From Slut to Sex-Positive
July 2008
My sexuality has always been a touchy subject for me, one that has inspired mixed emotion and intense inner scrutiny. From it's first blushes- puberty, masturbation, unconsummated relationships with bright eyed boys in catholic school uniforms- to the confusion and embarrassment of intimacy with my first sexual partners. I was embarrassed by my attraction to sex itself, by my desires. Becoming sexual was a slow process, one that was at times painful and even scattered with the odd moment of regret or irresponsibility. The fluid sexuality that I found so appealing, so intimidating that I wanted to possess and project it- the Jessica Rabbit, femme fatal, fuck-conventions type- wasn't just a red dress that I could slip into. Instead, shaping my sexual identity is a lifelong process, a series of decisions and actions that inform who I currently am and will shape who I will be in the future. Nothing about who I am as a sexual creature has been left fully to chance- I sought out scenarios, lovers, kinks that I wanted to explore. Famed text artist Jenny Holzer said, in her Survival series, "Let your hand wander on flesh to make possibility multiply."(1) I take that advice seriously. To close your mind to all but the most vanilla sex is to close yourself to your own nature. Sex is innate to humans- it is what we do. Just as you must have the ability to say no, you must also have the ability to say yes- yes to sex, to pleasure, and to yourself.
When I climb on top of Danny* he is sitting on his old, ragged couch, and I am on top, facing him. It only takes one minute for him to come- it is his first time. Later, we lay around in his bed after round two, a much longer romp that has left me out of breath and feeling very sweaty, hot, and swollen, my entire body expanding and red like fingers in the summer heat.
"I thought I was going to regret that. I'm not sure. I still might."
Danny, a friend of six years, is about to turn twenty-two and until this night, he'd never been so much as kissed. We went to dinner and a movie as friends and he brought me home where we got tipsy on cheap wine. I kissed him for so long that it brought back memories of high school, of make out sessions that left my jaw hurting and my lips chapped. I felt as it were a favor among friends, an initiation into adulthood, a firm kick in the small of the back, forcing him to step out of his prolonged state of abstinence into the bright, scary world of sex, love, and fuck buddies.
"I always thought of you as being a little… dirty."
I lay there, a usually unashamed girl, blushing, mad, embarrassed, regretting every kiss, every touch that I had shared with this boy.
"I mean, you're pretty experienced."
At this point, I roll over and start a rant, one that ends with "Anyway, it's only been four people, including you. So I'm not as pure as the driven snow, but I'm not a slut by any means."
Eventually I did tell him the truth, that the number was, at that point, seven, if we excluded my dalliances with women. And although "slut" was a word that was thrown around in his reaction, among others, I still didn't feel that I was one. I felt indignant and self-righteous as I listened to his barrage of insults. I was comfortable in my sexuality and being lectured by someone I had so recently slept with was a shock to my system. Perhaps my intense reaction to his insults stemmed from the long struggle with shame and embarrassment that I had endured as a sexual female. My comfort with sexuality was not innate- it was a hard-won view.
I grew up not knowing anything about sex beyond the jokes on sitcoms and pieces of conversations that I overheard my mother having. I once sat in the living room reading while she talked to her best friend about what a blow-job must feel like in the next room over, unaware of my presence. They laughed through comparisons to dipping their legs in hot water and having their fingers sucked on while I sat as still as a mouse on the couch, my cheeks burning with embarrassment, but wanting to hear more. I also went to church where I was told that sex was just for marriage, but I knew that was not true because my mom was having it even though she was single. I have to thank my mother and her giggling conversations about cocks and orgasms that she didn't know I heard for giving me a view of sex as something life affirming and fun, a view that I have now returned to after some years of emotional turbulence regarding the subject.
