The Scarlett Letters

by Jenny Nordbak

  I braced myself against the headboard with my hands, but I was bouncing closer and closer to it until I was bracing with my head, neck turned awkwardly sideways. I had given up all pretenses of enjoyment. Had he taken a moment to absorb my expression, he would have been faced with incredulous disgust and a cocked eyebrow.

  You have got to be fucking kidding me.

  To my relief, Henry began to make strangely feminine guttural grunting sounds.

  “Oh, God. Oh yeah, baby! Come with me. Come with me, baby! Come with me!”

  I was tempted to ask him where we were going, since he surely couldn’t be referring to an orgasm, but I wasn’t given an opportunity. No sooner had he issued the invitation than he went rigid, gave an effeminate, drawn-out moan, and collapsed his weight down.

  As we lay in a post-coitus heap, he kissed me sweetly on the shoulder and nuzzled my neck. When he made his way to my ear, I expected him to whisper a sweet nothing. Instead, I got, “You know that they can do a surgery to trim off your labia so that it would be easier to get my dick in and you would get wetter on the outside? You don’t get wet like other girls do.”

  I thought my head was going to explode. He wanted me to surgically remove pieces of my female genitalia, which for the record are perfectly fine, so that he could insert his dick more easily without foreplay? Thinking about it now makes me want to surgically remove his dick. Back then, I almost died of embarrassment. I had never thought vaginas were a particularly sexy part of the anatomy, but I also never felt like there was anything especially unattractive about mine—or worse, something wrong with it. Now I was insecure about the most basic part of my female body—and would be from that moment until the first time a woman made love to me years later.

  Henry was consistently selfish and I didn’t put my foot down until the very end of the relationship, when that dormant Mistress that lives inside every woman eventually began to stir in frustration.

  In our final fight, I distinctly remember giving up and admitting, “I have never had an orgasm in your presence and you don’t even care!”

  Henry was part of an obvious pattern that I couldn’t yet see. My identity was based upon whomever I was in a relationship with. My outlook on life slowly morphed to match my boyfriend’s. Todd was a hustlin’, drug-dealin’ thug? Suddenly, I was listening to rap music, lying to the cops for him, and dressing like trailer trash. Henry was an aspiring writer who loved smoking weed all day? I was reading avant garde books that made no sense to me, wasting my life in a haze of smoke, and trying to fit in with the hipsters. Wes was commitment phobic? I was pretending I didn’t want a serious relationship. If I had stopped to question it, I wouldn’t have been able to answer what was really me and what was constructed to please someone else.

  A year before Mark, I was lost and terrified to admit it.

  So I began an internal odyssey to find my way back to my authentic self, starting with the source of my greatest frustration—sex.

  3. JENNY

  Prior to actually engaging in intercourse at the ripe age of seventeen, I had a pretty clear, if limited, idea of what turned me on. Before anyone else was involved, I was free to simply let my mind wander where it would, without judgment or distraction. As soon as there was a man involved, I felt pressure to please and be pleased by the same things he was into. It sounds pathetic, but is more common with women than you would think. I felt like I was somehow failing if I couldn’t enjoy it the way my partner did. After all, women aren’t just supposed to enjoy sex, they’re supposed to enjoy it the way the man does, bringing them to a pornographic simultaneous climax.

  And it wasn’t just something I was constructing on my own. I encountered disappointment and frustration when I attempted to communicate or demonstrate my needs, as though they were failing as men because I couldn’t get off from exactly what they were doing. Even those who were initially turned on by me taking charge eventually just wanted me to be able to get off from whatever they were in the mood for.

  More than once, I was asked, “The other girls I’ve been with didn’t take this long to come. Why is it so difficult for you?”

  Oh, I see … I’m the one with the problem.…

  Part of me wanted to scream, “They were all faking it, asshole!”

  But instead I retreated inward, coming to accept that sex for me would be about connecting with and pleasing my partner and masturbating would be about pleasing myself. It was bullshit.

