Sexy, Not Sexual

I

My mother tells me that I was being ogled by men by the time I was four years old. I was a very active child, so I had good musculature and enviable posture. Four years old was about the time she noticed men watching me wherever I went, and also about the time men seemed to start deciding it would be okay to discuss my body with her. It became even more imperative not to let me out of her sight after that.

I remember being maybe five, walking my grandmother's dog up and down in front of her house, always in view of the big picture window, and being approached by a youth in his late teens or early twenties. He asked me things like, “How old are you?” “Do you live here?” “Does your dog bite?” Finally he told me to call him when I turned 18. I didn't know what that meant at the time, but I kind of felt what it meant.

I must have been only ten, on a road trip with my parents, watching Disney movies and playing with my Barbies in the backseat, when we stopped at a truck stop diner to eat. We walked in, started perusing the menu at the counter, and I suddenly got an incredibly uneasy feeling. I looked around, and every single man in the establishment was turned to stare at me. Me. Not my father, not my mother (who was very curvaceous herself), but me. The wolves had caught my nubile scent. That is the very first time I remember consciously feeling the male gaze, and it crashed into me like a tidal wave.

From that minute on, I interacted in the world differently. From that minute on, I was on a stage, and if I was going to be constantly watched, I would give the audience a show.

II

I have dozens of older male cousins, uncles, brothers, and a father, and ever since I can remember, all of the men in my life have been telling me, "Do not trust guys. Guys only want one thing from you, and you will not, under any circumstances, give it to them." Over and over and over and over, and in every way possible. As far as I can remember this is what all of my conversations with adult men were about. You know, until I was old enough for them to start asking me, "So why don't you have a boyfriend?”

These lessons and interrogations were meant to be cute, sweet, and protective. They did it out of love for me and worry for what inevitably happens to any child when they grow up. They wanted me to know that they would have my back if anyone tried to hurt me, and there is no denying that that is incredibly sweet and endearing. I would imagine that the majority of southern girls have experienced this same thing from the adult males in their lives, and it affected each and every one of us differently. But for me it ended up being a mantra that stuck with me like superglue to my fingers, and it inhibited my actions in the world as such; you can scrub and scrub, and the glue won't come off without taking a little piece of your skin with it. Or you can wait for life to wear it down, for you to shed the skin that the glue is adhered to, simply through living. Either way, it doesn’t come off easily, and it makes your fingers feel like they no longer belong to you: there is a boundary now between you and the world. These male-given, man-hating diatribes made my body feel like something that didn’t truly belong to me, because the underlying assumption with those assertions is that it doesn’t. Since this meant there was no way I could protect my own body from any man if he wanted it, I became detached from my ownership of myself. And so every conversation with male relatives became a fresh application of glue.

Even to this day, at 27-years-old, the first thing my brothers will say to me if I make any mention of dating a guy is some variation of: “If he ever hurts you I will end his life,” and though it's relatively sweet, that line of threats and promises always continues for at least ten minutes. Thus, every crush or relationship I’ve ever had has begun with the idea that the boy in question can, and probably will, hurt me. As a result, I became terrified, distrustful, and disdainful towards men. But not men in general. I had the men in my family and some very good male friends, all of whom I trusted implicitly, but now there was a new subset that encompassed every other man who might view me sexually. The rhetoric of the men I trusted created an entirely new category of males in my head.

I came to believe that these men, that I will call “Fem Farmers,” are like pig farmers who specialize in women. First of all, they own the female body. They carefully oversee the breeding, nurturing, and growth of women. They count and weigh them, poke and prod them, manhandle and discuss them in vulgar terms, decide which of them are good for which tasks, and then funnel them into separate chutes to either be gobbled up or bred. Controlling women’s bodies is their livelihood and the source of all of their profits. Women are property, and women are meat. To Fem Farmers the very core value of me was as a sexual object and nothing else. But honestly, that was a better option than to have no value at all, because that chute ends in obsolescence. So I had decided to give my audience, my overseers, what they wanted: I acted sexy, dressed sexy, walked sexy, and danced sexy. But most importantly, I talked dumb. Because in my mind all any man/boy/guy cared about is whether or not I was sexy. Because still for a great number of men, smart is not sexy.

