What is it that society finds so troubling about the idea of young girls learning about sex and pleasure? Perhaps it’s the puritanical fear that it will encourage them to rush off and ‘sleep around’, as if their bodies belong to them and not to the society intent on controlling them. Absurd, I know.
I want to tell you about someone I went to school with.
Alisha Brown was the youngest girl I ever knew to be having sex. I met her when we moved to England. We were twelve years old, but she was years ahead of me in terms of experience. She seemed wild and free, and I thought that made her dangerous. She did things with her body that both terrified me and made me feel childish. There were some moments when she seemed to have a secret knowledge about the world, a knowledge that I would never be able to acquire no matter how hard I tried. At other times, she just seemed like a bit of a cliché. She enjoyed the kind of popularity that seems motivated more by the fear of other people rather than any genuine admiration – she was bitchy and mean, and totally unapologetic in her cruelty towards other girls. I didn’t like her very much, and used the fact of my dislike to justify the way I judged her sexual behaviour.
‘Twelve is just SO YOUNG,’ I would say to my friends. ‘She’s obviously just using sex to get love. I almost feel sorry for her.’
I criticised Alisha because a part of me felt that her sexual confidence made her a better, worthier girl than me. I was jealous of her because she knew things that I didn’t and because I was too scared to find those things out for myself. It was easy for me to deride her, because I was reading from a script that had been passed down from generation to generation. Alisha was a ‘slut’, I thought, and I had no problem calling her that. She gave things away that she should have held on to, and behaved in a way that she should have known was strictly forbidden. Verbalising this didn’t just give me an opportunity to put her down – it also allowed me to reframe my own sexual insecurity as a moral superiority. Boys might want to fuck Alisha, I thought to myself, but they would respect me.
Internalised misogyny is a powerful thing, and it starts from the moment girls learn that they’re considered inferior. Policing women’s sexuality is perhaps forgivable in a twelve-year-old girl trying to navigate her way through a world that has taught her to fear and mistrust other women, but not everyone lets go of those childish and petty cruelties. There are grown-up Alishas all over the place who are still subjected to judgmental bullshit from people whose only actual responsibility towards them is to mind their own fucking business.
The thing is, maybe Alisha was just having sex to get love. Maybe she was too young. Maybe she grew up regretting her experiences and wishing that someone had intervened. Maybe she wishes she had waited, maybe she wishes she had loved herself more, maybe she wishes she had done it first with someone she loved, maybe she hopes her daughters will be different.
But maybe she doesn’t.
Maybe she grew up to be a completely fine, normal, adult woman with memories of regret and triumph in equal measure across a broad range of formative experiences, the least of which might be the ways she chose to have sex and with whom. Maybe she grew up to be just like me, a girl who either by design or lack of opportunity waited until she was almost nineteen to fuck someone else for the first time, and feels neither pride nor remorse about that. Maybe it just is what it is, and maybe we’re both okay.
Sex education is about so much more than biology. It’s bigger than the conservative ideals we continue to force on young people, which includes the furphies that women use sex to get love and men use love to get sex. Pleasure isn’t a peripheral by-product of sexuality but an inseparable part of it. And there’s something desperately wrong with a world that is okay with making the control of female sexuality the domain of everyone other than the woman who owns it. It’s important that women be aware of this, but also that men are too.
Patriarchal society might be afraid of women’s bodies, but that doesn’t mean women should be taught to fear them too. We should be teaching girls to feel pleasure instead of shame, and giving them a framework to express sexual autonomy and confidence. Remember: if you build it, they will come.
I have come many, many, many times in my life – in different ways, with different people (or just by myself) and with different implements. I haven’t always orgasmed during sex, but I find it a pretty easy thing to do.
The first time I had sex with someone else, I was eighteen. I was in my second year of university and had moved out of home at the start of the year. I had done so with a very clear picture of what awaited me in my new grown-up life. Simply put, I expected to have sex. Lots and lots of sex. Lots and lots of sex with lots and lots of different, interesting people. It was just what happened: you turned eighteen, moved away from your parents and – ta da! – instant bonage. After all, I was in a share house now.
