The V Word

I am 31 years old and single. I'm also something else that I won't spell out. I feel vulnerable enough just from writing this. But then I kind of want the woman whose blog I linked to to read this.


In The Life of Brian a crowd stands outside Brian's house where he lives with his mother, and demands to know if she's a virgin.

"That's a very persona question!" she says.

Brian’s mother is right. Admitting you’re a virgin at her age is personal and private. It takes a lot of guts to share something like that, and they shouldn’t be demanding to know.

My first sexual experience was a bit like the scene from The Breakfast Club where Bender taunts Claire with "Are You a Virgin?"

I got intimidated and made to feel insecure by a guy, just like Claire is by Bender. I wasn’t popular, like Claire, though. Not that that matters when you’re in your thirties now. I think that making Claire into a rich, spoiled socialite makes it so that she deserves to be mocked. Really, personality-wise, I was more like Ally Sheedy’s character, The Basket Case. I never lied about all the sex I was having, like she did.

I guess the teenage-virgin daughter of Christian parents wouldn’t be any fun to have in a movie like The Breakfast Club. I was surprised to learn how much I was like Carrie White from Carrie. I wasn’t as sexually ignorant as her, though. I knew what tampons were. My mother was also nicer than hers.
I have had way too many issues to even think about dating. I have issues with rape, with sexual abuse, with self-esteem, with sexuality and gender issues. Then I met someone online, a guy, the type who would be banned from many chat rooms as a troll. We were both lonely, though, and for a little while that was enough. I thought I was able to be a little bit different. He called my fears about rape, the trauma I experienced, “bullshit.”
For a little while, I agreed. When I meet men, I like to channel them.
I would not have broken down completely like Clare did in that movie. I would have been sarcastic. I would have been cold. I would have been mean back. I would have tried to channel my inner butch.
“What do you know about me?” I asked Gary and Seddah. “Nothing!”

I was in third grade and my parents were recently divorced. They both still lived in a small Texas town near the border. My dad brought us over to my mom's house for the weekend. Something had happened. She had survived something. I was a precocious kid. My aunt would tell me "You ask questions like a 3-year-old." But Mom wouldn't say what had happened. At the Methodist church we went to, people would stand up and talk about how God had helped them through their problems and thank him.

So I said, "Mom, why don't you thank God in church for getting better from _____"

It happened slowly that I figured out what happened. She had nothing after the divorce. We slept on air mattresses on the hardwood floor of the rented house. I thought it was fun. Like camping out. A boy from school named Jodie Brown said he looked into our house ... her house ... and said "You didn't have any furniture!" and I realized it was a bad thing.

She has always been bad about personal safety. The door was unlocked.

I overheard my grandmother tell her, "They always say don't look at them, or they'll kill you." or something like that.
I yelled that out loud at the latest QSA meeting. That that was an unhelpful message about how to stay safe. I didn’t get the attention or the response that I needed, though, unfortunately.
My now-ex read “The V Word” when I sent it to him, and said, “I’m sorry your mother was raped.”
I think maybe he wanted to rescue me, but he was all hands.

Sexual intercourse is a beautiful thing, my mother said.

He said he was sorry, she said. He said he was drunk.

I can see her praying for him afterward.

******

I never dated or had friends in school who dated. My best friend, a fellow bookworm who introduced me to Mercedes Lackey, would discipline herself to not read the sex scenes. (And Mercedes Lackey wrote the best sex scenes, all full of mutual consent, and communication.) My friend was a good Mormon. We started talking in the 7th-grade PE locker room when she transferred briefly to my school. We were talking about books. I always tried with the new kids, because they wouldn't know they weren't supposed to talk to me.

The boys would call me ugly. Hit me. Put things in my hair.

People can be mean, says C. softly. He doesn't say "Get over it."
When I run away from my boyfriend the Troll, he sends me nasty messages, more concerned about the books he leant me than about my personal safety. I need to think of my personal safety, and whose hands I will let rove my cunt. In a message, he calls me an Angry Loser Girl.
In person, when I meet to give the books back, a ploy to keep me in his life, I think, but when I post that on Facebook, I get no response. Just Invis causing drama as per usual. Invis just needs a man to take care of her.
In person, he’s all nicey-nice. I am shy with him, not automatically coming in, and he doesn’t try to carry me over the threshold to deflower me.
I say that my Facebook friend the Radical Feminist and Sociology Professor said that he’d say fucked-up stuff to try to get me to stay. He said that my keeping the books was fucked-up, too.
I said he said fucked-up shit by calling me a loser.
“I don’t think that,” he said softly.
I am now racking up more experience with men and comparing that to when C. said, “People can be mean.”
I am thinking that C’s soothing words didn’t mean a thing, because this guy, my ex, when I sent him an email entitled “I haven’t forgotten you,” acknowledging his emails to me and saying I didn’t know what to say, called me a loser because I was devoting so much time to “demonizing” him. In my opinion, and I am, as usual, trying to cause drama, he was intimidating and threatening me because I want to write about him. Even if a lot of what I write is actually kind of sweet and romantic.
When I go on my Amtrak trip, I’m thinking about sending him a postcard saying I’m still writing about him, and he’s probably still all pissy about that.
“Remember when you got all bent out of shape when I called you a loser?” he asked.
That meant he was still sticking to his guns about that, despite the brief softening when I appeared one summer evening on his doorstep. Just like I decided to stick to my guns in regards to condom usage.

