Content Warning: mention of sexual assault
Last winter I bought a book of love poems by Pablo Neruda. It was small and pink and so, I loved it. I bought it because I found myself facing backwards: After all my years, I had had enough of trying to prove to myself that I was okay with my experiences with men. I thought back to one time in particular, it was one of those times when I entered his room and immediately regretted it. We didn’t know each other very well and the energy felt off. I knew I could put my shoes back on and make an excuse and leave, but I didn’t. We spoke about classes and all I could think of was how to speed it all up as fast as possible so I could get out of there. I said yes to everything I didn’t want to do so I could leave.
I grew up around terrible boys. Boys who would take pictures of girls performing oral sex on them without their permission. Boys who would make jokes about sexual assault and push us away if we ever dared to confront them. Even still, twenty years old, and I still am unlearning everything I thought I knew about male attention. Even still, I go back to sappy poems about someone else’s life*.
On television, women who are comfortable with themselves as sexual beings feel confident with their body, the people they sleep with (all of them), and they’ll speak about it to whomever, whenever. Now that I’m not in Middle School anymore and no longer blush and shake my head no when asked if I am a feminist, I am forced to wonder if the sex I have gives me the label “liberated”.
Sex on this campus is almost always public knowledge. After two and a half years at Vassar, I’ve learned that almost everyone (who wants to have sex) thinks they are having sex issues: sex with someone who isn’t the person they really want to have sex with, bad sex, too much sex that they aren’t seeing their friends enough, too little sex compared to their friend who is always sleeping with someone. For a campus that’s supposedly as open about sex as it gets, we are constantly worried about how we are getting it.
All that time ago, after I left that boy’s room, I immediately started crying. I cried all the way to my room. Unlike the portrayals in movies, I felt anything but comfortable with my body or the person I slept with. I never wanted to speak about it again. A friend asked me if he pressured me and I shook my head, because truthfully, he did not. He would have been a perfect gentleman if I told him I wanted to go home. He didn’t make me do anything.
I couldn’t put my finger on it; I couldn’t understand why this time was any different from any other sexual encounter I’ve had. I guess I stayed because I felt I had to. I even made sure to smile when I was talking to him as much as possible, so that he wouldn’t catch on that I was not that into him. Because that was what I knew to do. Because I felt relentless, ceaseless pressure, and it didn’t come from him. I was crying because I had just trapped myself into doing something I did not want to do, and I wouldn’t let myself leave.
Last winter I thought about this experience, along with many others, as I studied my past sexual relationships. How often did I feel trapped? How was I supposed to teach myself to leave a room I did not want to be in? I want to be clear, I like having sex. Most of the time I don’t feel trapped to stay in someone’s room; in fact, most of the time I want to be there. But at this point, I wish I could tell when I might lock myself into something. I understand that societal pressure and power dynamics play a huge role in the way I act when I have sex with men. I understand that. But my expectations of sexual liberation led me to believe that, once I achieved this liberation, I would be freed from these pressures. Once again, I am confronted by everything I preach against; I still have unlearning to do.
Truthfully, I still care for the boys I was raised with. I have known them since I was five. It was with them that I had my first big crush. It was with them that I got drunk for the first time. They were the ones who told me, after I spent an entire summer turning fifteen and lightening my hair, that I had become hot. They gave me compliments, in turn, I received confidence. At thirteen, confidence was transmittable. Beforehand, when I was twelve. I learned how to be aloof around them, none of their insults could touch me if I remained unfazed. I learned to be a “cool” girl who would smoke weed with them and shit talk the other girls in our school. They made a list of the hottest girls they knew and I laughed and pretended I didn’t care I was nowhere near the top. At fourteen I gladly accepted one’s small crush on me and let him kiss me whenever he wanted; a year earlier he had called me a “terrorist”. I was confident. And confident meant liberated. And then, at some point, I had enough of them. I grew up. But honestly, sometimes, I still miss them.
I have been thinking about this term liberated, and how that even applies to sex. Thirty or so years ago people would say it referred to people who were comfortable expressing their enjoyment of sex. Now, in the age of Tinder and Instagram and Snapchat, liberation cannot mean the same thing it did many years ago.