A main source of the shame that is associated with non-traditional sex (meaning just about anything beyond the lights-off, under the sheets, no talking, missionary position between a heterosexual married couple with no contraception and the intention to procreate) is from the conservative religious climate. Youth groups are a mainstay activity in my region, the ultra-conservative West Michigan. Our youth groups encourage abstinence and they talk about it as if it is the hip thing to do. Granted, making your own sexual decisions is, to me, the hip thing to do, but requiring abstinence is a command, not a choice, and it is contrary to the way our bodies are programmed. There is a reason a girl's panties start to get moist in high school when she sits next to a cute boy- after puberty, you are a sexual creature, regardless of whether you choose to act on it or not.
In droves, all across America, girls are putting on dresses, doing their hair with curls, hairspray, and tiaras. They are putting on perfume that fills their pink bedrooms with a flower-scented fog that lingers as they study their stained lips in the mirror and coat their eyelashes in thick mascara. They are getting ready, not for prom, but for Purity Balls where they will pledge their virginity to their fathers. Their fathers in turn pledge to protect the girls, help them remain chaste until marriage, at which point the girl's virginity will be relinquished to her so she can give it to her husband as a gift on their wedding night. The girls will dance like it is prom, but there will be no half-dressed romp in the limo- not until a few months later, of course, when the girls feel the desire for the first time to have fingers sliding into their panties, when the girls want to feel their boyfriends' dicks growing hard, when the girls want to take what they do at night, alone in their bedrooms, and add another person's anatomy to the mix. Then, unfortunately, they will fuck, but without condoms, without awareness of how to protect their bodies, without the information that health classes used to teach. Half of the teens that pledge to abstain from sex will go on to have sex within three years and 88 percent will have sex before marriage. However, "STD rates were significantly higher in communities with a high proportion of pledgers" most likely because of an odd anomaly- teens who pledge their virginity are less likely to protect their bodies with condoms when they break their pledges. If you have condoms, you were planning to have sex. The theory is that "If you don't, sex wasn't premeditated, which makes it more OK." The pledgers who do remain 'technical virgins' usually do have oral or anal sex, without condoms to lessen risks of STDs.(2)
The shame needs to be taken out of sexuality. American public schools in many states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Vermont, and Texas have been teaching "Abstinence Only" sex education classes. Massachusetts governor and native son of my home state of Michigan, Mitt Romney explains the reasoning behind abstinence only sex-ed by saying, "Abstinence education gives young people the support they need in making the decision to postpone sexual activity until they are mature enough to handle the emotional, moral and financial responsibilities of parenthood. This is more than teaching kids to say no – it will help them preserve self-esteem and build character."(3) The obvious flaw, however, is that abstinence only does not give support to the vast majority who will be making the decision to engage in sexual activity. Perhaps a better solution is to do as other states such as Oregon, California and New Jersey do- provide accurate medical information regarding sex, contraception, and STDs.
When I was in Catholic grade school, which followed the lead of the public schools in Michigan, sex education consisted of informative weeks of talking about safe sex and the biological structures of the male and female genitalia. Of course, in accordance with Catholic theology, we were told the church's stance on premarital sex, contraceptives, and abortions- in fact, parents could even opt out of having their children in the classroom during the sex ed classes. Kids in abstinence only schools are being told simply to wait for marriage to have sex, which reminds me of the sex-ed scene in the teen flick Mean Girls where the health teacher just says "If you have sex you will get pregnant and die." As said by Arthur Caplan for MSNBC, "Not only is such an approach contradicted by everything that medicine and science know about teens and sex, but it flies directly in the face of everything all ordinary Americans know about teens and sex."(4) He also points out that 70 percent of teenagers engage in oral sex, forty-five percent have sex, and 70 percent of girls and 80 percent of boys think that it is perfectly okay to have sex before marriage. In fact, 95 percent of Americans will have sex before they are married.(5) But for some reason that is beyond me, and apparently beyond common sense, the natural sexuality that has driven humanity throughout history is currently stigmatized culturally and politically to the point where legislation bans talking about it intelligently, where churches organize purity balls in which young girls promise to not let their boyfriends pop their cherries, and where I can lay naked next to my partner and feel shame for my sexual history.