So the number one rule of the game became: be sexy in every way possible, but never give anyone actual sex. This, I deduced, was my power. This was the way to "win" the Game of Life. Be sexy, but not sexual. Be something good to look at and you will command attention. Be something good in bed and you have given all of your power away to the men who enjoy it. Mystery and anticipation are what was actually sexy, so “giving it up” stripped away your mystery, therefore your sexiness, and thus, your power. Sex made you vulnerable, and vulnerability was not sexy. In fact, it made you prime for slaughter.

Life became a competition of Boy vs. Girl, "giving it up" was the ultimate loss, and I am ignited by a challenge. In this way “teasing” became the only option available to me: turn them on and scamper off. This got me labeled as a tease, a slut (by the girls), and a lesbian interchangeably in middle school and high school (so I guess you could say I was a triple threat?), but the most important thing to me was that I never gave it up. I was still winning the ultimate game, and that’s all that mattered.

III

I was a gregarious child, and I am a vivacious person. When I was a baby, before I could talk, if anyone around me was sad or quiet, I would fix them with an iconic smirk and belt out “HAH-HAH!” at regular intervals until anyone and everyone was laughing. In preschool I was never afraid to approach a new person for friendship. I was always the first to introduce myself to boys and girls alike, and get a game of “Pretend” going. By all accounts, throughout my childhood I was the cuddliest, huggiest, most touchy-feely little girl in the world. But around age 13 my parents began to notice I never wanted to be touched anymore. I would angrily and violently squirm away from their hands, wriggle out of anyone’s lap or embrace. That of course was in large part due to the raging hormones of puberty, but I think it was also a reaction to feeling like my body was not mine, to feeling the weight of those bodily labels more heavily than the weight of my forming breasts. I love people, and people are attracted to me. But when your body is all you think you have to offer anyone, for your whole life you have been put into very specific boxes because of it, and it is changing before your eyes, you want to hide in your chrysalis until you know what the metamorphosis will leave you with.

But my body only became more sexual, of course. "Sexy" became my core identifier to the outside world and therefore "smart" was locked away in the basement. I acted dumb because if no one cared about anything but how sexy I was, if everyone was going to label me based on that, without caring about any other aspect of my person, then I wasn't going to show anyone anything but how sexy I was. No man deserved it, and no man could handle it, being the “essentially sex-driven, lizard-brained savages” I had learned and taught myself they were. Being smart was not sexy, and sexy is all I was and could be to them. It was deflection: attracting their attention to my body was a tactic for protecting my true self from the predators’ notice.

But the problem is that I am smart. I got straight A's all through high school. I earned an International Baccalaureate diploma, which still remains the hardest two years of my education. I graduated from an amazing liberal arts college Summa Cum Laude and with honors in Anthropology. I love school, I love learning, and I love expressing myself in a multitude of ways, but I didn't think any men deserved that self-expression from me, because I didn't think any of them would value it for what it was truly worth. The Fem Farmers would funnel me right into the slaughter chute if they were to even suspect.

So with this big, heavy, human brain of mine, my adolescence became an exercise in over-analyzing myself and maintaining my white-knuckled clutch on the reigns of my body. When I entered college I found unprecedented relief in relinquishing those reigns to the carefree abandon of alcohol. I did not, and do not, have a problem with addiction, but I had built a wall around my life composed entirely of inhibitions, and alcohol was the toddler crashing through my Lego castle. If I was addicted to anything, it was that toddler’s pure and contagious laughter as the bricks fell to the ground; but without fail, the next day while the toddler slept, I would resolutely rebuild that castle each and every time. Intelligence was packed carefully inside the walls where no one could scrutinize, and ogle, and gossip about it like they did my body, and the moat swam with (sexy, sexy) alligators to deter anyone from climbing the turrets.

However, I didn't truly realize the monstrosity of impenetrable proportions that I had built until sophomore year of college. That year, on a regular weekend, one of my dearest friends (who was a psychology major, incidentally) asked me to take a walk around campus with her to discuss something with me. I was confused and nervous, because we had never done this before and something was obviously wrong. Finally she worked up the courage to tell me that she was concerned about how I acted around, and presented myself to, men. I was completely blind-sided by this. Isn't this how you’re supposed to act with men? Aren't they supposed to be kept at arm's length only, warily watched as they lustfully watched us? Like predator and prey circling each other in a stand-off that could only end in one of you losing?

