CHAPTER 2
BAD THINGS COME IN THREES: SHAME, BLAME, AND FEAR
EVERYWHERE I GO, WHENEVER I TALK ABOUT SEX AND rape and how women should have just as much right as men to pursue sexual pleasure on their own terms, I hear the same question coming from the women in the audience. It’s a very sincere and urgent question, and it breaks my heart every time I hear it: But how do I even know what I want?
That question haunts me because in an ideal world it would never even be asked. In a better world, it wouldn’t be that hard to know what we want, sexually or otherwise. We would be able to tell by what felt good. (Radical idea, huh?) Just as there are forces in the world influencing how we perceive our sexuality, which we explored in chapter 1, these same forces can work against us in other ways, in an effort to control our behavior. Sometimes it’s the media, trying to sell us something. Sometimes it’s our families, friends, or partners, who want us to behave in ways that make them more happy or comfortable, even if it makes us unhappy, uncomfortable, or worse. Sometimes it’s a religious or political faction that believes women should be subservient to men.
Whoever it is, whatever the motives are behind their actions, the methods they use are always the same: shame, blame, and fear. They’re telling us that we should be ashamed of our sexuality or that our sexual desires and actions are to blame for outcomes that aren’t actually our fault (such as sexual assault) or that if we pursue what we want sexually, we’ll be in danger (of getting a disease, of violence, of never finding love, you name it), so we should be wary of expressing our sexuality, or even outright afraid of it.
When you’re controlled by the Terrible Trio, as I like to call the triple threat of shame, blame, and fear, bad things happen. For one, you just feel crappy about yourself—second-guessing your decisions, worrying how people see you, feeling responsible for everything—and that crappy feeling can lead to even crappier outcomes. For example, if you feel insecure about your sexuality, you often don’t want to associate with your desires. You end up checking out of your body a little, like you’re watching yourself in a movie. In that checked-out state, whatever sexual encounters you engage in can feel like they “just happen” to you. You might have unprotected sex because you’re too afraid to admit to yourself that you want to have sex at all to speak up about using barriers. Or, if you’re “just letting” someone make out with you (because you secretly want to make out with them but you’re in denial about it), you might wind up “just letting” them do sexual things with you that you really don’t want as well. All of these dynamics collide to create one massive negative-feedback loop in which you feel bad about sex, which makes sex feel bad, which makes you feel even worse about it.
On the other hand, if you find ways to reject the Terrible Trio, you can create the exact opposite effect: You’ll feel more connected to your sexuality, which means it will be easier for you to get your sexual needs met, which will feel great, which will make you feel even better about your sexuality.
SHAME
Odds are, at some point, someone has tried to make you feel ashamed of your sexuality. Maybe someone, a parent or a classmate, said you were dressed “slutty.” Maybe you told a date you didn’t want to be sexual, or even just be sexual in a particular way, and they called you “uptight” or a “prude.” Or maybe the opposite happened, and you expressed your sexuality openly and with exuberance, and you were suddenly labeled “easy.” It doesn’t have to be about your behavior, either. You could feel shamed by something as simple as what arouses you. Take twenty-six-year-old Avory, for example. “My most sensitive spot is just under my armpit, which I find very, very embarrassing and often can’t even admit, because it seems so nonstandard and armpits are ‘icky.’”
Often, this shame gets lodged in our bodies. We feel ashamed of how we look, or we feel ashamed of how others see us, or we feel ashamed of what gives us physical pleasure and what doesn’t.
The variations on the shame theme are endless. But shame always boils down to one thing: A person or group is projecting their moral values onto you. It doesn’t even have to be directly targeted at you. Twenty-one-year-old Mag puts it best here:
The way my friends or people around me talk about experiences they’ve had with people, and the way Cosmo is constantly like, “50 ways to please your man” and, “OMG, virgins,” it makes me feel ashamed to not have had these experiences. And it makes it even harder for me to get out there and tell somebody, because I’m afraid that once they know that I haven’t done certain things, they’re not going to want to do that with me, because they’ll think there must be something wrong with me.