When I first became sexual in high school, I felt shame for how my sexual desires presented themselves. While sex is everywhere the sex that is on every TV show and in every movie isn't the type of sex that happens in most people's bedrooms or even in their fantasy life. Real sex is less waxed, tanned, and photoshopped and more sweaty, varied, and messy. My own sexual appetite, for instance, was not fully immersed in the context of great romance. In high school I found it just as sexy to get ate out by a friend on his twin bed while his parents were in the next room as I found post-prom sex- and in all honesty, the idea of being wined and dined and then eventually bedded seemed rather boring and took all the spontaneity and fun out of it. While I do think now that a balance of love and lust, while hard to achieve, can be incredibly sexy, at the time the thought of "romance" was as repelling as fingernails on a chalkboard.
At the time of my sexual genesis, it was hard to combat the voice at the back of my head that cried "slut" every time I went down on a boy. Sometimes I doubted my motivations to engage in oral sex, and wondered why I let the number of penises that I had pleasured reach a number that required two hands to count before my eighteenth birthday. While I know why I gave them to boyfriends and to boys I liked, some were just guy friends, in parking lots and bedrooms all around my tiny hometown, my neck muscles tense, the taste of come and spit on my tongue. I liked the boys I fooled around with, in a way that was similar to a friendship that I would have with one of the girls I hung out with around the lunch table, but heightened by physical attraction. I suppose I just liked making a boy come, liked the idea of myself as a vixen, a bad girl who gave boys good head before they knew what to do with a girl's anatomy.
Once I was with Tom, a friend from school. We were parked in the parking lot for carpools, where businessmen meet up to drive to work in office towers in the city. I was bent at the stomach with my lips on his cock, feeling the tenseness in it, the jerking contractions, tasting his come rolling around on my tongue. I licked and sucked with the skill that my friends wouldn't acquire until they packed their Ford Escorts full of clothes and old microwaves and moved to the closest state university. Boys would kiss my cheek, thank me, and I would be the girl that gave them their first good sexual experience.
Sometimes the culture of sexual shame catches up to you in situations that you wouldn't imagine it rearing it's ugly head. It's like a story I read by Erika Mikkalo, about how she came to be a "slut". You follow a boy to the woods, you enjoy being undressed by him, enjoy bringing him pleasure, enjoy him trying to please you, confounded by female anatomy, fumbling, licking, fingering, and why does that make you a slut? Taking an active role in the same sexual scenario that makes the male partner a 'stud' often leads to the inaccurate and derogatory label of 'slut' for the female, despite the fact that both sexes are programmed to be sexual and to have sexual desires. It is a sexual double standard that creates this environment, and it allows the shame of sex to become a large part of self-esteem issues for girls, which is clearly something that doesn't need to be added to. Being ashamed of being impure is similar to being ashamed of simply being born with genitals. And anyway, like Mikkalo says, "I wasn't too concerned about being a 'good' girl because I'd never been one."(6) If we can, perhaps, become a culture that doesn't see sex as a morality issue that is black and white, with winners and losers, then perhaps women can stop feeling that they are bad simply because they are sexual.
My view of sex has recently taken another shift. I have found myself in love, and as a result, have found a way to bridge the gap between love and lust and incorporate the formerly dreaded concept of 'romance' into my sexual identity. This may be a cliché thought, and I admit that fully. As a girl who has dated furiously, has kissed and licked and fucked for years, has been actively searching out sex and relationships since I was thirteen and had my first kiss, so I'm actually approaching my first full decade of "dating", the sudden difference in how my guts react when this man is in the room seems more meaningful than I can easily. And the sex, while we are on the subject, is different as well. After seven years of sex, there aren't a whole lot of brand new positions or techniques, although he has been known to surprise me every now and again. However, every single thing, every touch, every kiss is completely different. When I am with him, in bed or not, it's as if my borders are nonexistent, as if my inner monologue quiets a little, my body becomes bigger, more alive, and I'm more connected to my nerve endings.
