so here's the thing: i always forget that men actually tend to not see me as a real person. blame it on the bubbly personality, blame it on the fact that i'm smart and a smartass, blame it on the fact that i am a shameless flirt, blame it on my tits. i used to joke to my ex boyfriend that i didn't consider men people, and it's only now--several years after the fact--that i realize that it was because men didn't seem to consider me to be a person.
i'm thinking about this today because i spent twenty minutes tonight making out in a car with a man whom i am increasingly realizing that i am not actually interested in (mostly for reasons that will frankly sound a little snotty if i write them out so i won't, but also because i think there is a cultural gap that i do not feel like surmounting, and also because he used to be in the military and well-- absolutely not). a year and a half ago, when i got out of that long relationship, i was astonished at how easy it was to fuck men. it was like discovering an ability that i didn't know i had -- that under the right conditions, which most of the time i could engineer, really all i had to do was play along. the guys all seemed astonished at their good luck, and i was amused by that. i sat back and let them think that they were in control, wore my favorite long black dress and let them think that i was not entirely aware of every lame-ass move they tried, never as smooth or slick as they thought. i stood on stoops, smoked cigarettes outside bars, waited for them to kiss me (never luck, really, i just hung around long enough to give them a chance). i had thought it would be harder, is the thing. it was so fucking easy.
i know. i was 22, in my defense, and emotionally was roughly the equivalent of one of those wet baby chicks that's just broken out of its fragile eggshell, all the while thinking that i was strong and enlightened. i was drunk on new freedom and the easy sensuality of it all, and it took a while before it started to wear on me.
i thought what i was doing with these men was mutual - that we were both free and easy, seeing it as a free and mutually pleasurable sharing of our bodies and our time and the space in our beds. that we were sharing an experience. but i think actually a lot of them thought that they were getting away with something. that they were taking something from me. that i was less of a person and more of an object, a cardboard cutout of a girl that they could fuck and then discard. not all of them, but enough of them (and don't misunderstand me - i kiss and date and sleep with women and nonbinary people and everything else too, but they don't do this to me ). because if they had seen me as a person, a full person, they would not have treated me the way that they did. it's likely that i'm an easy target -- it's very easy to hurt my feelings, frankly, and at this particular season of my life i was emotionally vulnerable and make quite a lot of terrible decisions. but still.
and these kinds of experiences do nasty things to a liberated woman! i had thought that other people were silly to be wary of sex with men - why deny yourself pleasure when it's so easy to obtain? this was obviously incredibly stupid, in hindsight. but i needed to get a little bit bruised before i realized, over the course of about six months and one atrociously humiliating situationship, the reason that other women were wary of men, of sex with men, of casual sex with men in particular is that even the most superficially enlightened men will treat you like shit if you fuck them (or, as they tend to see it, let them fuck you).
i have a list of everyone i've ever slept with on my phone, mostly because i am a compulsive list-maker and journaler and recorder; as didion put it in "on keeping a notebook," "The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself." i worried that one day i would be older and not be able to remember the names of everyone i'd ever slept with. isn't that awful? but i've been like this my whole life -- i find it very difficult to throw out anything that might be a record of any bit of my life, even train tickets and the sticky labels peeled off my beer bottles at some party, worried at with a fingernail until they come off in one piece. again, as joan wrote later on in that same piece: "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget." left to its own devices, my mind would certainly forget the zionist (discovered all too late) and the annoying english teacher and the man in this new country who literally told me that he was moving to australia to get out of seeing me again after what i had taken to be actually quite a nice night and following morning. but i have to face up to all my old selves, even the ones whose vulnerability (and subsequent bad decisions) are so humiliating as to make me flinch.
after i slept with a very nice man who cares about me as a person this november i decided that i would not be updating it any more. i started to feel embarassed by it - it felt so high school - and also embarassed by myself and all my old bad decisions. i still feel the old list-urge, but i think i'll put it in a journal or something, not where i come across it all the time. is that growth?
anyways: this is how i feel. sorry.
next.
something interesting: an essay on the stanley cup as prosthetic body and tiktok here. way cool.