...No?

Oh...

So after my intervention, I slowly and painfully started training the "dumb blonde" persona out of myself. It wasn't immediate, and it wasn't easy. It was gradual and subtle. My friends noticed, and through their encouragement I was finally beginning to believe that men could find value in my brain. I started taking to Facebook to express myself. I began small, relaying silly observations and events in my life in funny ways, and the responses I got fueled me to keep testing the waters. I gradually increased to things that seemed silly but became unexpectedly deep, and people started to be delightedly surprised with my “sneak-attack wit.”

Yet, still when I crossed the stage to get my college diploma, announced with all of my honors, there was actually a split second of stunned silence from the audience before such uproarious applause that I actually gasped before sprinting to get out of the limelight. Afterwards I was bombarded by my classmates rushing up to tell me that I "won college" because they “had no idea [I was] smart!”

Well, that there was another challenge. That false perception was my own doing and I had to fix it. I have spent the last five years carefully crafting Facebook rants, musings, and observations, hitting that "post status" button and releasing my brain into the world. That has been one of the very best things for my "recovery" and I am proud of how far I've come. I am truly myself in the world now, the good, the bad, the ugly, AND the sexy, and I'm never looking back.

But that doesn't mean that years of psychological training have gone away. It doesn’t mean I’ve scrubbed off all of the glue. The problem now was that my sexuality had always been so public that I had absolutely no idea of how to deal with it in private. In private, all of the strictly obeyed rules by which I had crafted my entire public persona didn’t apply. In private I was continually sent out onto the stage without knowing any of my lines. It was like the field of play had been switched from freshly mown grass to four-feet of swamp muck.

And even though I now unabashedly own my sexiness in the public sphere, I am still a sexual object in a man’s world. Cat-calling and street harassment are pervasive for all women. The fear of random acts of violence against women and rape is real and omnipresent. I have, on multiple occasions, been straight up told by both strange and familiar men, many variations of, “You look like you would be good at sex.” But despite the vulgarity, at least those men are upfront about what they want. Dating these days, or the pathetic attempt at the façade of dating, can for the vast majority of my experience be boiled down to: “excuse me, Madam, I would very much like to use your body to pleasure myself. What’s the going rate? A couple of rum-and-cokes? Dinner if you’re feeling hard-to-get?”

Women have a lot of terrible sexual experiences. I have had a lot of terrible sexual experiences. Many men have had terrible sexual experiences as well, and I am definitely not trying to demean victims of male molestation or rape, but for women, traumatization by a sexual experience is almost considered inevitable. Yet, when I learned from my gynecologist that I myself have some psychological sexual trauma that was manifesting with physical side effects, it still shook me up more than I expected it to. I have never been violently raped, but I have typed up over thirty pages of stories of my non-consensual, scary, sad, ridiculous, and sometimes hilarious dealings with “Fem Farmers,” and I think the majority of women in this great-big, blue, world could probably do the same. In fact, all of my diaries from ages seven to twenty-seven could probably have a fourth of their contents extracted and the remainder simply be renamed “My Confounding, Dumb, and Terrifying Interactions With People Who Own Penises.”

So I knew I had issues with sex and men, but I didn’t know it was diagnosable, and what my gynecologist finally revealed to me is that I was switching up the playing fields myself. I have the script, but I’m terrified of playing the part. Where I am the star of the half-time show on the big stadium stage, I have crippling stage fright in the intimacy of the small local theater, and I am the only person who can fix that.

IV

It is true that my detachment from, casual disdain for, and terror of Fem Farmers throughout my life have been responses to relentless, pervasive, and both painfully subtle and outrageously aggressive, oppression by them. It’s an extreme reaction to the feeling that my body puts me in a lesser category than a male body does, because I don’t own mine. Somehow the Fem Farmer owns his and he also owns mine. It is the extreme reaction to the knowledge that my body can be usurped from me at any point, that all men want to seize it like a barbarian army eyeing an enemy fortress, and that that is only their nature, so it can’t be helped. I have been sexualized for my entire life, and that took my sexuality away from me. But that was kind of the point, wasn’t it?