Douglas Coupland wrote a story once, that I love dearly. In it, a man talks to his estranged wife about intimacy: "I tell her how strange it is that we're trapped inside our bodies for seventy-odd years and never once in all that time can we just, say, park our bodies in a cave for even a five-minute break and float free from the bonds of Earth… I tell her that I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body."(7) As it happens, intimacy when combined with feeling of love is my cave, where I leave everything behind and am reduced to my purest form. It combines everything I've always loved about sex- tingles on my skin, the electric shock of pleasure, the ability to please another human being, the smells, sounds, and tastes that overwhelm senses- but it also brings an entire new level to it, one that I can hardly describe, but that makes me fully understand why I've been doing this for so long.
I'd like to recount one moment in my sexual past, with a boy that I dated for a month or so in high school. One summer day I am with Jon. We've just saw Attack of the Clones, and we kissed each time Yoda was on the screen. He is driving me home in his sister's car, and we stop in the parking lot to Leppink's. We park in the farthest away space from the door, and the car is enveloped in the shade of trees. I am laying in the backseat of the car, staring up at the clouds, my head resting on the open window. My pants are down and Jon eats me out while we listen to the local rock station. For a minute, watching the clouds through the branches and leafs of a birch tree, I lose track of where I am, what is going on- my brain dissolves into the moment, into the texture of a warm tongue and soft lips against my skin.
Although some of my sexuality leads me to fuck outside of the box of standard conventions, I've embraced who I am and what I want. I've battled with my shame of being a sexual creature, learned to go after what I really want sexually, and begun the journey of incorporating sex within a long term, monogamous relationship. Maybe I'm not a 'good' girl, but I am honest with myself, and I am happy with my sexual expression. Women's magazines and advice columns about sex have been telling women to claim their sexuality and tell their partners what they want for years and they will continue to do so, simply because women (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, men) are programmed by a sexually repressive society to feel embarrassed to ask for more oral sex or for new positions. And it isn't until we remove the stigma from all things that go on between consensual adults that women will feel comfortable saying "Hey, pay more attention to my clit." Sex is not just sex and it is not just love. It isn't just lust and kinks. It is not dirty, it isn't bad, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. If you like sex, that doesn't make you a slut and if you aren't interested in sex, that doesn't make you a prude. Sex, like anything, is personal. It is a life affirming expression of yourself and of your feelings.
****
* Names changed. I won't kiss and tell.
1. Holzer, Jenny. "Survival, 1983-1985". University of California, San Diego. July 9, 2008 .
2. Baumgardner, Jennifer. "Would you pledge your virginity to your father?". Glamour.
3. Ambinder, Marc. "A Michigan Activist Wants To Make Sure You Know Mitt Romney". The Hotline. July 16, 2008 .
4. Caplan, Arthur. "Abstinence-only sex ed defies common sense". MSNBC. July 9, 2008 .
5. Wind, Rebecca . "Premarital Sex is Nearly Universal Among Americans, and Has Been For Decades". Guttmacher Institute. July 9, 2008 .
6. Mikkalo, Erica. "How to be a Slut." Sex and Single Girls: Straight and Queer Women on Sexuality. Ed. Lee Damsky. Tronto: Seal Press, 2000.
7. Coupland, Douglas. Life After God. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
Copyright 2008 Jessa Marsh
Read Comments
Posted on 09-29-08 9:46am by Michelle
Just so you know.
"inane"
1 : empty , insubstantial
2 : lacking significance, meaning, or point : silly
I believe the word you were looking for was "innate."
"innate"
1 : existing in, belonging to, or determined by factors present in an individual from birth : native , inborn
2 : belonging to the essential nature of something
Posted on 09-29-08 9:57am by Michelle
Last lines.
I love these last lines;
"Sex is not just sex and it is not just love. It isn't just lust and kinks. It is not dirty, it isn't bad, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. If you like sex, that doesn't make you a slut and if you aren't interested in sex, that doesn't make you a prude. Sex, like anything, is personal. It is a life affirming expression of yourself and of your feelings."
What a perfect conclusion.
Posted on 10-02-08 6:50pm by Nikita
No Subject
This is a very interesting discussion on sexuality. The use of outside published sources along your own experiences and observations creates a very broad and varied view, which is really the only way this subject can be looked at to see it at all accurately.