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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.

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.

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.
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“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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”

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.”

Aphantasia is a little-known condition that affects the mind’s “inner eye.” While most people are able to close their eyes and have real-feeling sensory experiences (visual, aural, and otherwise), I am without this ability. When I close my eyes, I see only darkness. And while others dream in full color and hear sounds, I only dream in words and feelings.  

I used to think that my experience of darkness was like that of everyone else. We often use the same language to describe our thoughts and feelings, with there being no differentiation indicating our individual experiences like that in the mind’s eye. Once I learned about my difference of perception, I had vivid conversations with others who thought that my experience was foreign. For a while I felt broken and incomplete because I was missing out on something that was so basic for others, but these days, I do not feel so bad about it. It’s hard to miss what I have never had, and the idea of suddenly seeing pictures in my mind actually scares me.

Aphantasia exists on a broad spectrum. Although aphantasiacs experience a lack of sensory imagery in the mind, many with the condition still dream with full sensory imagery. Others experience face-blindness, struggling to recognize the most familiar of people. It is estimated that about 2% of the general populace are on the aphantasia spectrum. For me personally, I am 100% sensory-blind when both awake and asleep, but I do not have problems with recognizing faces.

It is widely accepted that aphantasia is a congenital condition, manifesting from birth onward. According to a study by Joel Pearson at the University of South Wales in Sydney, those without aphantasia have more activity in the prefrontal cortex in the brain. “The visual cortex is like a sketch pad; it’s where you create images,” said Pearson in New Scientist.

Given that the prefrontal cortex controls the visual cortex, this allows for what we call the mind’s eye, an ability to create visual images. Pearson’s same study found that electronic stimulation can enhance activity in the prefrontal cortex with technology called transcranial direct stimulation (tDCS), which can potentially allow for an aphantasiac to experience imagery instead of darkness. He posits that science’s ability to manipulate the mind’s eye—increasing or decreasing its strength—could affect everything from learning new ideas and making “moral decisions” to potentially decreasing image-based trauma or hallucinations among those who are schizophrenic.

I am definitely a sexual person, and desire sex in my life. However, due to my complete mental darkness, I am unable to have any visual sexual fantasies about future and/or possible sex. I always have known that my approach to desire is different from others, but could never put my finger on it until discovering I have aphantasia.

In my teens, while my peers began discovering their own senses of their sexuality, I remained—quite literally—in the dark. I always wondered how people just “knew” they were gay, or “knew” what they liked sexually. When people talked of having fantasies, I could not relate because I had none of my own.

As a teen, I had my own crushes and senses of attraction as well—albeit in a unique way. I focused on intellectual capacity and creativity, and found people attractive in the way one would marvel at an excellent work of art. While I many pined after handsome faces, I fell in love with a British theater actor from “Topsy Turvy,” a film about the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan, a Victorian librettist and composer duo who wrote famous operettas such as The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. For me, creative expression and artistry are the bedrock of my sense of romance and sexuality.

Due to my complete mental darkness, I am unable to have any visual sexual fantasies about future and/or possible sex.
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Yet as years passed, I still felt extreme anxiety because I had no sexual fantasies. I started to fear that I was gay because I did not fantasize about men, but there were never any thoughts about women either. I felt tremendously insecure in pursuing any sort of serious relationship. What if I choose a person of the wrong gender or gender identity?

Regarding my insecurities with sexuality, I have confided in close friends over the years, trying to gain perspective about what I really am. My friends always reassured me that whatever my sexuality is, it is a beautiful thing to celebrate and express. Yet it did not feel beautiful to me—it felt like a scary, gaping hole.

Beginning in 2015, I began browsing the online forums on the website of the Asexuality Visibility & Education Network (AVEN) to try and find answers for myself. It is a great place for me to visit when I have my questions about sexuality, where people are friendly and able to write without being under the influence of sexual excitement. It was not until 2018, at the age of 33, that someone mentioned that my lack of fantasies may be due to me having aphantasia. After briefly investigating the condition, I immediately realized that this was my experience and reality!

I inquired about aphantasia on AVEN, and some members professed having similar experiences to me. A casual poll in 2017 on AVEN asked members about having aphantasia, and 42.5% of 54 respondents said they were on the spectrum. This is far higher than the purported 2% in the general populace.