Would it hurt? I wondered. The instructional guides I’d consumed voraciously (see: Judy Blume’s Forever and the 1980 movie classic Little Darlings) indicated that it probably would. But this was okay, I decided, because it was like a rite of passage. It was a mark of the journey you’d take from being a girl to becoming a woman.
I pictured myself in cosy bars, wearing glamorous outfits while drinking sophisticated wine. Carnal knowledge would make me glow, transform me from the awkward child still wrapped in puppy fat into the kind of woman I was desperate to become. Men would flock to me to exchange witty banter and I, knowing already that their answer would be yes, would casually invite them to come back to mine. We’d laugh as we stumbled up the garden path and then kiss at the front door. We’d tiptoe across the hall to my bedroom, me being ever so slightly theatrical in my whispers so that my flatmates were made aware there was a gentleman caller in the house, and then undress each other in the soft glow of the lamplight. He wouldn’t feel repulsed by my body. I would feel light and delicate beneath him. We would always come.
I’m sure it will come as no great shock to you to discover that reality turned out to be quite different.
I had moved in with a new friend who was the epitome of sophistication. What this means is that she wore silk dressing-gowns and Samsara perfume and had done it loads of times. I figured I could learn a lot from her.
Amazingly, I found a fellow I liked who also liked me back. After a short courtship involving copious amounts of alcohol and the Travis song ‘Driftwood’ played on repeat, he became my boyfriend. I prepared myself for what was to come – specifically, me. It only took a few short weeks into us being ‘official’ for me to inform him one day that I was ‘ready’. We’d gone to all the bases already. I’d seen a penis close up and I thought I had it pretty well figured out. The next step would be Full Penetration. I was excited and nervous and scared, but mainly hopeful that everyone around me would be able to tell that I’d finally Gone All The Way and was now one of the initiated. I looked forward to being able to reminisce about my first time, staring off wistfully into the distance and offering the occasional knowing chuckle. I anticipated instructing younger, more naive ladies in the ways of the world. They would hang on my every word and marvel at how I managed to stay so grounded despite all my experience. ‘She’s so cool,’ they’d say, ‘but also just so nice.’
It happened on a Saturday morning, the day of the Adelaide University Law Ball. Beth Orton’s ‘Central Reservation’ (carefully selected for the occasion) played in the background. Did it hurt? Yes. But not exactly in the way I thought it would. It wasn’t so much like a constant dull ache as it was like a thousand needles stabbing you all at once and then screaming at you. And then, suddenly, it didn’t hurt that much at all.
Afterwards, I wrapped myself in a blanket and went into my housemate’s room under the guise of borrowing something. It was very important to me that she see I had become A Woman. She spotted it immediately (which was probably more to do with my nakedness and massive clown grin) and we giggled like teenagers, which of course we were. So this was sex, I thought – fun, silly and adventu
rous.
Which is a pretty good way to be initiated into it, don’t you think?
And yet, this is not how many women experience it and nor is it encouraged. The sexuality of boys is considered sacrosanct. Not only are they thought of as entitled to pursue sex, but many boys aren’t provided with the option of not wanting to have sex or wanting only to have sex with people they feel intimacy with. For girls, the opposite is true. We’re told to get our hands out of our pants, not to pleasure ourselves, not to seek pleasure from other people and to guard our bodies with our lives. Sex for girls is still too often treated like something we have to police – an activity we can only enjoy and benefit from when done with a committed partner, and something we definitely shouldn’t do with too many people because it makes us dirty and sluttish and a gross bag of garbage that men don’t want to touch.
But we deserve more than this. We deserve not only to have our choices and autonomy respected, but to be given the information from the outset that lets us know it’s okay to be connected with our bodies in that way. Frigging myself stupid on a bathtub changed my life. And you know what? Even if it had been a stroke, I think it would have been worth it. Because to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever re-created the intensity of that moment.
Oh, I’ve had more intense interactions, for sure. I’ve fucked people, made love to them and done a whole lot of other stuff in between.