  At least I was in the category of women who knew how to please myself. I learned that trick when I was only twelve. I didn’t even understand what I was doing. I got my hands on one of my mom’s forbidden romance novels. It was some bodice-ripping tale of a colonial woman who finds herself in the clutches of one of the native savages. He takes her as his woman and somehow it all works out well in the end. Her blushing virgin reluctance was close to nonconsent the first time he ravages her, but she enjoys it, so it’s okay. Right?

  The characters in the novel graphically made love multiple times throughout the book, but it wasn’t the tender or even the raunchy parts that made me feel funny in my lady bits. It was the scene in which Nicole, the demure Irish redhead, was being borderline raped by Tipaake, the wild savage, that had me agitated. I read it so many times that that section of the book fell out of the bindings and I stashed it between my mattress and the wall, no longer needing the rest of the novel.

  The day my mom brought my now wonderful stepdad home to meet us was the first day I actually achieved orgasm. I had been locked in my room all afternoon obsessing over that scene, frantically touching myself like an inept frat boy when eventually something explosive and life changing happened. The novel had referred in loose and poetic terms to Nicole achieving release, but the whole exercise wasn’t clear to me, and I certainly didn’t realize I could reach such a pinnacle without my very own Tipaake.

  After coming once, there was no fucking way I was going downstairs to meet some dude my mother brought home. What if I stopped and couldn’t do it again? I kept my door locked and refused to emerge. I must’ve come ten more times that day. My mom assumed it was just the prospect of a new man in her life after my dad that had me upset and unwilling to come down, so she left me alone.

  Some would argue, after first confirming a total lack of abuse in my past, that my current perversions are somehow related to reading that scene at such an impressionable age. Why did I fixate on that scene in particular, though, when there were other more traditional ones I could have chosen? And why—long before that—did my Barbies somehow always end up tied to something, helpless and tortured? Why since childhood had I been orchestrating epic playground battles between the genders, which had resulted in more than one trip to the principal’s office? These were the questions that I had to consider to reclaim my identity.

  * * *

  At the tender age of five, my parents moved us from a small town in Scotland to an equally small village in France. They had been told that the best thing to do with kids in that situation was to simply start them in school and they would learn the language quickly: a typically French sink-or-swim approach. Thus my two sisters (who were four and seven at the time) and I were dropped off at the village school, literally able to say four things in French: “yes,” “no,” “please,” and “thank you.” Heaven forbid we had bad manners as a result of the language barrier. This proved a traumatic experience for my introverted older sister. My younger sister simply refused to participate in the silliness. When the other preschoolers were told to sing French songs, she sang “It’s a Small World” in English as loudly as she could. My parents received a distraught call from her teacher explaining that she had essentially staged a preschool coup resulting in all of the children refusing to sing anything but “It’s a Small World” in English.

  I had an altogether different approach. Even at such a young age, I was aware of the attention I was receiving as the new girl in the village, and I liked it. Two boys in particular seemed to be endlessly fa
scinated by me and tried repeatedly to engage me in conversation. I had absolutely no idea what they were saying, but responded at what seemed like appropriate moments with either “oui” or “non.” They quickly caught on to the game. When I would say “yes” to one and “no” to the other, they would laugh and point at each other, but then I would quickly turn the tables and give the other an affirmative and devastate his friend with a negative. To this day, I don’t have a clue what we were saying, but it is my earliest memory of learning what feminine power over men can feel like. At a Sunday afternoon village lunch about a year later, one of the boys, Francois, pulled my dad aside for a man-to-man talk. He explained that he was seeking my dad’s permission to marry me in a few years—you know, when we were like eight or nine and of a more appropriate marriageable age. My dad still tells this story and relates that it was the moment when he knew that of his three girls, I would be the one to give him the most trouble. He had no idea.

  I have always had a villain complex. While other little girls were running around pretending to be the princess, I was fascinated by the antagonists. Growing up with two sisters, we were always playing imaginative games, and in any of our make-believe worlds, I was the villain, the male characters, or an occasional ass-kicking heroine thrown in for good measure. My villains were spectacularly bad and particularly preoccupied with rendering my sisters’ damsels powerless and at their mercy.

