He wrapped his long, strong arms around my waist and kissed the back of my neck, my shoulder blades, and then interlocked his fingers within mine. With his warm body nestled behind me, and Bill Maher interviewing Seth Rogen on the TV, I was in ecstasy. I’d been crushing on a guy I’ll call Adam for a while, and finally, after a few casual hookups, he seemed to actually want to connect with me.
Then he said something I wasn’t expecting.
“I’d love to see you fuck another dude.”
I knew the guy was a tad freaky. The first time we had sex he pounded me so hard I thought my bladder would explode, so I rushed home and took some amoxicillin to ward off a UTI. He also shoved his cock so hard down my throat repeatedly, I practically puked on myself and could barely breathe. For some reason, I pretended to like it.
You may wonder why I remained bewitched by him. There were the understandable reasons: He was brilliant, educated at a good college, ostensibly classy and a self-professed feminist. All of this was hugely attractive to me. And I was so used to his kind of sexuality — that rough and detached porn-style sex — I just figured there was something wrong with me if I didn’t dig it.
“Let’s go to a swingers club,” he said. “You can wear a leather bikini and I can wear a suit.”
“That’d be hot,” I lied.
I didn’t really consider the ramifications of the request in the moment. I told myself that he was just a free-spirited man who wasn’t shackled by societal conventions, a kind enough person who just wanted to have some casual fun.
Plus, what kind of ramifications could there be? As an empowered 21st-century woman, I should be able to screw five men at a time and a horse in between without any emotional fallout. Any emotional fallout is simply a byproduct of social conditioning, a tool to keep me sexually repressed. And the last thing I want to be is repressed.
“Let’s do it next weekend,” he said, and we enthusiastically set the date.
But later, at home, I began to reconsider. I worried about the risk of catching diseases (yes, I know the culture strictly enforces protection, but condoms break all the time). I oscillated between being offended at the invitation and feeling ashamed that I didn’t want to spread my legs for total strangers and watch this guy, who I actually liked, have sex with a bunch of other women. I oscillated between wanting to tell him to fuck off and wanting to acquiesce with the hope that he’d develop a genuine affection for me.
Eventually, I sent him an email: “I don’t want to go to a sex club, mainly because of diseases, mainly because I know it will destroy me, mainly because I’m not that kind of girl, mainly because I know I’d just be doing it to get your affection.”
And with that, I cut off communication for good.
* * *
I used to party hard. I was often so wasted I could have all sorts of sexual liaisons with no emotional entanglements, like when I woke up one morning to discover I’d just had a threesome with my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend, and someone was getting strangled up in the mix. It was really easy to brush it off because I was only half-there at the time, if present at all. Plus, I could get drunk again, blurring both my memory and consciousness one more time for the next encounter. None of it hurt.
This kind of blasé sexual conduct seemed to be normal, expected even. As a fine arts student in college, everyone was having sex with everyone. These were moneyed kids at a prestigious university who prided themselves on their orgies and drugs and STDs. A friend in my photography class took portraits of all the random guys she slept with, something like 27, while another girl took a video of herself fucking 100 guys in an hour. This was art. This was empowerment. This was feminist, or so they said. And I adopted that perspective as my own, without any serious critical inquiry.
Then I quit drinking. By 2007 I had run my life into the ground, thanks to the steady flow of vodka and Adderall running through my veins. Unable to work, and barely able to finish grad school, I realized I had to get sober. But it never dawned on me that when I kicked booze to the curb I’d have to rediscover what was OK for me sexually, because my entire sexual identity developed when I was wasted in my early 20s, and when I was wasted, nothing mattered.
Now that I don’t drink, what I do or do not do sexually really matters. I experience, feel and remember everything — his touch, his tongue, his lips, his gentleness, his roughness, his words or lack of words, his intoxicating smell or his rank smell, his twisted fantasies or his hot fantasies. Now that I’m fully present in my mind and body, I can’t check out. It’s just not the same when I’m wasted. I don’t care. He doesn’t care. No one’s getting hurt.
But as I remained sober and started growing up and taking responsibility for myself, I unwittingly surrounded myself with the same kind of guys I hung around with when I was trashed. They all assumed I wanted to be screwed like a porn star—without sensuality, without subtlety and without any artfulness or intimacy. And I’m left with lots of questions about what I do or do not like and what’s expected of me. If I don’t like having my hair ripped out or being called “cum-slut,” does that mean I’m a prude or frigid or somehow not a fully realized sexual being?
To the contrary—I am a highly sexual woman. Just because I don’t want to be demeaned doesn’t mean I don’t have a sex drive or that I’m not insatiable. It also doesn’t mean I don’t like to mix things up and get kinky when I’m in a (dare I say the R word?) relationship. So when Adam asked me to go to a swinger’s club, I immediately said yes, mainly because I didn’t want to be labeled a prude.
And then it hit me: Why should I feel guilty and ashamed of not digging on orgies?
Maybe I should have given Adam a chance to engage a conversation, to talk honestly about the whole plan, but at the time I was completely convinced he’d think me a close-minded puritan and lose interest in me because I was not sexually “open.” Maybe I should have had that conversation. Maybe it would have benefited him. Maybe it would have benefited me. Maybe he was trying to show off, posturing the whole time, having porn star sex with me because he thought that’s what I wanted. Maybe the next time this happens I’ll have the balls to have that conversation, because it would probably have been better for both of us—good for him to hear that I’m not interested in that stuff, and equally good for me to start talking about the stuff I actually am into.
But for now, I’m glad I could assert what was right for me. I am neither virgin nor whore, and I choose to hold that space proudly, which is not easy to do. I’ve always felt pressured to be one or the other to suit some man’s fantasy. But now, at 36, I can admit that, while I love to screw, I don’t want to be degraded like a porn star, objectified like a whore, and I don’t enjoy being orally raped. Do I want dudes to piss on me? No. Do I want to be pounded so hard I get a vicious bladder infection? No, especially because I have terrible health insurance. Do I want to have a guy spray his cum all over my face while he hovers over me in a state of complete emotional detachment? No.
And at 36 I can also admit that I can’t do casual sex. If I sleep with someone, I start feeling an emotional bond, even though some sex workers and sex writers tell me that attachment is a myth propagated by the patriarchy to keep me sexually disempowered. It doesn’t matter — I can’t do it. Maybe that makes me uncool, unhip and undesirable, but I just don’t care anymore. Do I have to be emotionally attached to sleep with someone? Hell no — if a guy’s got charm and brains and that indefinable sex appeal I’ll want to rip my clothes off. But today, I have to use discretion. Today, I have to be honest with myself, and if I think the guy’s going to bounce the second he gets in my pants, I have to turn him down.
