While we do see efforts to combat this narrative, the labor is often performed by women of color. Rapper Lil’ Kim emphasized the priority of women’s sexual sovereignty in the 1990s through her sartorial decisions and in her music, as did Foxy Brown. Salt-N-Pepa released singles like “Shoop” and “Push It”—“Can’t you hear the music’s pumpin’ hard like I wish you would?” they rap in the latter—that delight in the expression of unbridled female desire. As the AIDS epidemic ravaged marginalized communities across the United States, the late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes of the R&B trio TLC donned a condom as an eye patch to broadcast to her fan base the importance of safe sex. In the early aughts, rapper Khia’s 2002 single “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)” announced itself with a salaciously matter-of-fact demand for men’s attention to female pleasure. Over the course of her career, Missy Elliott, too, has recorded music that unapologetically showcases her stipulations for any person she takes to bed. More recently Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion, and Cardi B have asserted themselves in wardrobe and in their lyrics as assertively sexual. Minaj, for instance, raps confidently about who wants to fuck her and who hasn’t, and what she demands from a lover in the bedroom. The track “Only,” from her 2014 studio album The Pinkprint, opens with an especially audacious declaration: “Yo, I never fucked Wayne, I never fucked Drake / All my life, man, fuck’s sake / If I did, I did a ménage with ’em / And let ’em eat my ass like a cupcake.” Both Lil Wayne and Drake appear on the track after Minaj’s opening verse as rejected suitors who emphasize their unceasing devotion to her.
Model and actress Amber Rose has taken an especially keen approach to challenging the extant diminishing perceptions of female sexuality. In 2015, she introduced SlutWalk as a yearly event that recognized the systemic shaming women endure for expressing their sexualities, raised awareness for domestic violence, and called for the abolishment of rape culture, as well as general inequities of sex and gender. The event was successful while it lasted—Rose canceled it in 2019 for personal reasons20—nonetheless, Rose, like Lil’ Kim, Minaj, and Cardi B, remains a target for her sexual assertiveness. Similarly to SATC’s Samantha, few would argue that these women are unappealing for rapping about or discussing their relish for explicit sexual acts, but as women of color, their sexuality is already coded as excessive, hazardous. They are fundamentally vulnerable to attacks of lewdness that white celebrities more easily eschew. Decades before, Madonna—now anointed as a national sex symbol—confronted similar, though less virulent, protestations after filming controversial music videos for “Justify My Love” (1990) and “Erotica” (1992) and, in 1992, after publishing the coffee-table book aptly titled Sex (the book contains footage from the latter music video). But Madonna has always been legible to the mainstream palate: even when her videos are challenging or nearly pornographic, her careening melodies and soprano voice mitigate any perceived aggression. She knows how to deliver a hook and a chorus—how to package a song so that it is widely digestible. And, for the most part, especially as she has reinvented herself time and again as a pop genius, a guru, and as a mother, she has been treated as an exception. If both your commercial and physical desirability are not in question, you may not escape the stigma of sexual too muchness, but you won’t be lampooned.
Combating deep-seated, culturally sanctioned shame is already a complex business, particularly when it comes to younger girls. And at present, intense sexual drive is still coded as shameful, if not explicitly then implicitly. We praise women like Nicki Minaj and Amber Rose for their unrepentant sexuality with the recognition that we do not have their celebrity, their bodies, or their access to a glamorous lifestyle in which one is paid to be beautiful. We also recognize the condemnation directed at them for defying fixed ideals of feminine decorum. We’re offered the binaristic possibilities of slut—as it is hegemonically defined—and punch line. Neither are culturally attractive options. We are taught to strive to be Charlottes or, if we must, Samanthas—never Megan from Bridesmaids. There is nothing so embarrassing, Western culture admonishes, than female horniness unrequited. And as for Carmilla, who stalks her girlishly naïve conquests in the night, well—get thee behind me, foul lesbian vampire. Be the chaste girl who spends her Friday night swapping benign pleasantries on a Tinder date—not the one ensconced at home masturbating in her underwear, as pornography blares its telltale dirty talk from the computer screen. Yet I’d protest that with access to the right materials, the latter is a perfectly delectable way to kick off the weekend.
