze than gay men.

The reluctance to depict men as sexual objects may also be connected to a fear of male vulnerability. “Our cultural frame for sexual activity is not a cooperative one; it is more of a predator-prey-type frame,” Wade explains. “If we have this competitive frame of sexuality, you are either the one doing the fucking or the one getting fucked. You’re either the object of the gaze or you’re the gazer. It’s considered disempowering to be the object of the gaze, so I think that’s why men may be uncomfortable in positions where they feel like objects. And we have this idea of women interested in sex as being scary, voracious, hungry in a way that’s dangerous.”

The reluctance to depict men as sexual objects may be connected to a fear of male vulnerability.
Click To Tweet

The dynamic of a voracious woman ogling at a man challenges not only the male gaze but also the conception of the male body as inherently aggressive, threatening, and domineering. Penises are sometimes compared to dangerous things like swords or snakes, as if the sight of one is supposed to hint at sexual violence. Treating a penis as something pretty feminizes it, stripping it of this imagined power.

I’m not advocating that we reverse the situation and objectify men. But someone can be an object of desire without being objectified. To objectify someone means to depict them as only sexual objects. Enjoying looking at someone doesn’t do that. What does objectify someone is failing to acknowledge that they themselves look, too — which is what we do to women.

Another crucial difference between an objectifying gaze and a merely desirous one is consent. In fact, what makes dick pics so aversive for many women is that they’ve received so many unsolicited ones. “Dick pics may have gotten a bad reputation because senders were not asking for consent and using them for shock value,” says Stamoulis. But by actively seeking them out to gratify their own desire, women can transform this dynamic, she adds. “If women decide they actually want to see them, from people they are attracted to and from people whom they ask, it could transform the sexual script that men just look and women are just looked at.”

Someone can be an object of desire without being objectified.
Click To Tweet

For Hannah Schwartz, a 32-year-old in California, the act of requesting dick pics is part of their appeal. “I want him to know I want it, and then I want him to acquiesce,” she says. “There can be vulnerability in that, and of course there’s power in it as well, which is part of the turn-on.”

“I am used to being the object of the gaze, so it’s pretty powerful to step outside of that and do some gazing of my own,” agrees Taylor. “Even though women are socialized to be passive recipients rather than active participants in our own sex lives, I am not about to surrender all of my power like that. I have desires, too, and I know what it takes to satiate them. To hell with norms.”

Happy March. The rain has been steady and insistent—rivers overflowing, streets flooding, both of our dogs look permanently like waterlogged Paddington Bears in their yellow slickers.

Still, last week while walking to Alley Cat, there were two solid hours of sun, which is exactly what you want in the Mission, which is colorful and steams with a heat that isn’t ever a reality for San Francisco: for this part of the city to be somehow hotter than the rest of it. An open-faced sky.

The two hours of sun, plus the two bulbs finally emerging from my tulip bed, are offering a bit of respite: March will be easier, if only because it signifies the end of Winter, which has felt particularly long and sad this year.

When the rainy season hits, I find myself dreaming of the high desert. Tuscon, my grandmother’s old, flat ranch house with the baskets large enough to hold my child body, cold terra cotta tiles that matched the shapely ones curving like fault lines on the roof. Cacti with their arms in the air, holding atop their heads screech owl nests and bats and colorless flowers.

Instead, because it’s clearly a year to stay close to home, I find myself going on weekend trips to places I loved as a child, places that signaled to me, when we moved from Southern California to Northern in the late-nineties, that we’d found abundance in the form of rocky shorelines and tide pools.

My mom, sister, and I took my niece and nephew to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium at the beginning of February, a belated Christmas present. We rented a little house in Seaside, and cooked, and played endless games of Uno, and gave each other nicknames, and spent one rainy day combing the streets of Cannery Row, eating salt water taffy and looking at the leggy jellyfish and seizing any moment when the sun disentangled itself from the clouds.

My favorite exhibit has always been the giant female octopus, even if she has crammed herself into invisibility in spaces the size of a bell jar.

Octopodes are extraordinarily smart, though that isn’t exactly why I admire them. I love them because they are seemingly equal parts fierce and vulnerable.

An octopus can make her skin raised or bumpy, change color, turn to spikes, or do anything necessary in order to match the landscape around her, by controlling the projections on her papillae. While this is a feature of both male and female octopodes, it is usually the female who deploys this skill, turning to a one-woman battalion if her young are threatened.

They have three hearts. Their blood is blue. Octopuses are boneless, which is how they can wedge themselves into jars, behind tight coral or curl around objects or plants in the sea.