I then went on Facebook to join aphantasia groups for additional support, writing about how the condition gives me an experience similar to asexuality. Most people vehemently responded that they are absolutely not asexual, but that they experience sexuality in non-sensory ways. It appears there isn’t a reciprocal correlation—while asexuals may be more likely to have aphantasia, those with aphantasia are not more likely to be asexual.

What if I choose a person of the wrong gender or gender identity?
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After discovering that I have aphantasia, I am now investigating ways for me to adapt and adjust. With my boyfriend—whom I find attractive both aesthetically and intellectually—I now keep my eyes open instead of closing them when we’re intimate. Seeing him visually helps me feel in the mood, and now I realize what my sexuality really is. I’m heterosexual, but also feel like I’m on the asexual spectrum by default. The term “demisexual” seems to suit me—I only experience attraction with someone I am profoundly emotionally connected to.

While my experiences are unusual, I do not believe my aphantasia is any sort of deficiency. Instead, I’ve grown to view it as something that makes me unique, and believe that my experience is just as valid as those of others. I also feel that my aphantasia allows for me to have heightened senses in other areas. I find joy in contemplating life and the people around me as philosophical fodder, all describable with florid language. I journal and write constantly, putting these feelings and observations down on paper. I like to imbibe my words with a rhythm and lilt that feels akin to music. I know that I approach writing in a unique way.

As I talk to people about my aphantasia, many people express intrigue about my condition. It can be a mind-bender for non-aphantasiacs to try and fathom my world of darkness, just as their vivid sensory imaginations are equally as foreign to me. Honest conversations allow for us to share our world views with one another, practice empathy, and celebrate our differences.

Imagine that.

In many respects, Colton Underwood is the ideal Bachelor. He’s a former NFL practice squad member, a conventionally handsome Colorado native whose abs are more ripped than a pair of jeans from 1993. He fits in perfectly with the cast of other Bachelors who have appeared on ABC’s show, now in its 23rd season. But while Underwood never succeeded in his goal of becoming a world famous football player,  the 26 year-old has become famous for not being another kind of player; he will go down in history as the franchise’s first “virgin bachelor.” Sadly, Underwood’s sexual inexperience has made him the butt of many jokes.

Watching this season of The Bachelor is an illuminating case study in how society associates manliness with heteronormative sex. This truly toxic notion of masculinity marginalizes any man who hasn’t had vaginal intercourse, whatever his reasons might be.

The part of Underwood’s virginity currently receiving the most side-eye is his the reason he’s given for keeping it. No, Underwood’s not abstaining because of religious beliefs. In his words, “I’m waiting to be in love.” It is this dream of having sex with someone he loves that the world seems to find hilarious. It also has fans champing at the bit to see if Underwood finds someone he’s willing to let deflower him in The Bachelor’s famed Fantasy Suite.

On The Bachelor’s January 7th premiere, the 30 women competing to marry Underwood made a plethora of not-funny barbs. There were references to “virgin cocktails,” and oblique references to “first times.” On the second episode, Billy Eichner made an appearance. He also snatched the opportunity to mock Underwood, implying he had yet to get laid because he was actually gay. Of course, having a gay Bachelor would be an awesome victory for TV diversity. However, the implication was that no straight man would willingly postpone vaginal intercourse.

The virginity jokes aren’t just taking place on the show itself. In an episode of The Ringer’s Bachelor recap podcast, Bachelor Party, host Juliette Litman expressed sheer confusion about Underwood’s virginity. The podcaster quipped there were only a few things she was certain of in this world, “Death, taxes, and professional athletes having sex all the time.” The fact that Litman was pushing stereotypes didn’t seem to be a problem for her.

We need to call out the jokes for what they are—virgin-shaming, slut-shaming’s chaste but equally problematic cousin. It is time to stop deriding Colton Underwood, and all men, for not having coitus.

This truly toxic notion of masculinity marginalizes any man who hasn’t had vaginal intercourse, whatever his reasons might be.
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The stats reveal there’s nothing remarkable about a man being a virgin in his twenties. The average age for a cisgender American man to lose his virginity is 17, if virginity is defined as penetrative vaginal sex. But average does not define normal. There are plenty of guys (14.3% of them, in fact), who remain virgins between the ages of 20 and 24. Between the ages of 25 and 29, 5% of American men have still not engaged in penetrative sex. And of course, there are gay and asexual people who aren’t interested in vaginal intercourse.