I’m a self-professed obsessive scroller and so I could get lost in any mobile interface for hours. Tinder is an interesting one. Once you start, you pretty much reduce your self worth into a five second decision. I love it. There is a sort of finality that comes with Tinder that satisfies my need for an uncomplicated demonstration of attraction. For me it isn’t only about the instant gratification, but about the one second of simplicity when there is a match.
Meeting someone on Tinder, in real life, is a whole different story. I rarely meet people from Tinder, but when I do, no matter how nice they are, I always restrain from wanting to see them again. I feel guilty. I didn’t do it the conventional way of meeting someone at a bar, and it requires me to rework the narrative of sex that I hold onto so dearly. Guiltiness does not seem to normally come into play alongside liberation. Aren’t I doing what I want to do, with whom I want to do it?
Sex has become commodified. I am worth more if I have it more often, especially on a campus as small as Vassar. Recently I have been putting more and more weight on if and when I have sex, and less weight on who it is with. I find that whenever my mental health starts to decline and my anxiety starts to rise, I always come back to sex as something that demonstrates my value. Remember, I still have a lot of unlearning to do. In this way, I guess I’m not liberated at all.
I like to think back to how I viewed sex in high school to see at what point I started feeling comfortable as a sexual being. I guess I have to think about virginity. Losing it was a big deal but also not. I remember afterwards sitting alone in my room and thinking that was it? I told myself I was supposed to cry after losing my virginity, because I knew a few girls that cried after losing theirs, but I felt indifferent about it. No, I felt cool. I had finally done the thing. All of a sudden I would walk around the city and watch women in their twenties, thirties, forties, and say to myself: I know. I knew what all the people who hadn’t lost their virginity knew. This made virginity something tangible, something that seemed to give me power over those who hadn’t done it. I had become important. I had value. From something I didn’t even enjoy at the time. I thought I had achieved liberation; I was a proud sixteen-year-old who started having sex with my then-boyfriend. At that point, what else could liberation have meant to me?**
I’ve found that the small pink book of love poems by Pablo Neruda turns me back around when I find myself facing backwards. Each poem is small, sometimes tiny, and is so, unequivocally, about him. They are poems about the women he loved, in the ways he loved them. They have given me one minute of refuge because they feel so personal to someone else. Neruda’s poems are so clearly his own stream of consciousness, and for a moment, I stop over-analyzing myself.
It feels tiring to have to constantly remind myself that liberation, whatever that means, can be individual. That the constraints that all the institutions which have been made to be pitted against me are personal. If liberation is personal, and our definitions of liberation change as we grow, then maybe liberation is bullshit. I don’t know, maybe I’ve become a pessimist. Revolution is as a group, but it is also individual. Maybe it takes distancing myself from my own insecurities by reading Neruda’s poems to start my own process of liberation. Maybe it takes a bit of passivity to move forward. And if I lean too much into individual inaction, is that liberation? I find selfishness to be important sometimes; maybe the Leo in me reveals its true colors as I write this. Selfishness when selfishness is due. I don’t think revolution is possible as a group if it isn’t first done personally. Self-care is more than just skin care routines (although I cannot deny the importance of a sheet mask). Self-care is giving myself time to perform individual inaction. Time to breathe and focus on the work made by someone else.
I don’t regret any of my sexual experiences. I don’t even wish the worst ones did not happen. I compartmentalize each one into little vignettes, little poems; one where I reduce myself down so small I’m not sure if my ex-boyfriend sees me, one where I try to make myself so grand, that I think I can withstand even the most obvious manipulation, one where I don’t make a move on that girl, and all the ones where I am too young to know better. I’ll take all of those vignettes, and all the times that come with them (when I tried to change my body, my laugh, my humor) and maybe do nothing at all but perhaps try to write a poem, and look forward.
*
Come to my heart dressed in white, with a
bouquet
of bloody roses and goblets of ashes,
come with an apple and a horse.
Because there is a dark room there and a broken
candleholder,
some twisted chairs waiting for winter,
and a dead dove, with a number.
(Excerpt from Ode with a Lament, Neruda)
**
I was treading a dark clay
That trembled
And I, sinking and coming out,
Decided that you should come out
Of me, that you were weighing me down
Like a cutting stone,
And I worked out your loss
Step by step:
To cut off your roots, to release you alone into the wind.
Ah in that minute,
My dear,
A dream
With its terrible wings
was covering you.
(Excerpt from The Dream, Neruda)