When someone is making you feel ashamed about your behavior, your appearance, or anything, for that matter, the most important thing to ask yourself is: Do I agree with this person’s values?
This seems like a pretty easy thing to do, but in practice it’s actually pretty complex, especially when you’re not in the habit of asking yourself the question in the first place, and particularly when you haven’t asked yourself the corollary question: What are my personal values about sexuality?
This is a good place for me to own up to my own values around sex, but let me be the first to say: You don’t have to agree with me! The important thing is to spend the time deciding for yourself what you believe.
I believe that we all have the right to experience sexual pleasure. For the vast majority of us,
1 sexuality is a central part of our humanity, a basic pleasure, like enjoying the taste of food or laughing until we cry. On a more practical level, if it makes me feel good before, during, and after; and if it involves other people and makes
them feel good before, during, and after;
and if everyone understands the risks involved and takes reasonable precautions to be safe, then, well, what’s not to like? For example, if you and your partner both love giving and receiving oral sex, then by all means, enjoy it with abandon. It’s really that simple, yet the Terrible Trio has any number of powerful ways to make you feel that it’s a shameful, even disgusting, taboo.
Of course, much of this is also open to interpretation. For example, what’s a “risk,” and what’s “reasonable”? For that matter, what’s “safe”? And how do you know if your partner is feeling good? These are valid questions, but none of them have simple answers. We’ll continue to address them as we make our way through this journey together.
But remember, whether you agree or disagree with my values, what matters is that you know what your own values are. Once you know what you believe about sexuality, you build up an immunity to shame. How? Just do your best to act according to your beliefs. (Hint: If that seems impossible, you may want to check in with yourself to make sure your values are realistic and allow for you to be a messy, complicated person. Because we’re all messy and complicated at least some of the time.)
If you know what your sexual values are and adhere to them most of the time, then it’s going to be a lot harder for other people to make you feel shame.
Dive In: Write a sexual mission statement. This should be a paragraph expressing what you believe about sexuality. Be sure to answer the following questions: What do you have the right to, sexually? What are your responsibilities when it comes to sex? What about your partners’ rights and responsibilities? What’s the most important thing you seek from sexual exploration or expression? What do you never want to seek from sexuality? What does no one have the right to do when it comes to sex?
Now, write a list of five times you’ve felt sex-related shame. Circle two of those five that felt particularly intense. Then pick one, and write out the story of what happened—what did you do or not do that triggered the shame? Did someone try to shame you for it directly, or did the shame come from the inside, from something you’d previously absorbed? Describe the shame you felt as specifically as you can. Now read back over your sexual mission statement, and apply it to this situation. Do you now, in the present tense, think you did anything wrong then?
BLAME
Oy. Blame. What hasn’t been blamed on female sexuality? When women act on behalf of our own sexual desires, we get blamed for being raped, for the demise of modern masculinity, for men’s cheating, for getting cervical cancer, for homophobia, for street harassment, even for earthquakes. But the truth is, there are very few ways to hurt yourself, your partner, or society through your sexuality.
Here’s the complete list of things that you should worry about during sex:
• Are my partner and I both enthusiastic about what’s happening, and both capable of free and enthusiastic consent? (More on enthusiastic consent in chapter 7.)
• Are we taking reasonable precautions to prevent STDs and other bodily harm?
• If, between us, we’ve got the physical equipment required to make a baby, are we using a reliable form of birth control, or do we both want a pregnancy?
That’s it. That’s the whole list. If you’ve got those bases covered, and you’re not lying to any of your partners, and you’re not an adult who’s cheating or willingly committing incest, I guarantee you’re not doing anything wrong.