On a night bus from Sydney and surrounded by dozing passengers, a boy I was secretly in love with gently rubbed the crotch of my jeans until I came, shuddering, in his hand. Like all of our sexual interactions, we never spoke about it again.
A humid evening in Adelaide, stoned with a girl I’d just met but who felt as familiar to me as my own skin, stroking each other beneath the sheets of a friend’s bed. Once invited, I hesitated for less than a second before lowering my mouth to her and crossing yet another frontier.
A park late at night, fucking my boyfriend on a park bench and giggling as another couple softly padded over the grass on their way home. It was more an exercise in adventure than anything driven by sexual need, because sometimes that’s exactly what makes sex good and interesting and fun.
Email confessions, exchanged between me and men I’ve never met, talking about what we like and what we would do to each other if given the opportunity. Photographs sent, sexual hints and desires discussed, secrets shared that we either felt too nervous to tell to our partners or that happily existed only in the safety of this private, safe and totally raw space.
If virginity is the maintenance of certain boundaries and codes, then I have lost my virginity countless times. I have lost it to men, I have lost it to women and I have lost it to myself. Some of these incidents have proven more profound and life-changing to me than the generic understanding of ‘virginity loss’ that’s inflicted on all of us, particularly women with vaginas. In the current cis-heteronormative discourse, women become inducted into the act of sexuality only when we open our legs for the first time and let a man fuck us. But the simple act of being penetrated isn’t enough to define the course of a life. Why should the moment I first experienced a dick inside me be any more important than any other transformative moment that opened my eyes to the possibilities my body held for me?
Something’s being fucked here, and it’s not the pussy.
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5 –
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
Before I became radicalised as a man-hating, separatist feminazi hell-bent on installing a matriarchy and imprisoning men as its slaves,* I possessed a nominal amount of internalised misogyny about the value of women. Women were bitchy and mean. They cared about irrelevant rubbish and talked in loud, shrill voices. Their laughter was annoying and tinny, and they did it too often and performatively. Women were boring to talk to, and they were especially boring if they were pretty and nice and well liked – coincidentally, all the things that I felt I wasn’t and that thus excluded me from the club of womanhood.
There were even a few years in my late teens when I congratulated myself on eschewing the company of women. I was full of praise for men, and prided myself on ‘just getting on better with boys’. I flattered myself that, even though they didn’t want to date me like they did my female peers, they wanted to confide in me. I thought this was better. I thought it meant I was more important, that they saw something in me that was more valuable than physical desire.
To me, other girls were the enemy and they had an arsenal of complicated mind games and underhanded tricks they’d use to make you feel like shit. Boys were easier, smarter and less complicated in their bullying. If a boy was going to be mean to you, he’d call you a nasty name or laugh at you. But girls, on the other hand . . . well, girls froze you out. Girls did peculiar things like pretend to be your friend and then have everyone at a party ignore you. Like boys, they made up stories about you but it hurt more coming from them than because somewhere, deep down, you thought they were supposed to be on your side.
Were I born a few years later, I’ve no doubt I could have easily fallen into the horrifying hole that is the Women Against Feminism movement. Being down on other girls wasn’t just about a general antipathy towards the way they behaved; it was a gesture to reassure all the boys around me that while I may have looked vaguely like a girl on the outside, I wasn’t really like a girl-girl.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is that at the age of sixteen and seventeen, I was what you would call a ‘gender traitor’. Girls were dumb. Their empty heads could think of nothing more interesting or important than how they looked (the great irony being that about 90 percent of my time was spent obsessing about how ugly I thought I was) and their ignorance about ‘important issues’ was embarrassing. That I had a pretty flimsy grasp on what these ‘important issues’ were supposed to be was irrelevant, because factual accuracy is never the issue when pointing the finger at an entire group’s supposed failings. It was easy to pretend that ignorance was a particularly female trait, because it tied neatly into the other idea I was helping to prop up, which was that boys’ heads aren’t filled with the petty concerns of women. It took a special person to be able to distinguish herself from those stereotypes, but I was determined to have boys see that I was different. Look at me, I could say to them. I’m not like all the other girls.