Chapter Nine
Cheat
Those of us who choose to marry and represent that bond with a set of rings know the soft anxiety of a ring fitting. One tries to determine aesthetic and tactile preferences in a context leaden with both cultural and economic heft, all the while fielding a volley of questions, the practical jumbled with the existential. “How does the size seven feel? Now try the six and three quarters. Better? Do you want it to feel loose or snug? Remember, your comfort is the most important thing. Do your fingers expand in the summer? What sort of wedding do you want? Are you planning to have kids soon?”
It’s preferable to avoid selecting a ring so small it throttles your finger, but that’s a far less disquieting possibility than the alternative: a wedding band that’s too loose. A wedding band, slightly slicked with hand cream, that flees your finger with a flick of your hand. A wedding band that—in the perfect convergence of circumstances—transforms an afternoon into a cliché by bouncing off your finger onto the sidewalk and then clinking tragically down a storm drain.
A lost wedding ring, beyond the distress it engenders, carries an ominous symbolism. It implies the fallibility of an institution: one that has, historically, been relied upon to fasten society’s hold on women’s bodies and freedom. Bulky with long-cherished ideals, not to mention anxieties and hopes, a wedding band encircles not just a finger but a selfhood. After all, when we finally settle on the precise measurements, tentatively shake our hands once or twice to ensure minimal wiggle room, we are not merely demonstrating that we fit inside its perimeter. We are promising our partner, ourselves, and the institution of traditional marriage that we are the sort of women who can abide by matrimony’s dictates, that we—for better or for worse, ’til death do us part—can conform to the ring’s smooth but unyielding contours.
For many women, this transition is a joyful, easy one. Marriage is one form of commitment among a platter of options, and if it seems most personally suitable, then there’s no reason to reject it. But our fetishization of marriage—in no small part manifested by the industrial complex buttressing it—can muddy the boundary between want and obligation. Someone who has never had cause to doubt the logic of marriage is likely to assume the mantle more willingly and with less agitation. And yet there are thousands of women who marry, happily, only to realize that the constraints do not suit them, whether due to a shift in their relationship or simply because they find themselves disinclined toward institutionalized monogamy. There are women who shift restlessly beneath traditional matrimony’s burden, try as they might to acclimate to it. Desire, they find, is not some malleable clay. When we promise to always want the same person, and all that accompanies them, we are throwing dice that will not necessarily land where we intend. Or perhaps we have taken a gamble on ourselves, only to realize that when we are shoved like fingers into wedding bands, we begin to throb under the constriction.
Sometimes these women fuck up: we have one-night stands or protracted affairs or perhaps kiss a random person in an out-of-town bar. Whatever American culture would have us believe, infidelity is not necessarily a relationship’s death knell. But sometimes we realize that, rather than recalibrating as a couple—reconciling, and returning, newly penitent—we long for emancipation.
A woman who cheats, especially a woman tethered to a conventional marriage, knows all too well that the only act more egregiously selfish than infidelity is abandonment. To be clear, there are certain specific extenuating circumsta
nces: we are more inclined to exonerate a woman fleeing an abusive marriage or a philandering spouse. Without these caveats, any woman serving divorce papers suffers leery, sidelong glances, sometimes even outright censure. Before Cheryl Strayed finally declared, under the alias of Dear Sugar, that “wanting to leave is enough,”1 women had only been supplied with liturgy to the contrary; a liturgy that continues to ensnare unhappily married women in the familiar haunts, whether church, family, or one’s own carefully learned, internalized shame.
And for an adulteress to leave her marriage, well, that’s altogether worse. It means wearing one’s sin like silk lingerie, reveling in its pleasures and daring others to protest. Demanding a divorce after committing infidelity implies the latter’s legitimacy. Women are supposed to be humbled—shamed—by the emotional and sexual excesses that render us incompatible with a measured life. And when we sleep with the wrong people, uttered apology is not sufficient. Our lives, even our sexual sovereignty, must serve as apology.