The data shows twenty-something virgins are actually pretty common. To put things into perspective, it’s estimated only 5% of Americans are natural blondes, but no one balks when a natural blonde pops up on TV. As is true of every aspect of human existence, there’s a lot of diversity when it comes to sexual activity. Regrettably, Hollywood has all but erased the existence of male virgins over age twenty.

When adult male virgins do get portrayed by Hollywood, they’re usually represented in one of two ways—as tragic misfits, or complete rubes. For the former trope, an excellent example is Michael Ginsburg of Mad Men. Ginsburg is a prodigious ad man whose status as a twenty-something virgin is presented as the symptom of a severe mental illness, which culminates in the character cutting off his nipple. On the comedy side, we have Steve Carell in 2005’s The Forty Year-Old Virgin. As the film’s on-the-nose title suggests, the middle-aged protagonist’s virginity is the entire plot of the movie, though it turns out his reasons for waiting are much like Colton’s—he wasn’t ready until he met the right person.

In my real-life experience, adult male virgins do not fall into a reductive binary. I personally know a number of smart, funny, attractive men who didn’t have sex until their late twenties. My friend Calvin was 27 when he lost his virginity. A personable entrepreneur with an active social life, Calvin was never tragic, nor was he a buffoon.

When adult male virgins do get portrayed by Hollywood, they’re usually represented in one of two ways – as tragic misfits, or complete rubes.
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While Calvin has always been a cool person, that didn’t make him immune to the effects of virgin-shaming. He tells me the trope of older virgins as weird and inept took a toll on his self-esteem. He recounts a sense of “shame” surrounding being a virgin: “I worried I would be bad at sex.”

Today, Calvin is a happily engaged thirty-something with no complaints about his sex life. Losing his virginity at a later than average age did not derail his life. However, he still takes umbrage with the portrayal of Colton as the “first virgin Bachelor.” As Calvin sees it, The Bachelor is turning Colton’s virginity into a spectacle, making his virginity into his entire personality. Calvin contends, “They’re presenting him as a one-dimensional character to gain ratings.”

Obviously, virgin-shaming hurts people. And the worst part is that virginity is an entirely social construct. The idea that people who have had coitus are fundamentally different from those who haven’t is a patriarchal idea created by men as a means of controlling women’s sexuality. Not to mention how it marginalizes any sex that isn’t penis-in-vagina sex by suggesting it somehow doesn’t count.

Historically, the idea of a sexual purity that could be sullied by penetrative sex has been applied more to women than men, a double standard that was a strategy for safeguarding paternity. After all, how could you trust your wife’s kids are yours unless you’re certain she’s never slept with anyone else? Hence, the creation of a long list of epithets used to other women who’ve had sex outside marriage, and the idea that a woman who has had vaginal sex before marriage is impure, “damaged,” or otherwise unsuitable.

The idea that people who have had coitus are fundamentally different from those who haven’t is a patriarchal idea created by men as a means of controlling women’s sexuality.
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By contrast, dudes have pretty much always been given a free pass to have copious amounts of nookie, and are considered more “manly” the more sex they have. Look at the case of, Henry VII, the British king who executed multiple wives on grounds of infidelity. Henry killed these women despite himself siring multiple children outside of marriage. Rather than condemning sexually voracious men as wanton or out of control, society has naturalized the myth of men as hypersexual beings. Even today, the idea that men’s uncontrollable sex drives cannot—and need not—be contained is used to justify toxic behavior. And if a man is not having sex, he becomes less of a man—which in a patriarchal society is never what you want to be.

Male virgins like Colton Underwood threaten the patriarchal logic that underpins the sexual double standard. By waiting to have sex, Underwood is publicly defying the toxic logic that redblooded men are somehow at the mercy of their sexual urges. He is a walking refutation of the adage that “boys will be boys,” that their innate desires are somehow beyond their control. Perhaps that’s why adult male virgins make society so uncomfortable…

Choosing a dashing virgin as this year’s Bachelor could have been a valuable opportunity to fight virgin-shaming. Underwood’s casting had the power to normalize the existence of twenty-something male virgins. Next time a man in the public eye proclaims he’s a virgin, let’s hope society doesn’t reduce him to a poorly written punchline.