I have had my ass slapped, grabbed, and fondled by males I knew and by complete strangers, in public and in private spaces, since I was 11 or 12 years old. I’ve had strange men try to finger me on crowded dance floors. I have had bosses and interns alike, talk to, and text me, inappropriately at work. I have been unknowingly followed home by someone whom I thought was a friend, yet accosted me outside of the building, without speaking a word, and shoved his hands into my pants before I could, in shock, squirm away and run up the stairs. Things like this have happened to me countless numbers of times in countless situations. And in probably more than 75% of cases I responded by giggling and playfully pushing the aggressor away as if we were in on some funny joke together. Why? Because as a woman, not only are you taught to always say “no,” but you are also taught that when your no’s don’t work you just need to “not make things weird.” According to a great number of people out there, my sexuality is not mine, and making a scene when a man tries to take it from me would somehow be the obscene part of that situation. My body is unclaimed territory, prime for the taking, unless I have a boyfriend of course. Men may not respect the land itself, but they do respect another man’s flag shoved into it.

Speaking of boyfriends, I’ve had multiple best-friend’s boyfriends get drunk and try to get me to kiss them, or hit on me, or grab my ass, or all of the above. In college one time I got a little too drunk at a house party, so my friend put me in bed next to her already-passed-out boyfriend; a boy I knew and trusted and that my friend obviously trusted as well. The whole reason for putting me in there with him was to make sure no random party-goer could prey upon me in my weakened state. I woke up to that boyfriend playing with my panty-line and stroking my waist and hips. But I lay there and pretended to be asleep, moving away from him as much as I could while maintaining my sleeping facade, because maybe he was sleep-fondling and I didn’t want to make things weird.

“Oh you know how men are, they just can’t help it!”

“They just want to show you how attractive you are, what’s the big deal?”

“If you didn’t want it then why were you flirting with me?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have dressed like that.”

“Why didn’t you just say ‘no’?”

Because women are indoctrinated to not make a scene, not be hysterical or crazy, and most importantly, not to be “mean,” a bitch, or “bossy.” Because often times this type of thing happens to us at the hands of people we know and trust, and the event is so shocking you don’t know what to do in the moment. Because saying “no” only works some of the time, and having your “no’s” ignored feels like having boulders catapulted right into your castle walls. It’s much easier, much more palatable for your psyche, to pretend like you’re in on the plan, than to accuse someone of having an extreme and frightening power over you to make you do what they want. Womanhood, as I’ve known it, is about creating layers upon layers of protection around yourself; digging your moat until you suddenly find yourself to be on an island. Don’t let any man get too close because he will take any opportunity to get much closer than you want him to. And you know what he’ll be saying the whole time? “Don’t make this weird. Don’t make this weird. Don’t make this weird.”

So in a sense, my cousins, uncles, brothers, and father were all right. There is a lot of evidence out there that the Fem Farmers are after one thing and one thing only. That they will try to get that thing at any cost, using any tricks, without any care for what the woman actually wants. Pervasive sexism and patriarchy STILL, in 2016, can lay waste to the fortress you've built of yourself. And it's easy as women to collect all of these different oppressive experiences with men, in all of the facets of our lives, and say, simply, "well…so men just kinda suck, yeah?" But, they are as much victims of the patriarchy as we are, because they have been funneled into these roles generation after generation. Our society teaches boys from the earliest ages that femininity is derogatory (“you pansy,” “you pussy,” “You throw like a girl”), so how can they not come out thinking women are the lesser? And we cannot forget that where sexual predation is concerned, women are perpetrators too.

When girls are taught to only say “no,” boys learn that “no” sometimes means “yes.” Femininity is already devalued, as detailed above, so this doubly devalues the female “no,” to the point of making “yes” obsolete. In the same vein, our society teaches that men should always want to say “yes,” and if they are truly a red-blooded, virile man, there is no reason for them ever to say “no.” In this way, girls learn to devalue a boy’s “no” too. We need to take back the power of the “yes.” Little girls should not be taught to always say “no,” and little boys should not be taught that their manliness hinges on always saying, or getting, “yes.” All genders should be taught how to know when they are truly ready to say “yes,” and only then will we get back the power of “no.”