In 6th grade the girls started getting pregnant.

*****

In college I tried a few times, but it always felt like I was letting them molest me. I kept making friends with young women who had been sexually abused. I felt attracted to them, emotionally, physically.

I wish I'd majored in art back then, and had to draw the nude models, so I could see that looking at a naked woman wasn't a big deal.
People would laugh at me and say, “You have so much to learn.”
It’s true. I knew about tampons, but it would hurt to insert them. On the box, it says that when correctly inserted, you shouldn’t feel a tampon.
During a cervical exam, which I have also avoided because of the pain, the OBGYN said I have a very long cervix. Or she said that my cervix is hard to reach. She suggested what I’ve heard before, that I take a mirror and look down there.

I started wondering why I wasn't doing what I was supposed to do sexually.

I tried coming out as a lesbian.

Then I decided I must have been sexually abused and didn't remember it.

Now I know I'm just mentally ill. I'm just like her. I take the same medications as my mother. And it's not going to go away.

I'm 31 years old and average looking.
I've lost weight.
I've decided I need to look for someone normal, but someone normal couldn't handle my issues. Then again, nobody’s normal, and everyone has issues.
I don't have the energy to go to the gym.
I worked the graveyard shift, and I was so tired. Then I lost my job and got back on disability. Failure and defeat just made me more tired.
I have artistic talent, but don't feel safe expressing it. I know it won't be a career.

I tried dating again at age 29.
We met at the art class he was teaching. I was so innocent back then. I thought when he said he quit drinking that it was permanent. I can hear anyone who reads this laughing.
Because of his perceived innocence, I found him unattractive. I found out later he was functionally illiterate.

"My daughter called me when she was having a nightmare. She called me instead of her mom."
I wanted to call late at night when I was scared, too.

I went out on 2 more dates with him than I should have. "At least we were never physically involved," he said.

Then I met someone in the community college cafeteria. He left a note on the table next to me: "I'm behind in my homework, too. Call me?"

It seemed okay talking to him at first. He even liked folk dancing. Some of my female friends do that. It's like hanging out at the senior center, though.

Now here was a young, decent-looking guy who liked doing that.

Then I was meeting a fellow student in the library to work on a class presentation and there he was, walking in and asking if I was busy.
Yes I was.

He saw me again in the cafeteria and apologized. I tried to brush him off with, "Don't do it again."

Then the day before Thanksgiving, I didn't go "home." I stayed in the cafeteria between classes. He sees me and makes a bee-line for my table.
Then he gets up. "Are you going to be here a while?" he asks. "I going to pay some bills." He leaves and comes back. "I like paying bills!" he chirps. "What are you studying?" "Medical terminology." "Oh! I had a friend who was taking that class. It was great fun helping her memorize her terms!"

I give him the stoneface look and he gets it.

"Do you wish to be left alone?" he asks. I say I do (want to be alone).

There was the Rand Paul fan I met on a hiking meetup. He said people are only liberal because it's "cool." The problem with conservatives is that I'm insecure about my political beliefs. Anyone is able to convince me. I am always questioning myself. I am diagnosed with OCD.

I also was talking to a lesbian woman in the cafeteria, who I met at a speed dating event but never followed up on. I thought I would try and see if I was really gay or just had Homosexual OCD. There had recently been some suicides by queer youth, which had inspired a Wear Purple day. We talked about it, she and I. I said I wanted to start a gay-straight alliance at CNM, because there wasn't one, like there was at UNM. She said she wasn't out to everyone.

I know I need to keep trying to date. I know it must get better. I know I shouldn't talk and talk and try to get Artist Dude back with a sob story. Tell him I changed my mind. Because he's drinking.

And that's why I'm glad I found the woman whose blog I am linking to in my post.

If you read this, Andrea, thank you.

I have heard you reading at poetry slams before.

I wanted to, but I'm too scared.

I shouldn't be.

I have survived that
I am still alive.
I deserve to be alive.
I have the right to be treated well.
To demand to be treated well.
To abstain if I’m not treated well.

I have a room of my own and enough money to support myself.
At the Queer Students’ meeting place on UNM campus, I paged through Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin. In the chapter on Virginity, she writes about that as being empowering.
Joan of Arc was a virgin.