So why are there so many bad behaviors that get blamed on women’s sexuality? That’s a great question, and sometimes we have to recognize when and where it’s happening so we can understand that we’re not at fault, and how to redirect that blame so it lands where it belongs—which is on the perpetrators of the behaviors, not on us.
Street Harassment
Say you wake up one morning feeling kinda sexy. Maybe you had a great sexual encounter the night before. Maybe your new workout routine is giving you great energy. Maybe it’s spring and the warm air is making you feel tingly. So you go to your closet and put on something that suits your mood. Maybe it’s a little clingy, or swingy, or the fabric feels great. Maybe it shows off your shoulders or your legs or your cleavage.
So, you’re walking down the street, feeling hot, having a great day, and suddenly you hear him. From a car, perhaps, or maybe just from across the street. He’s yelling gross comments at you, or making rude gestures. It could be anything from, “Nice tits, baby,” with accompanying hand gestures to illustrate what he’d like to do to them, to the vile thing my friend Chloe, age twenty-three, heard when she was walking down the street one day: “Damn, baby, I wanna put you in a cage!”
If you asked this guy why he’s shouting at you, he’d probably tell you that (a) he meant it as a compliment, and (b) if you didn’t want the attention, you shouldn’t have dressed so sexy.
“If she’s a slut, you have to treat her like a slut” is what one young street harasser told reporter Joe Eaton at the
Washington City Paper in a story on the phenomenon.
2 But street harassment isn’t your fault, no matter what you wear—and it has little to do with your wardrobe.
As much as harassers want to claim their behavior is sexually motivated, the truth is, it’s really about power. When I get harassed on the street, it usually has less to do with what I’m wearing and more to do with how I’m feeling. Most of the time, creeps target me when I’m feeling tired or nervous or lost or distracted, not when I’m feeling confident and strong. It’s got nothing to do with what I’m wearing or how “good” I look. And I’m not alone. When
Jezebel.com surveyed its readers about what they were doing when they were harassed on the street, the three most popular answers by far were: minding my own business, wearing jeans, and having no makeup on.
3It’s important to recognize that however we feel about the harassment ourselves, it’s still not our fault. Some women, like twenty-six-year-old Becca, sometimes find themselves struggling with conflicted responses: “I have, at times, felt like it was simultaneously really affirming of my femininity, and really awful from a political standpoint.”
There’s nothing wrong or surprising about that—of course all of us have been exposed to the myth that any male attention should be taken as a compliment, and that vulnerability is a valued feminine characteristic. None of these feelings mean you’ve “asked for it” or are “bringing it on yourself.”
There’s a growing movement of women who recognize that street harassment isn’t our fault and are doing something about it. They’re reporting harassers online and to the authorities, snapping pictures with their cell phones, sometimes even confronting them in the moment. What all of these women have in common is that they are placing the blame where it belongs: not on their own behaviors, but on their harassers’. For their inspiring stories, and resources that you can use in your own life, check out
ihollaback.org.
Couples Harassment
If you walk down the street holding your female partner’s hand, or kiss her in public, or even just look “dykey” together (or by yourself), some Neanderthals may decide to yell at you, threaten you, or hurt you. That’s awful, and it’s also a hate crime in the United States and many other countries. (U.S. federal law permits federal prosecution of anyone who “willingly injures, intimidates or interferes with another person, or attempts to do so, by force because of the other person’s race, color, religion, national origin, actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.”)
4 But one thing it isn’t is your fault. And yet people may tell you it is. If only you wouldn’t “flaunt” your sexuality, they might say. If you’d just kindly refrain from “shoving it in people’s faces,” then people would leave you alone. But that’s crap, for two reasons:
1. Nothing you can do, short of physically harming someone else, justifies their physically harming you. If they hurt you, and you weren’t hurting them first or credibly threatening to hurt them, they’re the ones at fault. Period. Always.
