I was lucky, he said.
A sexy baby sitter took
My virginity off me before
It became a burden.
I became a man before
I finished being a child.
I knew my way around,
Worldly in the ways of women,
But lost in the wild abandon of boys.
The others were filled with envy.
If only they had had a nanny
With a name like big, fat Fanny!
They could have walked the world
With pride, chest out and shoulders high.
They would have been the rivals of the others,
And the heartbreak of daughters and mothers.
They would have lived on the loose,
The Lucky Ones.
And our brown-eyed boy
Was proud of his conquests.
He was the real wild one—
Drunk and disordered—
The loner untethered to anyone.
Promiscuity is praised in a boy,
And a sad loner has a certain mystique.
He was lucky no one could ever
Tie him down, and he
Tied the knot in the noose himself.
“I’ve had plenty of anonymous sex before,” she said, “and I still know how to find it.” Jan intended this as a threat or warning, obviously, but she also knew it stung in its own right. She first learned to weaponise her own sexuality when she saw the crestfallen look on her father’s face when she knew he knew what she’d gotten up to with John one night. Since that day, she had learned a number of ways to use her own numbness to sex to devastate men. Not that it made her feel that much better, but it was something.
Maybe it was revenge. Maybe it was something else, but it gave her a feeling of power, and who doesn’t want to feel that sometimes? Everyone wants to feel a little control over things. The way she told it, she had always controlled her own sexuality. She was 12 the first time, she said, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Her parents were gone for the day and she called her school band director on the phone and asked him over. It was her idea. That’s what she said.
She said it hurt, but he was very nice. He took care of her. When he lost his job at the school, she and some other girls formed a group to get signatures on a petition to get him his job back. They really liked him. When she graduated high school, she wrote to him to let him know she was doing all right, and he wrote back and said he was glad to hear it.
Bobby couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He told her she was only 12, for God’s sake, and definitely no child could be responsible for what she described. She had obviously been groomed and manipulated, and so had all the other girls. She was raped, he said, but she averred. “But I knew what I was doing was wrong,” she said, “That’s why I never told anyone before now.” Bobby told her it wasn’t her fault, but he wasn’t prepared for this conversation.
Somehow, he made her feel more judged than supported, not that he was trying to, but he really wasn’t equipped to respond to this information, and he felt a little sick. But Jan didn’t notice that. She was just trying to make a point about her prissy classmates who acted so shocked to find that a professor was having an affair with a student. She was just wanting to say, “Hello! I was having sex with a teacher when I was 12! Grow up.”
I’ve seen you enveloped in passion
Entranced and wandering aimlessly
In all consuming lust as you fold
Into taut skin stretched over
A well-tuned bicep shimmering
With the sweat of ones who
Would possess you,
Confiscate your love,
Loyalty, lust, passion, devotion,
Breasts, lips, thighs,
And even your new mountain bike.
I’ve seen you capitulate to complete
Sexual abandon and forget
Your past, your future, and your
Unpaid mortgage. On some
Occasions, you switched from
Lover to lover in your bed
Like a child trying different
Ice creams at the shop with
So many flavours.
I’ve seen you soak the sheets,
Draw blood with your nails,
And shriek till the rafters shook.
You took it all in,
You put it all out.
You forgot who you were.
You looked through me,
Past me, beyond me.
You forgot I existed,
And when you remembered,
You laughed.
You laughed.
Then you shouted.
I had no business blocking
Your way to paradise.
I had no reason to be in your way.
But as you stroke my back,
I open my eyes,
And remember why I came.
People overstate the importance of first impressions. It’s possible to change your impressions of someone, for better or worse, on second or third impressions. It is even possible to change your mind about someone after 25 years. I’m sure of all that, but some people sure do make memorable first impressions.