Octopus mating rituals are nothing special. Many marine biologists have remarked that they look like “they’re just going about their business.” No pomp. The male octopus has a mating arm, which he extends and inserts into a cavity on the female octopus, keeping his distance lest she try to ensnare and strangle him.

“The males have a host of tricks to survive the mating process,” says Katherine Harmon Courage of BBC Earth. “Some of them can quite literally mate at arm’s length. Others sneak into a female’s den disguised as another gal, or sacrifice their entire mating arm to the female and then make a hasty retreat.” 

Female octopodes are larger and hungrier than their male counterparts. It’s every bit as likely that they’ll mate with a male as strangle and eat him. Conversely, the females die shortly after laying their many eggs, dissolving their own bodies to feed their young. Joan Halifax uses this as an example of pathological altruism in her book “Standing on the Edge”.

As I stood at the edge of her tank at the aquarium, which was covered with small, white, rectangular signs that featured a picture of a camera with an X drawn through it and words reading “DO NOT FLASH THE OCTOPUS”, I watched men of all sizes and shapes shine their iPhones directly in her one visible eye. I thought about the lines from the Mary Szybist poem:

The Lushness of It 

It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you—
not that it wouldn’t reach for you 
with each of its tapering arms:

you’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus.  But the creatures of the sea,
like the sea, don’t think

about themselves, or you.  Keep on floating there,
cradled, unable to burn.  Abandon 
yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon

your heavy legs to the floating meadows 
            of seaweed and feel 
                        the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea-
spray, barnacles.  In the dark benthic realm, the slippery neckton glide over
the abyssal plains: as you float, feel 
                                    that upwelling of cold, deep water touch
the skin stretched over
                          your spine.  Feel 
fished for and slapped.  No, it’s not that the octopus 
wouldn’t love you.  If it touched,

if it tasted you, each of its three 
hearts would turn red.

Will theologians of any confession refute me?
Not the bluecap salmon.  Not its dotted head.

The fourth time the flash flashed—when the octopus didn’t reach through the glass and strangle and eat the man next to me—I put my body between him and her. “You’re done here,” I said firmly. He looked at me with surprise, his own pupils large in the low light. I could see myself shining in his own pupils, arms crossed, a good foot shorter. Something moved in the blackness there, and I felt it as surely as a heart turning red: this is a man who has hit women. He looked at the people gathered around us, the children with their faces flat to the thick glass, and he walked wordlessly away.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because she is like the very best people I love: shape-shifting according to circumstance, principled in her priorities, and completely no-bullshit. When she needs to, she exercises extraordinary boundaries. At the same time, she knows when it’s time to acknowledge a great cause—in her case, the need to keep alive an entire next generation of youth.

The no-bullshit of animals means there’s no performance of self, no need to deconstruct the way a self is socialized. Maybe animals are a living manifestation of honesty.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because I have reached a level of self-awareness that includes knowing what I struggle to become.

When I was young, my adopted dad used to take the door off my room when I was in trouble, which always felt like the worst punishment imaginable. He read our emails, our diaries, listened in on our phone calls—he asked his friends around town to keep an eye on me and my sisters. When I had my first kiss in the almond orchard by my middle school, he knew about it before I even registered what had happened. Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.

Context: my adoptive dad was abusive. I got in trouble for everything from legitimate fuck-ups of youth (skipping class) to things that just bothered him (burning incense). As a manipulative, MENSA-level genius with a history of Vietnam-era warfare, my adoptive dad know exactly the kind of violation taking a door off the hinges was for a teenage girl.

Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.
Click To Tweet

To circle back around–maybe the female octopus isn’t the best example of boundaries. However, she’s a really great example of understanding where her boundaries are. Anger, for example, is a useful tool because it shows us where our boundaries are, and thus, how they’ve been violated. And while we can’t be 100% certain that the female octopus is angry when she strangles and eats her mate (she might just be hungry, and that’s okay), she has a robust understanding of how to get where she needs to be in the world. She doesn’t care about whether or not her behavior is socially acceptable.

This is the moment where I meet and try to channel the octopus—there seems to be a lesson in this for me/us: the realization that boundaries are necessary for cultivating and protecting the work you’ve done on yourself. That psychic, emotional, physical, intellectual, romantic, platonic energy are expendable resources that all work together in an ecosystemic way.