2. When straight couples walk down the street holding hands or kiss in public, are they harassed or harmed for it? Not usually. Straight couples are free to “flaunt” their sexuality all day long, in public, on TV, everywhere. Saying you shouldn’t have the same right just because you’re not straight is hypocritical and unfair, and any behaviors that are fueled by that hypocrisy are the fault of the hypocrite, not you.
The same holds true for other couplings that are frowned on by the Normalcy Police. Gray, a Black woman, gets it all the time:
I’ll be walking down the street with a guy who’s not Black (someone I could very well just be friends with), and a group of Black dudes will be like, “You know, you can always come home,” or, “I know he’s not hittin’ that, right?” or tons of other stuff like that. It’s really ridiculous—especially when I think about how some of them had dated white women.
The bottom line is this: No one but you gets to say who you love or who you’re attracted to. And until we can create a world where everyone actually behaves that way, the best thing to do is get clear about that with yourself, so you can reject all that misdirected blame that may come your way. (Well, that, and get better at risk assessment, which we’ll be getting into in chapter 4.)
Rape
It’s sick, but many people want to blame women for rape. Some women blame it on the poor decisions other women make, because they want to feel safe; they think if women get raped only when they make “bad” choices—like walking alone at night, or going home with a man they don’t know very well—then they imagine they can avoid getting raped themselves by simply making “smarter” decisions. Some guys blame women because they’re afraid to look at their own behaviors and attitudes, or they don’t want to believe that some dudes they know and like could be violent criminals. Whatever their reasons, victim-blamers love to point to women’s sexuality as the reason they get raped.
And under this rationale, anything sexual can be called into question. Take these examples: When an eleven-year-old girl was gang-raped in Texas by eighteen young men,
The New York Times focused on her behavior (“She dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said”) and wondered how the perpetrators “could . . . have been drawn into such an act?”
5 And a judge in Manitoba refused to give a rapist who had told his victim the assault “would only hurt for a little while” any jail time, because she had “dressed in a tube top without a bra and jeans and [was] made up and wore high heels in a parking lot outside a bar, [making her] intentions publicly known that [she] wanted to party.”
6And the list goes on . . . Why were you wearing those heels/ that skirt/that dress if you didn’t want it? Why were you dancing like that if you didn’t want it? Why were you flirting with her if you didn’t want it? Why did you kiss him if you didn’t want to have sex with him? We know what you’ve done with other people, so you’re obviously down for anything. It’s a familiar litany, but it’s totally and completely bunk.
First of all, the logic doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Are these victim-blamers seriously saying that if you wear a pair of sexy shoes, then you’re consenting to any and all sexual acts with anyone who might happen to see them? That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? But in addition to the fallacy of logic associated with blaming the victim, this line of argument is insulting to men, too. It assumes that men (the overwhelming majority of all rapists) are sexually incontinent—that if you turn them on they literally can’t control themselves. Which is obviously untrue. If it were true, most men
would be rapists. Instead, researchers have found that only 4–8 percent of men are responsible for committing the vast majority of rapes.
7 Seems like most men are fully capable of flirting with a sexy woman and not committing a violent felony against her, doesn’t it?
Also, the whole idea that women have to keep our sexuality in check so we don’t get raped is an impossible trap. Are we supposed to never have fun? Never wear anything that makes us feel good? Are we supposed to police our own pleasure so that other people don’t assault us? It’s profoundly unfair and totally unrealistic. Even if you tried to do that, even if you believed it was your responsibility to never be sexual so that you’d never be raped, could you succeed? We all choose short-term pleasure over abstract risk some of the time. It’s part of the human condition. And telling women we’re not allowed to enjoy our bodies and our sexuality while men are allowed to do so freely is sexism of the highest order.
Finally, I’ll repeat what I said earlier about homophobic attacks, because it applies here equally: Nothing you can do, short of physically harming someone else, justifies their physically harming you. If they hurt you, and you weren’t hurting them first or credibly threatening to hurt them, they’re the ones at fault. Period. Always.
