When you strive to share every personal experience about
your body and sex life with the world at large, the response is inevitably mixed. My
grandmother recently watched this short film I co-wrote/directed/produced which opens with three
young women (me being one of them) talking about sex and masturbation in the kitchen while the men are
outside by the grille talking about babies and fatherhood. My grandmother
wanted to know if us girls really talk that openly about sex. Yes, I said. We
do. This scene was based entirely on real things that my girlfriends and I
actually said. My grandmother was amazed.
“In my day, my girlfriends and I just didn’t talk about that
stuff,” she said.
But she wasn’t put off by it like I thought she might be.
She was simply in awe.
When I was home recently, we had some of my parents’ friends
over for Thanksgiving dinner. Our guests included the parents of my best friend
growing up. They too had seen my film. The mother of my friend, after a
couple glasses of wine, openly expressed that she found it to be a little
shocking. That we would actually talk like that. She too wanted to know if it
was based in reality. She mentioned that she also found Girls to be shocking in the way they talk about sex. I weighed my options: change the subject or engage. Obviously,
I chose the latter.
“I personally love this new openness. I feel like sex has
been cloaked in shame for so long, especially for women, and I think it’s good
to talk about these things,” I said.
Two of the older women at the table piped up in unison: “We
weren’t ashamed. We were just embarrassed.”
“I just feel like, sex is the most natural thing after,
what, eating and peeing.” I couldn’t help myself. My parents laughed and shared
a look between them, uncomfortable and
embarrassed. “Why is something so natural still considered so shameful and like
we shouldn’t talk about it?”
My friend’s mother asked her younger daughter (early 20s),
also at the table, if she talked as candidly with her girlfriends about sex.
“Yeah.” She blinked, unfazed.
Her mom looked surprised. “Oh. Okay.”
Someone brought up the recent attack on Lena Dunham for being a “sexual predator” for looking into her little sister’s vagina when she
was seven.
“I’m so sick of that name Lena Dunham,” said the father of
my friend.
“That made me so mad,” I ramped up for my tirade but,
looking around the table, realized I had lost my audience. They’re of a
different generation, and no matter what I say, I won’t convince them that we
should all be talking about sex and masturbation over Thanksgiving dinner. The
topic changed to Ferguson and the decision to not indict the cop who shot Michael Brown, something we could all agree was fucked up.
When I first told my mom I was going to write this blog, she
was concerned for my safety.
“You’re really going to write about your sex life on the
Internet?”
I chose to make the blog anonymous. Not because I was
ashamed, but because I wanted the freedom to write about the guys I fucked and
if everyone knew I wrote the blog, I felt it would skew my subjects’ behavior
towards me or I wouldn’t be comfortable being utterly candid about my
experiences, knowing they might read it.
In the early days of the blog, Mom used to read it. Then she
called me one day, outraged. She had just read about a particularly heinous interaction with Gaffer Guy that left me crying on the floor, covered in hot soup.
“Why are you sleeping with this asshole who treats you like
shit?” She rightfully wanted to know. I didn’t know how to explain the animal
magnetism between us, the fact that I couldn’t get enough of him, despite the
fact (or maybe because of it) he was a complete asshole.
As I tried to justify myself, Mom started crying. “It’s
really hard for me to read about this. I just don’t understand. I mean, do you
have to write about this stuff?”
This made me mad and I exploded at her, “Yes, I do! This is
my experience! And you know what, you just shouldn’t read it anymore.”
“Yes, I don’t think I will,” she sniffled into the phone.
And that was that. Mom stopped reading my blog. Which was
good actually, because it allowed me a new level of freedom to be even more
honest and uncensored and not worry about her getting upset. I actually admire
the incredible self-control she exhibits in knowing her daughter writes a sex
blog and choosing not to read it. From time to time, if I write one I think she
will like and that is light on the sex-with-assholes factor, I will recommend
it to her.
As for my dad, he too knows I write the blog and he too
chooses not to read it. Actually, that second part was my mom’s idea. But one
day, Dad called me out of the blue and said, “I read your last blog.”
“Oh, really?” I held for his reaction.
“It was hilarious. The writing is great, and I love the way
the story unfolded. That guy is ridiculous.” He was referring to the Studio Exec who picked me up in the park, fresh off his trip to
Burning Man.
Dad laughed and started quoting the blog. “I love when [your
ex] says ‘rock the cleavage’.” I couldn’t believe Dad was repeating my lines
back to me, and laughing about it. I felt so moved I almost cried.
I suddenly feel the powerful urge to “come out,” to put my
face on the blog, to publicly become the Slutty Feminist. Because I don’t
want to hide. And it’s a different time than when my parents were growing up.
My generation is one of disclosure. Any and all information about everyone and
everything is at our fingertips, and nothing is private anymore. This is a
mixed blessing, but one thing I find wonderful about it is that there is a
resource now for shared experiences, and I think people are realizing they’re
not alone. There’s a community for everyone, no matter your kinks or weirdness,
to be found on the Internet. This is a great thing for female sexuality in
particular, which has been shrouded in mystery and ignorance for so many
generations. There is finally an outlet for women to share their stories and
realize what they thought was weird or unnatural is actually totally normal.
God knows sex education isn’t doing a great job of teaching us about our bodies
and our desires, so we gotta figure it out for ourselves, on the Internet.
I listen to this wonderful podcast called Guys We Fucked: The Anti-Slut Shaming Podcast and these gals are not hiding behind a pseudonym. They are Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson and they are loud and proud about it. Every
week, they have a guest on the podcast—usually guys they’ve fucked. It seems
from the comments they read in the beginning of each show that a lot of their
audience consists of teenage girls, which at first seemed a little dubious because
they talk so candidly and explicitly about sex. But then I was like, no, this
is good that these young girls are getting this perspective on sex. Because most of
their sex education is probably coming from the endless steam of porn on the
internet, most of which is made for men by men. I’m glad they’re getting a female side to the
story, from two smart funny 20-something NYC gals. At least if they’re being
prematurely exposed to sex, they have a chance at a balanced perspective, which
is more than I can say for previous generations.
The more I read memoirs like Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants
by Jill Soloway and Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham, I realize
there is a community out there for women like me. I think that Jill and Lena
would relate to my weird musings. Like the fact that every time I’m on a public
bus, I imagine everyone as giant genitalia and I can’t help but picture the bus
filled with enormous penises and vaginas; the sheer amount of genitalia
surrounding us at any given moment never ceases to amaze me. I think about how so many
of our interactions in the world can be linked back to our genitals, and how
it’s amusing to me that this is the one thing it’s most socially unacceptable
to talk about.
Although I’m sure it would make my parents and their friends
cringe, I look forward to a time when we can all talk openly about fucking at
Thanksgiving dinner. There’s something amazing that happens when people come
out of the closet about sex and really start to hash it out. People’s faces
light up. They get excited. I get the sense that this is the one thing people have
been waiting to talk about, but they’ve never had permission or they’ve always
been too embarrassed. It’s amazing to me what happens when I talk to strangers
about my blog, because my candidness seems to give them permission to open up
and suddenly I’m hearing about the sex lives of people I don’t even know. There’s
an instant connection because we’ve skipped through the bullshit small talk and
gotten to something real. Sex is something we all do and we all think about a
lot of the time—it’s something we literally all have in common. So let’s
fucking talk about it! Every time I get together with my girlfriends, of course
sex always comes up, and every time we talk about it, I feel like real progress
is being made. Sex is a powerful force, and something that women haven’t had
ownership of for far too long. Owning it will be the final frontier for women’s
equality and liberation. That’s what I think. (mic drop)