But for all the bite of its condemnation, Western culture has something of an, ahem, “love affair” with adultery, and more specifically with adulterous women. In books and plays and films, from The Scarlet Letter to Madame Bovary and Tyler Perry’s Temptation, we are taught again and again a lesson held dear by masculine society: that women of unwieldy emotion are neither trustworthy nor suited for coupling. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the theocracy’s true believers might say that we are “unfit.” But then, women like me—women who are Too Much—have never needed dystopian fiction to imagine how their sexuality, their flings and extramarital crushes and dirty talk, might be vilified and punished.
* * *
In the rearview mirror, my affair, a one-week cataclysm that cracked open the winter of 2010, seems ludicrous and resistant to comprehension: it’s banal in its particulars, yet it was for me both shatteringly ecstatic and distressing. When I kissed Paul, it was the end of my first, frenzied semester as a doctoral student. I had only been married to my husband, Nick, since August. My panicked heart burned and sputtered.
I fell in love with Paul slowly, but easily. We met in a graduate seminar on nineteenth-century literature: I admired his artful, quick-witted mind and his velvety warm blue eyes. After collaborating on a class presentation, I was enthralled, but in a way that seemed chaste, even sisterly. I had never found it difficult to maintain platonic male friendships while romantically committed, so I assumed the band on my finger wouldn’t bar friendship now.
But once I acknowledge my attraction to a person, I am almost irrevocably distracted, my awareness totally reoriented by piqued desire and curiosity. Such was the case when, one fall evening, Paul and I grabbed a beer at a restaurant near campus. I had reassured myself that this outing was innocent—why not make friends with my new classmates? But as the night drew on and the beer eased my edges, Paul’s own form, though shadowed by the dim light, seemed to solidify before me, peripheries defined, precious matter within a nothing of space. I could hold him, and I wanted to. Some obscure voice at the back of my head admonished me to wave aside these thoughts, to excuse myself to the bathroom and douse my face (a foolproof measure if ever there was one). But I was as curious about my desire as my head was muddled by it. I hadn’t had a crush in years, and my affection for Nick had long lapsed into an antiseptic lull.
Later that evening, Paul walked me to the metro station. As we crossed a pedestrian bridge, we paused at the midpoint to look at the night. Always keen to imbue any moment with cinematic gravitas, I cast the two of us in my mind’s off-brand Nicholas Sparks flick.
After we were married, Paul would tell me that, over the course of the evening, he had thought to himself, wryly, what a perfect date we were having. But in the moment, he betrayed not a trace of partiality or affection beyond the bounds of friendship. I left him at the train and returned home disappointed, though I muttered to myself punishing admonishments. It was ridiculous, not to mention hazardous, to dwell on this attraction. It was crucial—positively crucial—to get a goddamn grip. I tucked myself into bed and dreamily recollected the evening until I fell asleep. Paul’s face drifting before my tired eyes, a gentle, sweet-hearted, imminent crash.
* * *
It always begins this way, doesn’t it? Or so that is what the prevailing adultery narratives would have us think. Two people meet; one is attached, but they proceed without caution almost defensively, as if to say, “Why should I be careful when I would never dream of committing such a clichéd indiscretion?” (I pawed at the very same excuse.)
Then follow the swollen silences and lingering glances that you don’t entirely want to go unnoticed. Perhaps there is a crisis of conscience a mere half a breath before succumbing to passion—but this isn’t right!—and then, of course, the bittersweet, utterly rhapsodic consummation of desire. More often than not, these plotlines center around a woman who, despite some (never enough) effort, cannot stem the flow of sexual impulse, or one who is more unabashedly insatiable. And more often than not, the woman is punished—by man or by happenstance—for an indulgence that disrupts the harmony of a heterosexual pairing. Were women not so sexually greedy, were they not so lascivious or curious or mercurial, infidelity would not be the scourge upon matrimony that it has always been.