Dive In: Think about times you’ve been blamed for something (nonsexual) that you knew wasn’t your fault. List a few of them in your journal, then pick one and write about it. How did it feel to be blamed for something you didn’t do? How did you maintain confidence in your innocence, despite other people’s insistence you were guilty? Did you convince your accusers that you were not responsible? If so, how did you do that?
FEAR
It seems like there’s so much to be afraid of when it comes to sex, doesn’t it? Pregnancy, disease, violence, heartbreak, social rejection . . . I could go on and on. Fear is the number one tool folks use to try to control women’s sexuality, and for good reason: It works. Why? Because some of these fears are based in reality. But a lot of them are exaggerated (like the risk of being attacked if you’re walking around by yourself at night), and some of them are fabricated altogether (like the idea that having casual sex will make you incapable of bonding emotionally with a future partner), while some things that you might be afraid of if you knew about them—such as the many dangers that flow from not having direct, respectful communication with your sexual partners—don’t get discussed at all. It’s a mess, but it doesn’t have to be.
All fears, whether real, imagined, or exaggerated, have one thing in common: The more energy you give them, the stronger they become. Am I saying that if you pretend STDs don’t exist you’ll never get one? Quite the opposite. If you’re too afraid to talk about STDs, or learn about them, or negotiate safer sex with your partner, you’re more likely to get infected. I used to teach self-defense to women, and one of the things I’d hear from many of my students was that they had been reluctant to take my class because thinking about having to use safety skills made them feel scared. Instead of dealing with that fear, instead of just feeling it and moving through it and moving on, they had been stuck, with fewer skills, and felt less safe as a result.
Let me put it another way: The best weapon against fear is information. You find yourself held back by fear? Investigate it. Ask yourself the following: How likely is it that this thing I fear will happen, really? How bad would it be if it happened? Is there anything I can do to make it less likely, or less awful if it happens? And: Where did I learn to be afraid of this? What might have motivated the people or institutions that taught me to be afraid? Do I feel good about those motives?
Let’s practice by taking a deeper look at some of the most common fears women have about sex and sexuality.
Pregnancy
It’s true that some kinds of sexual activity can put some of us at risk of becoming pregnant when we don’t want to be. Fortunately, there’s also a lot of good information about how to reduce and/or manage that risk.
A great place to start learning more about your birth control options is Planned Parenthood. You can visit their birth control info page online at
www.wyrrw.com/ppbc, or, if there’s a Planned Parenthood near you, make an appointment to go speak to one of their trained counselors, who can talk through your options and the risks with you and help you choose a method (or combination of methods) that feels right to you. If you can’t get online or to a Planned Parenthood, another great resource is
Our Bodies, Ourselves, which is all about women’s health and has lots of good information about birth control options, risks, and effectiveness.
If you don’t have access to any birth control, or none of those methods, even in combination, feel safe enough for you, there’s plenty of sexual activity you can engage in that doesn’t involve pregnancy risk. Masturbation, making out, all kinds of touching that don’t involve a penis touching a vagina, oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation—take your pick. They’re all incredibly low- or no-risk activities when it comes to pregnancy, and they can be lots and lots of fun.
Still worried? It may be time to ask yourself what you’re really worried about and why. Some girls worry about pregnancy as a stand-in for the greater fear that engaging in sexuality will ruin their life. If that’s the case for you, it’s better to realize it sooner so that you can explore the real fear underneath and deal with it directly.
STDs
Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are serious. Some of them, like herpes, can’t be cured, and if you get them, you’ll have to deal with them for the rest of your life. Some of them, like HIV/AIDS, can kill you. Sometimes you can be infected and not know it at all, which puts you at risk of transmitting disease to other partners.
But STDs are also preventable. Yes, the old saying is true: The only truly safe sex is sex for one. But there are some basic ways to have partnered sexual interactions and keep the risk of transmitting disease very, very low. Get educated, decide how much risk is right for you, and you’ll feel the fear melt away.
