Mine and mine alone
Sweet 16. Butterflies.
Hours of kissing.
Deliciousness in his touch.
Subtle hints when softly brushing past my breasts.
Accidentally, yet intentionally.
Opening the button of my pants, hinting. Leaving it at that.
Hot breaths sparking between us.
Lust. Desire.
So much pleasure. So much time.
And we were not done. Never done.
Yet it always ended there.
“Gosh, this feels so good!”
When I was a teenager, I spent hours kissing, indulging in the pleasures my body felt with someone else caressing it. Sucking, licking, chewing on my neck and ears, bodies on top of each other and all over each other, with a maximum of a hopeful hand softly reaching under my t-shirt, caressing some more … gosh, the bare memories of those times send a tingle down my spine. Good times indeed and in retrospect, I am very grateful the young girl I once was got to linger in those experiences for a bit before moving on into a world of sexual activity. Sex in the way the rest of the world saw it. Sex as in intercourse ¬ the non-plus ultra, the only way of having sex, according to the sad version of sex education we got – which, in all honesty, I only started having so my friends would stop asking me about it. I didn’t like it. I remember thinking “are you serious?!? This is what all this fuss was about?!?”. Gone were the hours of pleasure. Of enjoying bodies. Of hands dancing a gentle, entangling dance, while quietly getting to know one another … of taking off clothes with eyes only, long before the hand dared to even touch the skin underneath.
"Are you serious!?
This is what all this fuss was about?!?"
What came after my sweet teenage experiences were years of bad “sex”. Meaningless sex, often. Pleasureless sex, almost exclusively. Clothes that were ripped off, trying to get to the bottom of things as quickly as humanly possible. The lead up to sexual intercourse was sometimes hot … dancing, touching, kissing, grabbing, often mixed with drinking … It was only decades later I admitted to the fact that I was drunk in way too many of the sexual experiences I had in my 20s. It took some more time to question what that meant in the light of consent and even longer to dive into the feelings of one specific experience. One where my consent had clearly been violated. A moment only, in the midst of things, where I articulated wanting to stop, yet he did not. And looking back, I could easily brush the sexual experience off as just one of many. A meaningless, pleasureless encounter with a man. But I am done blaming myself for stuff that was done to me. Stuff that affected me long after the word ‘no’ was voiced, yet unheard.
It happened in my car and no matter how hard I try, I cannot remember which one it was. Gosh, I don’t even remember which year it happened. The memory was shoved into a deep, dark corner inside myself, though the feeling of that night never left me. Not for one second. I still remember how dirty I felt coming home that night. I remember trying to wash the experience off in showers upon showers, while they stuck like a second skin that had grown on me in just a fleeting moment. A moment that had come to linger. That was not going to go away. I thought that experience, like many others, was my fault. Had I not put myself in that situation, it would not have happened. Right?!? Had I not said yes initially … I did not have the language for what happened to me that night and never spoke about it to anyone. My body, however, had a clear and continuous response to the specific position I was in when violated. It made my alarm bells go off. This is not right. You do not want this. While I had hidden the memory in a place inaccessible, my body remembered it all.
What happened to me has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the person who did it to me.
It was only once I started claiming my body for my pleasure, however, that things started to crumble. That I started to feel the sweet pleasures of those delicious, tingling hours of teenage bodies exploring, as much as I felt the full load of dirty shame that came with the recollection of my consent being violated. And while the words still failed me at first, my body slowly guided me to release the pain and shame it had been carrying for all these years, helping me to let out the rage that had been caged up in a secretive, dark, lonely, non-accessible place inside myself for too long and – fucking finally! – admitting that what happened had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the person who did it to me. ‘No!’ is a full sentence, is what I teach my kids today, but back then, I did not know that. Consent was blurry lines, something not covered in the little sex education we got, and definitely considered unimportant amongst the many sexual myths we were (and are still) fed.
Today I know that the wetness of my body says absolutely nothing about my desire and is most definitely not a sign for consent. I have also learned, that given consent is not all-inclusive, but can, in fact, be taken back at any given time. I have that power. I get to make that choice over my body. What I say goes. No one else gets to even have as much as an opinion on the choices I make. Now I know and it feels good to finally know that. Still, I wish I had known it growing up. I wish that someone would have told me that sex has very little to do with intercourse and instead, has everything to do with pleasure. Everyone’s pleasure, mine included. That I am not obliged to give access to my body to anyone, no matter the setting. I wish that all the beautiful women in my life had had the words to tell me that.
I have made peace with my younger self. She did the best she could with what she knew. Today I know better. I have come to learn and embrace that I am orgasmic energy and because of that, have the power to reframe my sexual story. When looking back to my early years of being sexually active, the memories that come up today are the sweet, tingly sensations my body still holds when remembering myself at sixteen. It was the time I was truly learning … leaning into soft desires and joy. When talking about my first sexual experiences, I now choose to sink into those memories, for that is what sex has become for me: pure pleasure. Full circle.
What happened to me does not define me. Long years of bad sex and violated consent say so much more about the society we live in than it will ever say about me. It took a moment for me to see that and, in writing it down, I am finally letting go. I am mine and mine alone. And gosh, it feels so good.
It. Feels. So. Good.