I walked through the door with you
The air was cold
But something ‘bout it felt like home, somehow

I’m not entirely sure why, but as I entered the party I had Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well” in my head. Considering I had never been to this location or one of these events and I wasn’t arriving with anyone, the lyrics had no relationship to what I was actually doing; attending a members-only intimate party via an anonymous erotica club. Not quite a sex party, although that was certainly available to anyone interested in partaking. It was more of a hyper-flirtatious gathering for adults; consenting, eager adults.

Each party begins with some icebreaker games for the newer members, accompanied by music and live burlesque or acrobatic performances. There are tables with snacks set out, encouraging the seventy or so members to meet and mingle. Behind some doors are the actual “playrooms” where guests can engage in sex, erotic play, or just sit and watch. Ever mindful of my journalistic integrity, and crippling social anxiety, I remained an observer.

It was fascinating to watch the playroom, a room of maybe fifteen people, some in pairs, some in trios or more, all in different positions and various states of undress. As I stood holding up the wall as though it would crumble behind me, I was approached by a beautiful woman in ripped jeans and a crop top with her hair natural and teased out.

“First time here?”

“Yes.” I was certain she could hear the T-Swift refrains repeating in my head.

“Cool. I mostly just watched when I first started coming here. Let me know if you have any questions.”

“Oh, do you work for the club?”

“Nope, just know it can be intimidating at first.”  

She smiled warmly and walked away, the goal not to out me as a newbie but to offer some support in an intimidating scene. I breathed a sigh of embarrassed relief and moved on to the next track from Red, pressing down my skirt as I had decided my inspiration for the night was Kathleen Turner from “Romancing the Stone.”

This type of friendly interaction is not a perk of parties like this, it’s the point. The atmosphere is designed to be a communal, artistic, space. Sex is available if you want it, but it’s not necessarily the end goal, and it’s certainly not the only thing available. It was my maiden foray into a private play party, but certainly not the first event I had attended where enthusiastic consent was a selling point. And that’s becoming far more common for clubs that host these kinds of events.

One of the most popular spots in the Brooklyn scene is House of Yes, a dance club and performance space located in Bushwick that has gained notoriety for its themed parties as well as its guidelines regarding club behavior. The rules are listed on the website, when purchasing a ticket, and are visible on walls throughout the club:

Behave with beauty, connect with intention. We are obsessed with Consent. Always ASK before touching anyone in our House. If someone is violating your boundaries or harassing you, please speak to a security guard or any staff member. We have a zero tolerance policy for harassment. If you feel something, say something, and we will help.

Each night at House of Yes is different to accommodate the different interests of the attendees. A Tuesday night may feature amateur burlesque, followed the next day by an aerial circus and DJ, and an early no-booze-on-the-dance-floor dance party for the nine to fivers. The website is clear that this is a space for anyone wanting to try something different from the norm. Imagine Studio 54 but without a crabby owner outside telling you that you’re not cool enough to come in.

And while clubs like House of Yes put a premium on safety, they are also careful about how they promote consent policies and lay out expectations to clientele. I spoke with Katie Rex, creator of the queer fetish party BOUND, who this year moved her events from exclusively underground to public spaces like Elsewhere.

“I don’t know of any club that markets itself as a safe space. To call a space a ‘safe space’ you would have to screen every single person entering the door and evaluate their behavior while intoxicated before entry. The only proposed safe spaces are completely underground. Clubs are certainly upping the ante when it comes to the priority of safety and how to manage unsafe people, but it would be completely irresponsible for a space to say they can promise none of their patrons will act out of line.”

The application process to the private party I attended is detailed. Currently the club encourages female members who may bring male dates, but has recently opened up selective spots for men who have displayed appropriate behavior at previous parties to attend events by themselves. While the club does not have language directly addressing submissions from prospective non-binary members, it makes clear in the questionnaire that the goal when vetting members is mostly about your vibe.

The questionnaire I filled out had the standard questions, “Age,” “Zip Code,“ “How did you hear about us?” then followed with more thoughtful inquiries like “What made you interested in us,” “Describe your current relationship and what you think [Party Name] can bring to it,” “Do you trust your partner?,” “Do you feel comfortable communicating your needs and desires with your current partner or other intimate partners?”.