There are basically two approaches, which you can feel free to use in combination: barriers and behavior modification. Putting a latex barrier securely between you and the sexual fluids (and blood) of your partner significantly reduces the chance of catching a disease. And, if that’s not enough for you, you can choose to engage only in sexual activities that don’t bring you into contact with your partner’s fluids.
Sound a lot like my advice on pregnancy prevention? That’s because it is. And you should turn to the same resources to learn more: Planned Parenthood’s page on STD prevention (
www.wyrrw.com/ppss), a Planned Parenthood counselor, or
Our Bodies, Ourselves.And the same caveat holds true as well: If nothing quells your fears about STDs, it may be because this fear is a stand-in for deeper fears about sex. The sooner you can figure out what’s really at the root of your fears, the sooner you’ll be able to get what you really really want.
Rape
When we accept the blame for rape, even hypothetically, the fear of it can really hold us back. “I was taught ‘sit with your legs closed. Don’t be loud. Be damn near unnoticeable,’” says Gray, when she thinks about the rape-prevention messages her family taught her. “And now I feel like there’s this constant corseting I do to myself. A conceptual corseting. It sounds terrible, but at one point, I was afraid of every man I saw on the street.”
Gray is far from alone. One of the tricky parts of the pernicious myth that women bring rape on ourselves is that women internalize the blame and then start to worry that anything we do that’s remotely sexual puts us in danger of being raped.
Let’s clear this up now, shall we? You know what puts you in danger of being raped? Being in the presence of a rapist. You could be wearing seventy-three layers of shapeless, baggy sweats and still be raped if there’s a rapist around. And you can wear your tightest, tiniest, hottest outfit and be completely safe if there’s no one around who has the drive to violate you sexually. Thing is, the fear that acting sexy or sexual will get you raped is based on a misunderstanding of why and how rapists do the horrible things they do. Rapists don’t attack because they want you so bad they can no longer control themselves. Rapists attack because they like raping. And the vast majority of them prefer raping victims they already know. They pick out their victims in advance and deliberately get them into situations where they’re easy to attack. That means they don’t look for victims who are super-sexy, they look for victims who they think will be easy to manipulate. That’s why alcohol is so often involved with sexual assault: Rapists deliberately encourage their targets to get drunk so they’ll be more malleable and less likely to fight back.
So go ahead. Wear what you like. Flirt how you like. Sleep with whom you want to. None of it is going to “get you” raped, because that’s just not what rape is about.
And if you’re still struggling with the fear of rape (after all, as many as one in five women in the United States will be raped in her lifetime; it’s not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of), instead of curtailing your own activities, I strongly recommend taking some good self-defense training so you’ll have some more tools with which to combat those fears. I’ll talk more about self-defense in chapter 4.
Being Labeled a Slut or a Prude
Being called a slut or a prude hardly ever has anything to do with how much sex you are or aren’t having. Girls who get labeled “sluts” are just girls who seem disobedient or threatening to the status quo. Sometimes this happens just because you have opinions and aren’t afraid to speak up about them. Sometimes it happens because you’ve rejected blame and shame and that can seem like you’re “out of control” to folks who haven’t.
Girls who get labeled “prudes” aren’t that different, actually. Maybe people call you a prude because you choose not to get drunk, or like to be sexual only with people you’re in a committed relationship with. Sometimes it’s just about your personal sense of style, or about someone else’s cluelessness or mean agenda.
Twenty-three-year-old Prerna has felt this firsthand. “When I was upset with myself for sleeping with someone I didn’t care about, my friend told me that I’m young and I ‘should’ be sleeping around without feeling bad about it,” she recalls. “She thought she was releasing me from slut shame, but really she made me feel terrible about the fact that I want to be more selective with my sexual partners.”