So, it’s not “men” as a general population that I should be afraid of, and it never has been. What my uncles, brothers, father, and cousins should have been teaching me my whole life was to fear and fight a society in which a) girls are continuously told their bodies are not theirs, and b) boys are continuously told to staunchly shun femininity, but relentlessly chase females. Even by women, and in every form of media, the female form is open to more scrutiny than anything else: more than the rampant corruption in our banks and politics, more than the completely avoidable, careless human practices that are raping our planet to the eventual point of our own extinction. Nothing is more carefully and systematically dissected, maintained, and regulated on every level of our society than the female form, and we are taught that we need to scrutinize our own bodies even on top of that. Imperfection is not an option, and the idea that you can do what you want with your own body is offensive and even selfish.

V

In my adult life, many people have told me on multiple occasions that I am “the most complicated person they know,” that I’m “difficult”, and “too much.” I’ve been continuously told I’m an “anomaly,” an “enigma.” People constantly tell me they can’t figure me out. I've never purposefully aimed for that perception, but in a sense that is exactly what I want, because that means my life’s work has been a success. Mystery is sexy, sexy is mystery, and both are me in a nutshell.

But on another level, really I think people have “trouble” figuring me out because the world is an anomaly to me, and I can’t figure it out. I can see how my outward confidence in most other areas of my life can clash with my inner confusion of what is right and normal in a sexual sense. But that is because up until now, nearly every one of my sexual interactions has been a paradox: I have been systematically trained throughout my entire life to fear all of the ways that men would try to use my body, yet either chastised for being too hard on my gentleman suitors or pitied for not dating at all. I have been told that I am sexually appealing unceasingly, in every way possible, and in every type of outfit, but then asked with disdain why I dress and act so sexually when I specifically decide to show off my curves. I have been groped, fondled, and had my confusion taken advantage of so many times that I consider that to be normal, only to have those same guys go and crow to their friends about their big score; they had, after all, beat me in the game. So this is how I seem to come off to people as if I have little insecurity, when in reality I am plagued by it. And I know I am not the only one.

But what I’ve finally learned is that despite what much of our society would have us believe, I do live in a place and time where I can actually control my own sexuality. My female body does not have to be submissive. Having control over my body and myself does not mean abstaining from sex, it means actually making all of my sexual decisions for myself, for my own reasons. As females we truly have to start being our real selves in the world; sometimes, or most times, we will have to aggressively be ourselves, because sometimes or most times ourselves are aggressively attacked just for being what they are. It’s time for us to take sole ownership of our own bodies, and it’s time for us to make things weird.

I’m writing this now for any young girls out there who are confused or scared like I have been, and still am: some people will try to hurt you, so you have to be on your toes. But protecting yourself does not mean suppressing your sexuality, it means taking control of it in any way that you feel fit. Your body is yours. Your brain is yours. Do not ever let anyone else make you feel like they have more of a right to either of those precious things than you do. You’ll need to use both to navigate this world, and you need to remember that you are the goddamn Commander in Chief. Because I can’t stand the thought of any more generations of girls in this country going through the needless turmoil that I went through and am still experiencing. I cannot express how deeply I feel the ache in every one of my bones from 27 years of worrying about how the world perceives my body, and I need to do my part to protect anyone else I can from that.

You cannot control how other people perceive you, but you can control how you move through the world. You can be sexy and smart. In fact, to any partner who is worth anything, smart is sexy. The body does not function without the brain, and someone figuring out the riddle of your beautiful brain should be the only key to your bodily VIP access (even if that riddle is simply, “What has two thumbs and wants to have sex with you?”). These days I’ve learned to walk sexy, talk sexy, dress sexy, dance sexy, and slice up my foes with a razor tongue. I do it all for me, and by extension, for the people who have earned their key. As women we need to create our own mantra, for our sake and for the sake of all of the men and women who will come after us: our bodies are ours and our sexualities are ours, and when we want to, we can, and should be, both sexy and sexual. That’s just how women are, and we shouldn’t have to help it. These are our bodies, and only we have the right to decide what to do with them. It’s about time Fem Farmers became obsolete.