This was the first of many surprises when researching this scene; how deliberately it draws a line around what type of members they’re looking for, establishing from the outset that this wouldn’t be an unsupervised fuckfest, but a community of like-minded adults who wanted a place to comfortably explore and experience different parts of themselves, either sexually or creatively.

The atmosphere is designed to be a communal, artistic, space. Sex is available if you want it, but it’s not necessarily the end goal, and it’s certainly not the only thing available.
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This type of vetting is inherent to private parties, and bringing it to a public space like has not been as simple as posting rules on a website as Jacqui Rabkin, Marketing Director, and Consent Co-Director at House of Yes, and I discussed.

“A lot of it is very straightforward. You make a policy, you make it visible, you make a system for reporting,” she says. “You have to know your limits, and know what your knowledge base is and what your capabilities are and if you want to have a safer space … you should build a team, you should talk to other members of the community who are also doing this.”

The other Consent Co-Director is consultant Emma Kaywin, a sexual health writer and activist who works with clubs, private parties, and music festivals, training staff how to manage public play spaces. It’s become a vital part of the House of Yes program, specifically for their House of Love events, which mirror private parties, but with more limits on what can take place.

“The Consent Team and program we have in place is modeled after real play parties. We have active guardians; people walking around the club kind of monitoring,” says Rabkin. “We call them ‘Consenticorns’…[they] have been trained by Emma in de-escalation techniques and bystander intervention, just the basics of how to approach people so you can step in and offer people help without causing a scene or a complication but also they have these light up beacons so someone can find them easily if they need help.”

The queer community has been managing the “safer space” movement for far longer than their more cis-hetero counterparts. The inclusivity and safety of many queer clubs and roaming parties underscore the nuanced language around sex that many marginalized communities developed because of the very real threat of violence that hangs over the head of anyone considered other. Safer spaces needed to exist where people could express the very basic desire to represent themselves honestly, without harassment or judgment.

It’s not surprising then that straight women were attracted to these spaces. When fear polices your daily life, regardless of exactly why you are being targeted, anywhere you are able to simply breathe comfortably is a welcome relief. Moreover, those communities were often required to police themselves to avoid bringing unwanted attention from anyone on the outside.

Safer spaces needed to exist where people could express the very basic desire to represent themselves honestly, without harassment or judgment.
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Self-policing is also a part of the kink community that, while not an apparent physical presentation, labors under a societal stigma that pushes it underground. Kink works only when lines and boundaries are drawn very clearly before physical interaction. Fantasy scenarios are outlined over text or email, safe words are established early, and aftercare is often essential before a play session can be considered “complete.”

These rules are not only important for physical safety, but they also acknowledge that sex and intimacy can be emotionally challenging for any number of reasons. In the current #MeToo era where predominantly cis-hetero men and women are still grappling with dangerous societal gaps in sexual communication, this type of prior consent was bound to find its way into the mainstream.

While these spaces were not and are not free from any form of harassment or problematic behavior, their emphasis on community safety and clarity of purpose is a welcome jolt of change into more public spaces where people have not yet figured out how to communicate desires or boundaries. As House of Yes became more popular and saw its audience expand, they had to make changes to how they approached and enforced their policies.

“When we became really really popular we got this tsunami tide of people who maybe don’t have the best etiquette on the dance floor and the vibe started to change,” Rabkin tells me.

“Too many people, more spectators, they’re not dressed up, they’re not overly friendly and they’re not participating. They just show up to see what crazy shit is happening. If you’re going to survive that you need to be very proactive about trying to orient and educate your new clientele.”

The club initially attempted to combat the changing crowd by instituting a mandatory costume policy, but realized shortly thereafter that such policy was excluding lower-income patrons who may find the need to spend money on a costume prohibitive, as well as tourists who want to attend but may not have packed a feather crown in their suitcase. They relaxed the policy to greatly encourage people to express themselves through their look, as well as providing a costume box for guests to get their make up done, restyle their outfit, or pick up some accessories to signal that they’re excited to participate in the night ahead.   