Don’t let the fear of “getting a reputation” of any kind hold you back from exploring your sexuality on your own terms, even if that means you’re not ready to explore it yet. Trust that you’ll know when it’s time.
At its core, the whole idea of the “slut” is based on an archaic double standard. Guys who sleep around gain status, but girls who do the same are seen as somehow damaged and suffering from low self-esteem. On the flip side, girls are often called “prudes” because they don’t let peer pressure dictate how they experience sexuality. Guys who do the same thing are idolized as heroic. How you interact sexually is nobody’s business but yours and your partner’s, and as long as you’re both having fun, being safe, and being respectful, it has no bearing on your value as a person.
No One Will Want Me
The fear of not being wanted is both powerful and seldom discussed. Many women are afraid to feel our own desire because we’re afraid if we try to pursue it, we’ll be rejected. And not just rejected by one particular person (after all, if you think you’re pretty appealing, then one person’s rejection won’t matter that much). No, this fear is pervasive and personal, and there are any number of reasons why it might embed itself in your brain. For thirty-two-year-old Heidi, it went something like this: “Society has told me, day in and day out, that my body is too fat/too lumpy/too ugly/too unacceptable. That my body is too much. And I believed it because I didn’t think I had any other option. According to this world, my body is wrong . . . and it’s hard to imagine that anyone could possibly overlook that.”
Maybe, like her, people have told you that you’re undesirable, maybe even over and over. Maybe your body doesn’t fit our narrow cultural beauty standard in one or more of an almost infinite number of ways. (We’ll talk more about some of those ways in chapter 3.) Whatever the reason, there’s only one thing you have to know: It’s a lie.
No, I don’t know you. I’ve never met you, never even seen a picture of you. But I can still promise you, right now, that you are desirable to someone. Probably lots of people.
Why? Because people are different and unpredictable. That’s one of the awesome things about getting to know someone new: that moment when you find out she knows how to sword-fight, or he’s an überfan of some obscure band you’ve never heard of before, but now that you’re hearing them, you actually kind of love them—that crazy, quirky weirdness that makes us human also means that no two people have the exact same definition of “hot.”
There are people in the world who will find the very qualities you hate about yourself—your skin, your butt, your laugh, whatever they are—completely irresistible. There are people in the world who will be incredibly turned on by other parts of your appearance you may not value as much as you should—like your strong shoulders, or the shape of your nose. And there are people in the world who just don’t care very much about appearance, period. They’re going to be attracted to you because of who you are and how you act.
The flip side of this is the fear of being wanted for the “wrong reasons,” which goes a little like this: The only people who want me don’t want me at all, but want something that I symbolize to them. This can be a pretty painful experience for lots of women, including women of color, fat women, trans or genderqueer women, etc., who are often treated as fetish objects instead of as whole people. (We’ll get further into navigating “wrong reasons” land mines in chapter 6.)
Ultimately, living in fear of rejection can make it much harder to discover and articulate what you really really want. As Phoebe, forty-four, puts it, “I know my vulnerability is around not feeling attractive. But what that fear leads me to is a bigger one: that I’ll lose the ability to even know what I want in a sexual situation, because I’ll be trying to read what the other person wants. And that fear is paralyzing to me.”
Put another way: The energy you spend denying your desires for fear of rejection is energy spent sabotaging the chance you’ll see those desires fulfilled. On the other hand, the more energy you spend making friends with what you want, the better your chances of getting the opportunity to fulfill those desires.
I Want the Wrong Things
There are all kinds of desires that can feel “wrong.” Depending on your background, it can feel “wrong” to want to be sexual with women or transgender people. It can feel wrong to want to act on certain fantasies. It can feel wrong to want to be sexual at all. If you’re feeling confused about what’s wrong and what isn’t, the best person to ask is you: Go reread your sexual mission statement.
But sometimes we want things that may actually be wrong. Maybe we want someone who’s in a monogamous partnership with someone else. Maybe we want someone who doesn’t want us, and we want to force them to be sexual with us. Maybe we want someone who is off-limits because the power differential is too dangerous: a boss or a student or a friend’s parent.