Like so many girls caught in this trap, it wasn’t enough for me to want to be considered an intellectual and social equal by men (because, really, that’s what a lot of this scrabbling for their approval comes back to – the misplaced desire to achieve equality for ourselves by being welcomed into the inner sanctum rather than to destroy the sanctum altogether and redefine the dynamic entirely); I also had to climb a tower made out of the discarded, disdained bodies of other women in order to prove myself worthy to enter. Clearly, I had absorbed the patterns of thinking bell hooks outlines in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, when she writes:
It is sexism that leads women to feel threatened by one another without cause. While sexism teaches women to be sex objects for men, it is also manifest when women who have repudiated this role feel contemptuous and superior to those who have not . . . Sexism teaches women woman-hating, and both consciously and unconsciously we act out this hatred in our daily contact with one another.
Because I was born a girl, I was taught to fundamentally distrust other women. So in saying that, I have to also accept and forgive the ways many of them were taught to mistrust me. The first twenty years of my life are filled with uncomfortable experiences of girl-on-girl crime. Whether it arises as bullying, cruelty or viciously applied sexism, girls are separated from each other (and from organising into a bloc of power) by being encouraged to view other girls as competition. And if I’m being truly honest, I’d say for me this began with my sister.
Despite being almost five years older than me, Charlotte has always been a much gentler soul. She seems to care for people in ways that I don’t, sacrificing her own comfort at times to make sure everyone
around her is properly looked after. Her patience is in inverse proportion to mine, to the point where I sometimes wonder how we came from the same parents. Growing up, I took advantage of this kind nature and was often vicious to her. As siblings, we all called each other the nastiest of names at times (isn’t this normal?), but the ones reserved for me and Charlotte (either levelled at each other or spat at us by our brother) often related to the way we looked. The go-to barbs were ‘fat’ or ‘ugly’, but we weren’t shy in spitting ‘bitch’ at each other either. I had the advantage of being more outspoken and willing to really go to the edge with my cruelty than Charlotte, and I’m ashamed to say I often pushed her long after she’d conceded defeat. We’re extremely close now, but it took us a long time to get there.
I might have begun that fractured relationship with women at home, but it absolutely followed me out into the world. There are many times when I have not been a good support to other women and times when they’ve let me down too. I think of these moments now with a prickly sense of shame and an everlasting regret at all the opportunities lost.
Because the fact is, if we don’t stand by and for each other, then no one else will.
Pop culture has a pretty patchy record when it comes to representing women, but it occasionally gets it right where our friendships are concerned. In fact, when I’m feeling down or pissed off about something, it soothes me to think about all the great female pairings that exist across screen or page. Like the devotion Anne Shirley has for her ‘bosom friend’, Diana Barry, in the Anne of Green Gables series. Or how much Leslie Knope loves Ann Perkins in Parks and Recreation, frequently raving about how wonderful and beautiful and smart she is. The best thing about it is that Leslie, an eternal optimist, truly believes that everyone sees this greatness in Ann, even though she’s deliberately written as a character a lot of other people find weird and annoying. Then there’s Broad City’s Ilana and Abbi. Their relationship is particularly excellent because their creators (Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson) have subverted all the major tropes about friendships, where one girl is supposedly cool and the other is her sidekick. In any other depiction, Ilana would be the duo’s leader. She’s more adventurous, more sexual and just a lot more out there than the conservative Abbi (who’s so neurotic that she schedules masturbation time into her calendar). Typically, Abbi would be depicted as Ilana’s dogsbody, because cautious, sexually inhibited girls are always dismissed as boring and shit. But in Broad City, the opposite is true – cool, vivacious, sexy Ilana completely ADORES Abbi, and is always raving about how beautiful she is, how she’s so smart and funny and how she has ‘the ass of an angel’. And much like Parks and Rec’s Leslie, Ilana is so sold on Abbi’s essential brilliance that she treats it as self-evident. It’s a perfect disruption of the pervasive idea of girl-on-girl competition – because if a goddess like Ilana sees herself as lucky beyond all belief to hang out with a dorkier, more anxiety-ridden friend, then maybe there’s hope for all of us.
Fight Like A Girl Page 7