Combining the inclusivity and artistic expression of many LGBTQ clubs with the rules of consent in Kink culture is a powerful bulwark against sexual inequality, a pervasive and harmful construct that thrives on fear and silence. The only way to combat it is consent and communication, but also to remember that communities are not static. Reimagining and reinforcing rules to meet changing tides is just as important as establishing them in the first place.

Boundaries are there to make sure guests feel at ease, that they know what is expected of one another and how to behave. It’s not just about being safe, it’s not just about saying “yes,” it’s about allowing people the space to express themselves in ways they have been conditioned not to. You can do something, or nothing, and no one is entitled to pressure you either way. Once the threat of violence or coercion is removed, once a true sexual equality is established, the possibilities when exploring that physical and mental space become exciting rather than intimidating.

Growing up, TV convinced me that rejection wasn’t only hurtful, but also inherently cruel. From baby shows whose hosts routinely tore down the fourth wall and begged for companionship to very special episodes of Disney Channel sitcoms wherein the protagonist has no choice but to befriend a marginalized character in order to save them, the insidious message was clear: “No” was almost always the wrong answer. In a typical kid’s show, a protagonist’s bedrock relationships were impossible to leave or be ousted from because of their lives’ strict adherence to “The Status Quo is God,” a trope that dictates everything in an episode reverts back to how it originally was at the beginning before the credits can roll.

I graduated to the fraught world of teen dramas and anime in middle school. When I’d finished Gilmore Girls and Fruits Basket, I became infatuated with the many iterations of Degrassi that populated the airwaves in the mid 2000s. Though the storylines and language that made my beloved fictitious worlds whole became more mature and dynamic, their misrepresentations of rejection only grew worse. In the world of adult and adult-ish media, the refusal of attention wasn’t a solvable child-friendly problem-of-the-week. It was the absolute worst thing in existence, the ultimate form of humiliation. For the hero, being turned down was an intense personal smite, a societal defect, or both.

Writers often framed permanent rejections—the ones that couldn’t be overcome—as misunderstandings by using instances of the protagonist being accepted as proof. A denial of admission from any dream school became not a matter of luck but the fault of gatekeepers who could never understand the hero’s true talent. Same for an aloof heart-throb: the hero was too good to be rejected by them, so of course there would be some better, more accepting love interest in plain view for the jilted once the jilter realized their mistake.

Both on television and in real life, there are the uncomfortable gender politics of rejection. Girls are expected to find polite, nice answers to their problems while boys destroy the boundaries that hold them back. A strong boy never turned down a challenge; he either finished it, or hid his defeat, lest he be thought of as weak. As the boys in my life became more demanding, I became shy and cloying. I forced myself to kiss family members on the cheek when I was mad at them or didn’t like the texture of their skin, fearing that if didn’t and they died, they’d die feeling alone. I always said thank you, even when I didn’t mean it, even when people didn’t deserve it.  

Only after I switched out passivity for critical introspection did I learn that “no” wasn’t a mean word. I was just as entitled to use it as anyone else. But media continues to misconstrue its fundamental purpose and, by extension, consent. Consent advocates in all media spaces need to teach people, especially men and boys pressured by the immense weight of their need be invulnerable, that rejection is not an inherent wrong but objective instrument that can be separated from situational subtext.

We’re social creatures by nature. Early humans survived harsh environments by depending on small enclaves of other humans in order to meet survival and reproductive needs. Consequently, social rejection in any form then was often a literal death sentence. Human language uses the idea of hurt to describe both physical and emotional pains.

In a 2011 report, University of Michigan psychology professor Ethan Koss found that this conflation was the result of not just culture but also biology, upon discovering that rejection and physical pain share a common somatosensory representation. Using a MRI to monitor brain activity, Koss had test subjects whose partners broke up with them perform two separate tasks: the first, stare at a picture of their former significant other and the second, receive a “noxious thermal stimulation.” In both tests, the same regions of each subject’s brain lit up on the MRI. A broken romance hurt only slightly less than an actual burn.

It’s natural that rejection hurts, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be oppressive. What makes humans humans isn’t only our ability to feel but rather our ability to process our own emotions rationally, especially in an era where being denied companionship doesn’t signify literal death.

Both on television and in real-life, there are the uncomfortable gender politics of rejection. Girls are expected to find polite, nice answers to their problems while boys destroy the boundaries that hold them back.
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Not all rejection is personal. Institutional prejudices influence who we accept and who we reject.