It’s important to know that we all want “wrong” things at one point or another. Our culture’s standard of what’s acceptable sexual behavior for women is so narrow it’s impossible to live up to. So if you find yourself fearing your own desires because you think they’re “wrong,” the best thing to do is take the time to figure out which kind of “wrong” they are. Specifically, you want to ask yourself: If I acted on this desire, would anyone get hurt? If so, who and why?
Sometimes this feeling of “wrong” stems from a desire we just can’t let ourselves articulate to ourselves. In her book
Dilemmas of Desire, researcher Deborah Tolman talked with many teenage girls who’d experienced this phenomenon. One girl in particular, fifteen-year-old Megan, told Tolman about her struggles acknowledging her same-sex attractions:
There was this one girl that I had kinda liked from school . . . we were sitting next to each other during the movie and, kind of her leg was on my leg and I was like, wow, you know . . . But it’s so impossible, I think I just like block it out, I mean, it could never happen . . . I just can’t know what I’m feeling.8
Later, Megan tells Tolman more explicitly: “You know it’s like scary . . . it’s society . . . you never would think of, you know, it’s natural to kiss a girl.”
Even if you do find yourself wanting something you think would hurt yourself or someone else, I should stress here that there are no wrong desires, only some wrong actions. It’s very common to fantasize about things you would never actually do in real life, and there’s nothing bad about that. We’ll talk more about that kind of desire in chapter 8.
Dive In: Make a list of things that scare you about sex. Don’t worry if those fears seem rational to you or not—just write them all down. Now circle the three that scare you the most. Of those three, pick one, and write for five minutes about why that thing scares you and how bad it would be if that scary thing happened. Then reread what you’ve just written, and write for five more minutes taking the other position: arguing why that feared thing is unlikely to happen, or easily preventable, or not that bad after all.
Sensing a theme here? The Terrible Trio can be powerful and insidious, but you don’t have to let them rule you. And your best defense against them is information: separating fact from fiction, yes, but also separating the things you’ve been taught to believe about sex from what actually makes sense to you when you really think about it. Ever heard the phrase “sunlight is the best disinfectant”? It applies here, and what it means is this: If you’re infected with the Terrible Trio, the best way to get rid of them is to shine the light of fact and thought on them.
Go Deeper: 1. Take a big blank page in your journal and write your name in the very center. Then think about the people who’ve influenced the way you feel about your sexuality and yourself. Put the names of those who’ve influenced you most closest to you, and the ones who’ve influenced you less farther away, to make a cluster diagram. Now mark the ones who encourage you to feel shame, blame, or fear about your sexuality with an “S,” “B,” or “F,” as appropriate. And mark the ones who encourage you to reject the Terrible Trio with a star. Now make a new diagram. This time, put the people you want to have the most influence on you closest to you, and those whose influence you want to minimize farthest away.
2. Using magazines or the Internet, find images that represent all the bad things you can think of that are blamed on sexual women. Make a collage of these images, print it out if it’s online, and then take the collage, a deep metal bowl, and some matches over to a sink or bathtub. Making sure that nothing flammable is nearby, put the collage in the bowl and the bowl in the sink or bathtub, and then light it on fire and watch it burn. (Alternative: If burning isn’t practical where you live, run it through a shredder, soak it in water until it disintegrates, or rip it into tiny pieces.)
3. Make a list of names used for prudes and sluts. Write another list of names—at least as long as the first one—for women who are proud and sexual. Make these up if you need to.
4. Write a list of five sexual practices that are considered taboo. Write a list of five sexual things you enjoy doing.
5. Write a letter to someone who put you down, letting them know how hurtful this felt (an ex, an advertiser, a boss, a friend).
6. Write a letter to someone telling them how much you value how they see you and understand who you really are.