  They were never especially violent or homicidal characters, which I assume would have raised warning flags with my parents who, rather amusingly, were more worried that I was a lesbian than a serial killer in the making. My mom has recently said that she just figured someone needed to be the villain in our games and it made sense that it was always me since I was the most assertive of the three of us. The fact that I always wanted to be the guys and my female characters were curiously masculine evidently led to many a bedtime conversation between my parents about how they would eventually handle it when I came out to them. Little did my mom know that when I eventually did come out to her, it would have little to do with my gender identity, and a great deal to do with that early obsession with power and control.

  A typical scene of the three of us playing looked like this:

  Fiona, the oldest, with her straight black hair and serious demeanor, was generally cast as the leading female characters who in my eyes were weak and prime for the taking. Jane, my hilarious little sister, was cast as the secondary characters—the sidekicks, eccentric friends, or periphery cast. It must suck being the youngest, but she delighted in her role.

  “Make it” was our term for “let’s pretend that…”

  Fiona would start with, “Let’s make it that Barbie is seventeen and she’s going on a hot air balloon trip with her friend Kelsey [Jane’s doll].”

  I allowed this utterly boring hot air balloon trip to begin and followed Fiona’s plan until I felt my villain could make the maximum impact.

  After twenty minutes of their balloon ride sweeping us around the house, Fiona continued, “Make it that their hot air balloon has found a floating cloud island paradise.…” Jane and Fiona whipped their Easter baskets filled with Barbie, Kelsey, and girly rainbow-colored dreams through the air and up onto the top bunk.

  “But little do they know that this is the Unfindable Floating Lair of Dragar from whom there is no escape!”

  Yes, I really spoke like that as a kid. I was a little obsessed with Tolkien.

  Dragar, who was a Ken doll that I had cloaked in black and Sharpied his surfer-boy hair to a more acceptable color, flew through the air and before my sisters could protest, had snatched Barbie and Kelsey and dragged them down to the bottom bunk.

  While holding Dragar as though he was the perpetrator, I rapidly used loom loops to tie Kelsey and Barbie’s hands to the slats of the top bunk.

  “You have landed upon my plane and are now mine to do with as I please!”

  Fiona was not yet ready to concede to this turn of events.

  “But then Prince Phillip arrives on his flying white unicorn—”

  “Only to be caught by Dragar’s pet dragon and brought before the evil lord Dragar!”

  Poor Phillip was quickly emasculated and his rescue mission foiled now that he too was bound at the wrists, dangling above molten lava filled with lava sharks.

  “Dragar, let us go! You can’t do this!” came their helpless pleas.

  “Your begging will get you nowhere. Setting you free would anger my queen whose wrath I hope never to incur. You will be my gifts to her.”

  Interestingly, tied up or trapped is as bad as things ever got for the helpless damsels. It was as though my villains didn’t know what to do once they had them at their mercy. Which I now think was precisely the case. I had no concept of sex but, even at that age, deep down there was something alluring about being on the winning end of a power exchange.

  As I got older, villains filled my fantasies. I don’t mean uncouth or disgusting villains, but if he’s the sophisticated, clad-in-black, criminal mastermind—I’m in. Most women flock to the bad-boy figure. I like the bad guy. I like him for his power, ruthlessness, and ambition. A British, German, or Russian accent doesn’t hurt either. Picture Alan Rickman in Die Hard or as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood. (Alan Rickman passed away after I wrote this, and we debated changing it, but no one does a bad guy quite like him.) And it’s not that I want to save or fix him like many women want to do with the bad boy. I’m totally fine with him being a maniacal criminal, but he will bow down to me and only me.