The Victorians, keen artists of stigma that they were, conceived of sexually excessive women in biblical terms. Women who committed adultery, divorced, made a living by sex work, or had a child out of wedlock—even if by rape—were branded as “fallen.” The Edenic origin of the term is evident, as are the implications of a higher feminine ideal that the so-called fallen woman has betrayed. Victorian literature is well-populated by these women, sometimes as cautionary tales, or in the case of less ideologically rigid writers, to emphasize the impossible standards to which women were held.
For even if a woman did not exactly commit adultery, her reputation suffered as if she had. Author George Eliot, née Mary Ann Evans, lived at the periphery of polite society because her partner, philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, was unable to divorce his estranged wife. While they were by no means the first lovers to engage in extramarital coupling, Lewes and Eliot were uniquely bold in declaring themselves husband and wife—Eliot even began referring to herself as Mary Ann Evans Lewes. Consequently, Victorian society regarded the couple, particularly Eliot, as sexually perverse polygamists. However illustrious her writing career, Eliot could not escape the puritanical rhetoric that interpreted her decisions as ones fueled by intemperate lust and disregard for the sacrament of marriage.
It’s likely that Eliot’s own “fallen” status inspired her, at least to some degree, to pursue narratives invested in similar themes. When I first read her 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss during my senior year of high school, I found a kindred spirit in Maggie Tulliver, Eliot’s incandescent, frenetic heroine. From her childhood, Maggie is chastised for her rashness and intensity particularly by her brother Tom, the novel’s foremost exemplar of patriarchal duty and intractability. And when she comes of age she encounters one of the signature predicaments of the sexy Victorian lass: mutual, forbidden attraction that her beloved chases, regardless of its ramifications for her.
Because The Mill on the Floss is a mid-Victorian novel, we only learn of Maggie’s burgeoning erotic interest and, ultimately, her sexual indiscretion in evasive terms. During an extended stay with her cousin Lucy, she realizes, aghast, that she has developed feelings for Lucy’s intended, Stephen Guest. Stephen not only reciprocates, but also pledges his devotion on multiple occasions, though Maggie, beating back her own desires, tells him that any romance is impossible. Finally, Stephen orchestrates a clandestine outing for the two of them, luring Maggie into a rowboat with him and then begging her to elope. She refuses, but as the boat careens farther down the river and into unfamiliar waters, the pair is forced to seek shelter on a larger vessel overnight. Alone on that darkened poop deck, anything may have happened between Maggie and Stephen—or perhap
s nothing did. Regardless, Maggie’s reputation can only be preserved, somewhat, by marrying her admirer; but, out of loyalty to her cousin, she refuses. Her name is thus irrevocably besmirched—what sort of licentious woman commits such romantic folly?—while the community gently chastens Stephen for being rather too flirtatious.
Mr. Stephen Guest had certainly not behaved well; but then, young men were liable to those sudden infatuated attachments…Maggie had returned without a trousseau, without a husband—in that degraded and outcast condition to which error is well known to lead…[her] conduct had been of the most aggravated kind. Could anything be more detestable?…Winning his affections? That was not the phrase for such a girl as Miss Tulliver: it would have been more correct to say that she had been actuated by mere unwomanly boldness and unbridled passion.2 (emphasis mine)
As a child, Maggie embodies Too Much little girlhood par excellence: she is rash and petulant and prone to bouts of violent sobbing. She is no less passionate as a young woman, but her loyalties to kin and friends as well as her own ethical convictions run deep. Yet as the novel indicates, someone who exhibits “unwomanly boldness” cannot be trusted to demonstrate fidelity because, ultimately, she is the passive servant of her desire: like an automaton with a sex drive, she is “actuated” by “unbridled passion.” To possess unwomanly traits thus emphasizes a female character’s degeneracy. If women prioritize the safeguarding of their purity and honor the codes that structure home and the larger social web, someone like Maggie, someone wired to be sinful, is fundamentally incapable of choosing righteousness instead.
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