We are taught, especially people socialized as female, that:

• we have no right to boundaries
• putting up boundaries means sacrificing love and care
• putting up boundaries means people will leave rather than invest the time to respect them
• putting up boundaries is cold-hearted, or less vulnerable than not
• putting up boundaries means you are inflexible, unavailable to change

Furthermore, that forgiveness is not only a) mandatory, but b) must look like inviting someone back into your space and life, and lastly, c) the work of the person most harmed in the situation to do and do alone.

On boundaries, the magnificent Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says:

“What steals energy that you do not fully grant, is a thief in the house of the psyche. Whether it be a person, a place, a memory, a conversation, a meeting, or you yourself being the leaking seal around the chamber wherein the treasure is kept.

Think on these things if you lose energy easily, and make the adjustments to what you can and cannot engage with, accordingly, as you can, as is within your will and within your power.

We all have an energy range, as does a light bulb. Put too little or too much or too sustainedly or not sustainedly enough energy through the vehicle, and the light will not be the brightest as it has been constructed for/to/with/about/regarding.”

In her podcast ‘Tarot for the Wild Soul’, Lindsay Mack says this of boundaries: “The management of the fences around the property of yourself are necessary to make sure your crops and cultivated self is taken care of.”

What a concept to realize that setting boundaries is something that usually happens because you love the people involved. My friend Joey Gould insists, “’No’ is a love word.”

Here’s the not-so-secret thing about introspection in winter: the season is, itself, remarkably boundaried. You have less energy, sleep more, are more accountable to the animal of yourself because the borders of your landscape (the weather, the city, the clothes, the darker days) are starkly clear. And perhaps tulips, and sun, both respectively breaking from their bulbs and the clouds, teach us that we must hold on to the borders of ourselves even as the world around us becomes less obviously boundaried.

The lessons we learn from the female octopus may not be one of taking her boundaries as our own, but rather, understanding what our own boundaries are. What’s more: how to be both fiercely protective and generously tender at the same time.

I have always liked economics. I’ve always been drawn to the way in which its concepts could be applied anywhere. Economics as a social science “aims to describe the factors that determine the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” In practice, however, its theories can and have been applied throughout each sector of society.

Even in our everyday lives, we make choices based on laws of behavior that most of us are probably unaware of. Everything is governed by economic theory in one way or the other.

The law of diminishing marginal utility states that, with all things held constant, as a person consumes more of a product, there is a decline in the additional satisfaction a person derives from consuming one additional unit of production (or marginal utility). Continual consumption will at some point result in negative incremental satisfaction. The most typical example used to demonstrate this law is the concept of an all-you-can-eat buffet, wherein the more plates you eat, the less satisfied you become by the meal, until you eventually make yourself sick.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of marginal utility lately in regards to sex. And love.

INITIAL CONSUMPTION: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
Marginal Satisfaction: 8
TOTAL SATISFACTION: 8

Looking back, there is a good chance I romanticize the night that started things off. There was a party, mostly a group of us sitting around playing cards, drinking whatever we had brought, and a lot of smoking. There was some baked weed concoction passing around. We laid in bed and traded some drunken small talk, cuddling led to kisses, and kisses led to sex. And that was it.

The next time I saw him, we went for drinks and fucked in the backseat of his car on the way home. We talked about making the sex exclusive that night. As is the way of commitment phobic 22 year-olds, we assured each other that we would not catch feelings. Things fizzled two months later when his presumed ex (to be fair, my presumption) visited and we agreed it was best he not see me for a while.

I must have cried a lot in this period. Or was just righteously mad. I can’t remember which it was, or the combination that carried me over months of loneliness. Other things that happened in this period: buying my first car on my own; being steadily belittled at the most meaningless of jobs; drinking, a lot; falling into a hole of depression and anxiety I hadn’t realized I had started digging.

When he did reach out I was sure that it was him (or something like him) that I needed to make things better.

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION: DATING

Marginal Satisfaction: 10

Total Satisfaction:18

There were apologies and notes of me deserving more and him wanting to be more. There were his promises of trying to give all that I wanted, but slowly. And my promises of not wanting much. There were dates, and sex in beds, and introductions to friends. Slowly I started feeling important or at least wanting to feel important. I broke my promise first and asked for too much too soon. We decided it was best we stay friends.

I learnt about the benefits of break up sex that afternoon.

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION: OFF AND ON FWB

Marginal Satisfaction: 6
Total Satisfaction: 24

I had previously spent a long portion of my life lying to the people around me, and most of all, myself. Sometimes, it’s easy to slip back into the lying — like slipping on that old, worn hoodie that’s seen better days — lying that had become second nature at one point will always feel like a second skin. The best and worst parts of getting closer to people is them recognizing the lies you tell before you recognize them in yourself.