I first became aware of this after my introduction to sexual racism. OkCupid’s popular five year study revealed that heterosexual Black women and Asian men statistically received the least amount of attention from all men and all women respectively. I found the results disheartening, but even worse was the discourse surrounding them. People in my life both on and offline likened personal preference to the act of disregarding a whole race of people as potential romantic partners. Even those condemning the senseless vapidity behind online dating culture didn’t seem to understand that the study wasn’t about silly preferences at all, but the outright discrimination and social conditioning that weaponized rejection.

I wanted to be desired and I wanted to fight the very idea of it. I couldn’t force racists who I didn’t even like to like me. I became apathetic to the concept of attraction as a natural construct. I didn’t care if anti-Black men didn’t want to date me. I cared because many of them were in positions of power that allow them to determine the metrics of desirability, a valuable social currency. I cared because once in middle school, a white acquaintance of mine had told me they liked the hyper-realistic sketch I’d done of myself because my features looked beautiful on the white watercolor paper.

Because no one believed the victims of serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw since they were Black women, and thus historically viewed as un-rapeable. And because Tinder dates wouldn’t stop fetishizing me for my Blackness, and when I told one of them to stop he said, “What? Did you want me to say I think you’re ugly? Is that what you want?”

For as long as I can remember, the white spaces I inhabited have operated as echo chambers for heterosexual men to routinely remind me of their God-given right to say that not liking me sexually was the same as not liking a man. It was especially ironic when the same people complained about superficial women who didn’t want to sleep with them. I felt their contempt everywhere, in articles that use pseudoscience to argue how Asians are inherently cute and Black people masculine, on websites dedicated to pretty women that completely exclude black and brown women. I felt it even in explicitly black media when black artists like Donald Glover declared their fetishistic infatuation for women of other races and existential boredom for those in their own communities.

In her recent essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?”, Amia Srinivasan, a British-Indian philosopher, argues against the racial policing of sex and romance.

[…] [w]hereas you can quite reasonably demand that a group of children share their sandwiches inclusively, you just can’t do the same with sex. What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.

Srinivasan criticizes how feminist consent advocates make overly simplistic one-to-one comparison between sex, a human trait, and some personal object, creating a false discord between moral consciousness and consent that allows sexually regressive subreddits to thrive. Traditional consent politics, she argues, objectifies the people it tries to protect, reinforcing the idea of sexuality as a valuable currency rather than a non-transferable essence of being. For instance, the Rebecca Solnit essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me” compares sex to a sandwich. “Tea and Consent,” a British-produced PSA, compares sex to tea. Sex is viewed as a good that can literally be consumed.

We need to acknowledge when rejection is based in problematic beliefs. According to Srinivasan, before teaching, sex educators should first familiarize themselves with radical self-love movements, groups unified by the idea that we all have a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our problematic and often racist biases in all parts of our lives. But that doesn’t mean all rejection is based in institutionally-influenced prejudice. At a certain point, no one can be compelled to want someone.

I had to mute the television during Gossip Girl when Chuck Bass, a tragic rich boy, tries to attack Jenny Humphrey. I was afraid my mom would see and make me turn it off.

He lures Jenny away from a party and up to an abandoned rooftop, where he pins her down. The scene is visceral. She struggles against him until her brother Dan saves her, punching Chuck in the face. I assumed the attempted rape would become a central part of the narrative, reshaping the characters involved.

Chuck’s punishment is as brief as it is indirect. In a subsequent episode, he and his classmates fight for a coveted usher position with Dartmouth College. Of course, already being an established villain from his first non-rapey appearance on screen, Chuck is rejected again, this time from being an usher. His cockiness makes his comeuppance more enjoyable for audiences even though it is only a passive form of poetic justice, a simultaneous erasure and acknowledgement of the severity of his most recent crime. As the series progresses, Jenny and all the other central characters quickly, wordlessly, forget Chuck’s violent nature, absolving him from the unglamorous role of rapist and proving that the show can’t handle the permanency of rejection.