  In high school, I began to participate in our theater program and now realize that I was typecast. I know it will come as a shock to learn that if there was a sophisticated, sexual, domineering bitch to be played, I had the part. The first was Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy queen who toys with everyone for her own amusement. Next I played Antigone, the tragic ancient heroine who is put to death for defying her king. When I was a sophomore, our director announced that we would be doing Medea, an ancient Greek tragedy and the single biggest female role in theater. It is about a queen who goes on a murderous rampage to get back at her estranged husband, Jason, after he uses, betrays, and abandons her—going so far as murdering her own offspring to punish him. I went to a progressive high school. Medea is the baddest bitch of them all and I wanted the part.

  During the auditions, the director had narrowed callbacks down to about a dozen girls who were competing for the lead role. He had us all stand on the edge of the stage in a line and then threw his keys out into the auditorium. We stared at him in confusion.

  “Whoever retrieves the keys gets the part.”

  The girls launched themselves off the stage and wrestled one another as they crawled between the seats to find the keys. The director turned back from the hair-pulling bedlam to find me sitting on the edge of the stage observing the madness.

  “Why aren’t you trying to get the keys?”

  “Medea would never debase herself with something like that. She’s a fucking queen.”

  I got the part.

  Now, I can cackle quietly about all of this because I understand how it all comes together and have embraced it, but back then there were desires inside of me that I didn’t want to acknowledge.

  Over the years, I had heard many women admit to having “rape” fantasies, not having any better vocabulary with which to describe these images of power exchange and submission. Fifty Shades of Grey hadn’t been written yet, but it is certainly proof that more women are into it than anyone had realized. But up to that point, I had never heard a woman admit that in these fantasies, she was the aggressor—the one in control. Deep down, I wanted to make other people do things. And I was terrified of what that meant. I sometimes fantasized about being the man in these scenarios, but didn’t really want to be a man in life. Did that mean I was confused about my gender identity? Did it mean I was gay? It was too overwhelming to process back then, so I buried it all deep, didn’t tell anyone, and went
about pretending to be an average teenage girl.

  My high school years were marked by the same angst and insecurity that I’m sure everyone experiences at that age. I was a model student, competitive athlete, and participated in far too many extracurricular activities: speech and debate, theater, academic decathlon, honor society, mentoring programs, and the like. I think I was avoiding spending too much time at home with nothing to do. I was in the phase when you need your parents the most, but want to spend time with them the least. It didn’t help that things were rocky and a little confusing at home. After my parents’ divorce, everything had been great—for a while. They separated and only lived a few miles apart in the suburb of Houston that I grew up in. Initially, our custody arrangement was informal and we moved back and forth as we pleased, but that didn’t last long. When they both remarried, things got a little more complicated. I can’t extricate the bullshit from the truth now. I was just a kid, and I’d like to think that everyone meant well. There must have been blame on both sides. Custody arrangements aren’t natural, and when the kids being passed back and forth are teenagers, feelings are bound to get hurt.

  Normal divorce stuff is one thing, but after my dad remarried, things took a turn for the strange with my stepmom, Eleanor.

  I can see why my dad fell in love with her, particularly looking at it now through adult eyes. She was brilliant, kind, and poised in a way that made her seem like she came from another time, a time when women held themselves differently. When people are afflicted with mental illness, as she was, we seem to forget they weren’t always like that. The change can happen slowly, so slowly that it takes those closest to them a long time to realize something isn’t right. Once the realization has struck, it can take even longer to actually accept that the person you love is being consumed by their disease. Initially, it makes more sense to believe their delusions are real.

  It started with her becoming irrationally upset about little things—me using the wrong knife to prepare something in the kitchen, opening the bathroom door while the toilet was still flushing, arriving ten minutes later than expected. I was a teenager, so I’m willing to accept that some of it must have just been me being a royal pain in the ass and her struggling to find her footing as a stepparent. But then it got weirder. My dad sat me down and explained that they knew I had been stealing teaspoons and towels from their house and that I would have to either do chores to make up for the cost or return the “stolen” items. I denied any wrongdoing, but swallowed my pride and did the chores for the sake of peace. Maybe I had accidentally taken a towel to swim practice and left it at my mom’s once or twice. My sister liked to eat yogurt on the way to school. I suspected there were a few teaspoons in her car. There were explanations that mostly made sense.