At this point in my life I was struggling with the lie I wanted desperately to believe: that I was not in love, and that I was okay with the casual nature of our relationship. We went back and forth between sleeping together and being friends, or close approximations of these.

Utility is completely subjective. In logic-driven fields of study like economics, the subjective nature of satisfaction never made much sense to me. Utility can only increase for an individual if that person considers his state of affairs improved. That said, utility is pretty difficult to measure as well. In fact, outside of theoretical discussion, utility cannot be measured among different people; it can only be said to be higher or lower from the viewpoint of an individual.

There was a moment a couple days ago: I looked in the mirror at work, adjusted my glasses and realized I didn’t quite recognize the person looking back at me. I knew it was me, but something about me looked older, more mature, a little hardened. My cheeks were slimmer, but not the slimness of my teenage years when the milk was still fresh in my face. My posture was straighter, my stance more deliberate, less casual. Can utility be subjective even to yourself?

Can your past-self derive greater satisfaction from a situation than your current-self? It would certainly seem so.

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION: DATING
(OR SOMETHING LIKE IT)

Marginal Satisfaction: 5
Total Satisfaction: 29

There were no more conversations about our status at this point. We had wound up sleeping together one day and didn’t stop. There were sleep overs now, and birthday celebrations. There were introductions to parents, family breakfasts, and Valentine’s Day dinners. There were days and weekends spent in bed.

There were also anxiety attacks and accusations. There were tantrums thrown and in one particularly embarrassing night over 12 phone calls made one after the other, and none answered. There was social media stalking and interrogations of friends. In the lowest moment, I was hunched over his phone while he slept, succumbing to reading his messages instead of leaving his house. The night we broke up he told me he loved me. He told me he could marry me. He cried against my stomach as he hugged me tight.

When I drove off, my glasses were frosted with tears, my windshield from night dew. I scraped my car against the sidewalk in front of his neighbor’s house and drove to work the next morning with a flat tyre I knew nothing about.

Sometimes, when faced with all you’ve asked for, you realize that its worth is severely diminished. An alternate definition: “the rise in the supply of a good leads to a decline in the marginal utility of the unit.”

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION: FUCKING
Marginal Satisfaction:1

Total Satisfaction: 30

A birthday wish turned into sex that just continued for what felt like months, but was more like a sequence of days. We broke up, had sex, and broke up again. We didn’t speak for months. Until we did, and had sex the first time we saw each other.

I found myself emphatically telling him that I would not beg him to love me, that I would not beg him to be with me, and then begging him to do both. I think we must’ve hated each other then.

Or at least he hated me. I never stopped loving him.

I heard he had a girlfriend a week or two after we last slept together and I fell apart. I deleted all his social media accounts, his phone number (from my phone, not my brain), and avoided places I knew he frequented. I stayed home at the times I knew he enjoyed being out best. We didn’t speak for well over a year (with the exception of misguided birthday wishes).

When I finally did see him, it managed to be exciting, awkward and painful all at once. Twice we exchanged hellos and air kisses; his girlfriend stood awkwardly behind, never introduced. The third time, I hid in the crowd and willed myself not to cry in the middle of a party. I willed myself directly on top of a cooler, and danced like I was 18 again. I willed myself very, very drunk.

Peak satisfaction meant my limit. I had consumed all that I could have. Had swallowed all that my stomach would allow. This was all there could be without the very real possibility of making myself sick.

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION:
BOOTY CALLS AND AFFAIRS
Marginal Satisfaction: Negative
Total Satisfaction: Unknown/Unrealistic

We were pretending to be friends. Friends who laid in bed side by side watching Project Runway. Friends who spoke about the gym, and the changes we saw in each other’s bodies.

Friends who cuddled. Friends who felt each other up. Friends who gave each other head. Friends who fucked.

We talked after about youthful mistakes and indiscretions. We talked “never agains” and avoiding temptation. We spoke about his intention to end things and the roadblocks preventing him from doing it. We didn’t talk about anything after that. We messaged each other when we felt like having sex, but each pretending that we wanted to see our friend.

There was something buoyant about this. My ego completely inflated and held me afloat. But as we’ve learned with anything, there is a come down, and the feeling of satisfaction continues to dwindle. My ego, fragile as I know she is, deflated again once the time we spent together devolved from evenings spent watching tv and cuddles and talking, to tv and sex, to watching him wrap up a video game and sex, to just an hour in the middle of the night, sneaking in and out the back door of his house.