At a certain point, no one can be compelled to want someone.
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At best, rejection is portrayed as a weapon for smiting the Chucks of the world, and at worst it is the ultimate punishment. The latter is especially the case if the supposed victim is a man pursuing a woman. John Hughes’ 1986 film Pretty In Pink created an indignant subculture of fans who believed Ducky, an affable nerd, deserved the affections of his closest friend Andie instead of quintessential ’80s heartthrob Blane. In the Salon piece “The trouble with Duckie: How Pretty in Pink’s most lovable character gave a generation of teenage boys the wrong idea,” critic Jon Cyer invalidates the misplaced indignation behind “Duckiegate” by comparing Duckie to the more recent “nice guy” archetype, a man who believes the women he desires should reciprocate his male niceness with offers of romance or sex.

Duckie defenders fail to see Andie’s decision to continue her friendship with Duckie after he insults her as a valid form of acceptance—all because of the pervasive idea that in order to truly love someone, we have to accept their sexual advances. The “friendzone” has come to mean something just as bad as indifference or contempt because, to them, rejection in every form is equally bad. They misinterpret her choice as an intentional slight against her best friend, without understanding that her rejection of him as a romantic partner isn’t a rejection of his friendship or personhood.

Duckiegate is a part of an age-old paranoia that a woman’s autonomy exists to oppress vulnerable men. If you type “false rape” into Reddit, the search results are too numerous to count. On the controversial subreddit r/MensRights, two of some of the most popular discussion threads suggest false rape allegations are rampant and that extremist MRAs known as Incels are right in their belief that women are sexual gatekeepers who resent Duckie-esque “beta-males.” The group is an infamous star in the misogynistic and often racist constellation of online spaces colloquially known as the “manosphere.” What they all share in common is their obsession with how society punishes men who aren’t Blane-esque “Chad Thundercocks” by denying them sexual intimacy and, by extension, power, supposedly leaving them vulnerable to the judgmental perceptions of women.

They misinterpret her choice as an intentional slight against her best friend, without understanding that her rejection of him as a romantic partner isn’t a rejection of his friendship or personhood.
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While the manosphere loathes women, it doesn’t defend the Chads who prey on them. Some of the most popular comments and posts on r/MensRights about Brock Turner, an ex-Stanford jock who sexually assaulted a woman in 2015, condemn the wealthy alpha male (comment: “[Turner] isn’t being honest about what [the police report] said”). Same for convicted Steubenville rapists and former football stars Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the latter of whom is Black (post: “I think that as a community we should mention the Steubenville rape trials. We always talk about false rape allegations, but it’s just as important that we acknowledge real accusations”). Compare this to the site’s sympathetic view of Peter Naussenger, the middle class, white, nerdy man who fellow Columbia alum Emma Sulkowicz accused of sexual assault while the two were in college together.

Knowing that society believes punishment and rejection to be the same, MRAs view the ostracization of Chads as righteous and Duckies as offensive. To them, Chads not only deserve to not be loved by women but also hated by them. The internet Duckies believe they’re oppressed because they think their rejection/ostracization is undeserved. 4chan is famous for drawing national attention to the victim blaming that embroiled the Steubenville case, going as far as to demonstrate IRL wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and to send death and rape threats to Sulkowicz for indirectly ousting her alleged rapist through performance art.

During a workshop on dating violence in college, everyone in the classroom had to come up with a characteristic of a healthy relationship. The room was quiet. We’d already filled up more than half the whiteboard with traits of an unhealthy one (“gaslighting,” “physical violence,” “intolerance,” etc.). After a minute passed, a trickle of suggestions came, but they were all vague, and could apply to any type of relationship, good or bad. Hugs, hand holding, saying I love you—these were things even convicted wife killers had done.

It reminded me of that one cheesy ’80s song “What Is Love?” where the singer basically just repeats the title and “baby don’t hurt me.” I said nothing. If I were asked to do the exercise now, I would say rejection was the ultimate sign of a solid partnership. Regardless of who’s being problematic for what, acknowledging when a romance is or might turn sour is the definition of emotional strength.

However, going back in time won’t be enough to change societal views on rejection. Improving our communities would mean forcing people, especially men, to not only embrace the idea of consent but to also reevaluate the intrinsic violence of desirability, using their own experiences with people’s problematic preferences as an empathetic guide. Men are literally killing women for rejecting them. Until men learn it’s okay to be rejected, no one will be safe. And that’s going to take a cultural shift to turn “no” from an attack to just another word.