A final explanation: “as more and more quantity of a commodity is consumed, the intensity of desire decreases and also the utility derived from the additional unit.”

“What day is it?” one of my students asked in class last week, twirling his pencil.

“The 87th of January,” another quipped back, without looking up. Exactly, I thought. What other month does time slog its snowshoes through, leaving long slashes of slow footprints, like em dashes running through us?

This feeling of slog, of internal snow, is further compounded if you are grieving. If you have death anniversaries that lift their bone-sharp faces and resonate throughout winter, through the naked birch and dead ivy, the live oak and wild fennel. The totemizing nature of my love of planting tulips has never escaped me; with bulbs, you sit with the secret knowledge that a fully-formed, beautiful thing is under the soil, a little bastion of Better And Warmer times ahead.

The tulips in my yard are starting to poke through. Only one more month.

It has been years since I’ve intentionally born witness to the largess of January — as previously mentioned, I often go away, to some hotter clime, some place with friends who are good at the stick-shift of levity, a place where a cold glass sweats with your want of it.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a prolonged moonmoon state—the full terror and beauty of knowing that I'll eventually disperse.
Click To Tweet

But here I am. Sitting in the thoughtful shadow period that comes after losing loved ones. If you think losing grandmothers, especially both at the same time, is a kinder grief because of their longevity then you’re mistaken. Rather—and especially because I am a person who has also lost a mother (the Januaryist of all January anniversaries)—it feels like loss in triplicate, a kind of loss that secretly underscores and seeps; it becomes more compositional and embodied as the world continues its overwhelming ballet.

I am a person who obsesses; this has always been true. Rather than suffering from depression, I suffer from manic hyper-focusing, wherein I zoom in on something and fixate wholly. Right now, it’s embroidery and textile art, a revelation that is hardly a revelation, considering that both of my grandmothers and my mother, respectively, loved to craft. One year, when my grandma Sagert was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she spent an entire year embroidering hummingbirds.

Everyone she knew received at least one ornament, made from scrap fabric, embroidered all over its small and powerful body. I even received a thick white quilt, covered in needle-pointed birds, too beautiful to use everyday.

When she died, my friend Michelle sent me an article about hummingbirds and their incredible hearts. I asked her how she knew and she hugged me. It’s the powerful language of matrilineage. It’s the powerful language of our own collective inwardness, an eternal January.

Did you know that moons have moons themselves? That little submoons orbit the larger moons, pulled in and taxonomized as just another satellite in the gravitational pull of that celestial body. These submoons are called moonmoons (Incidentally, I’m working on a chapbook with the same name, forthcoming).

Moonmoons don’t have a long shelf life; they become engrossed in the larger bodies, or they drift off eventually and break apart. More often than not, they turn to energy that surrounds the larger moon itself.

Another thing: the (moonmoons) cannot stay in orbit around the Moon indefinitely because of tides.

Last week, I received an envelope of photographs that once belonged to one of my grandmothers. When I opened it I discovered that it was full of photos of me as a baby, sometimes with my grandparents, but often with my mother.

My mom died in a January in 1992, and the date has always been a hard one. This year felt particularly brutal, because of the legacy of archemom-types who had just died the month before—those who had been connections to this elusive woman I have loved, and known in the hazy aftermath of death more than in life. I spent the day sending care packages to friends, reading and rereading Meghan O’Rourke’s The Night Where You No Longer Live, and being quietly alone.

The thing about moonmoons is that they never get to be big moons. They eventually lose the groove of their orbit, the speed of their path in a predetermined direction. They fade away, become something larger than themselves. And perhaps that’s a better metaphor for childhood than simply saying that a human child eventually becomes an adult human. Children themselves don’t become moons anymore than adults are fully-conceived moons. Those bodies and ways of moving are temporary, but resonant.

When I look at these photos, I see the largeness of the adults around me—their outward shyness and joy, the way they tilt and move with grace, and observe a kind of order that butts against the senseless things they have, are currently, or will have to navigate outside of the space of these photographs. It’s hard to believe that I am now one of them, and that nearly all of the adults in that photo have fallen from orbit, become absorbed by the darkness of a universe we know very little about.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a kind of prolonged moonmoon state—the maddening circling of an elusively larger entity, the full terror and beauty of knowing that I’ll eventually disperse. That’s the kind of heavenly torture of grief, the slog and winter of it, the bulb before the tulip. There is, admittedly, something lovely about it—after all, we are rarely graceful at sitting in the same space as mortality and staying quiet.

Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
— Meghan O’Rourke