Sharon pretty much introduced herself to me by saying, “Well, I’m a Black bisexual woman who just wants to make trouble and maybe help make a better world.” Some people would say that for shock effect, but I don’t think she really cared about that. She just liked to vet new friends. It’s sort of like those signs that say, “You must be this tall to get on this ride.” If you were bothered by her introduction, then she didn’t need to waste any more time on you.
As far as I could tell, she loved life. She loved men and women. She loved humanity. Somehow, the world can’t accommodate people like that, though. Some of us just never find a safe place. One day she would talk about all the drama women cause. The next day she would lament all the baggage Black men bring on dates with them. What’s the difference between anger, fear, grief, or love?
Blame the structure of the world. Blame biology. Blame the devil. Do what you want, but it is hard for some of us to feel connected to anything. It’s like that Jimmy Cliff line about how loneliness would never leave him alone. You know, we’re all in this together—it’s just that we seem unable to share the burden of that, so we’re all seekers.
So, anyway, at her funeral, her aunt gets up and tells all the family and other busy bodies that no one knows where Sharon is now but Sharon and God, and no one else even needs to worry about it, so just shut your mouth and show a little respect. I guess some people think Heaven is a hotel that rejects people who couldn’t find safe shelter on Earth. Some people believe in a God that locks the door for his most sensitive children.
I guess that’s just our nature. We all want to feel we’re blessed. We want to feel protected in the end. We’re not like the others, somehow. Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin had this vision of good Christian folks like herself having their virtue “being burned away” as they descended into Hell while her inferiors sang and praised their way into Heaven. Some of us find out we are like the others before it is too late. Some of us don’t.
You have to be careful. I mean, you have to watch what you say. It’s easy to think everyone will see things your way, but you never know how they’re going to take things.
That’s what happened when she went to talk to Valerie. She wanted to get some things off her chest, and she just knew Valerie would be sympathetic.
Valerie was sympathetic. Of course she was sympathetic. What kind of friend wouldn’t be? And Valerie enjoyed, maybe enjoyed isn’t the exact right word, listening to other people talk about their sexual problems, so she was bound to be a good listener.
So she unloaded on Val. She talked about how her husband was supportive and everything, but the sex was too burdensome. She told Val how he had a slow fuse and could never just “get to business.” She liked a sort of “stick and go” approach, but he always made a big production out of everything with lots of cuddling, kissing, and holding before ever getting around to the good stuff. By the time he was ready, she had lost interest. You know how it is?
Valerie certainly knew how it was. Valerie understood the dynamics all too well because her husband, too, was a “stick and go” kind of person. He never cuddled her or kissed her or stroked her at all. He just went at it, had his orgasm, and fell asleep.
So, as Val listened to her friend sort of just describing her frustration with the burdens of too much kissing and cuddling, Val got a little turned on. Her fantasies were racing through her mind. She’d been lost in a kissing desert, and now her friend was describing a sort of sexual oasis, and, man, she’d like a good long drink.
So Val was a good friend, and a good listener, like I said. She shared stuff about her life, her sexual past, which had a bit of trauma, too, and her frustrations with marital difficulties. She listened intently. She made herself vulnerable. She offered warm hugs and encouragement.
Once she’d set her friend off in a cloud of mutual support, her own needs and fantasies drove her straight to the telephone. She was tentative and nervous, but desire is sometimes greater than fear. “Hi, I was just talking to your wife. She said you really enjoy long, deep kisses, just like I do.”
He wasn’t a virgin. He had definitely had sex more than once before and with more than one person, which was just another way of saying she was the third person on his sexual resume. He had enough experience to know where to put what and so forth, but things had never moved quite so quickly before. She was almost a stranger, even if they had talked in class from time to time.
To be fair, it wasn’t like she just threw him in bed and jumped on him. She invited him for pizza first, then she drove him to the park for a walk in nature. At the park, they sat in the grass on the slope of a kind of ditch, and he was lost in his thoughts, because that was where he spent most of his time. He was sort of staring into the distance, but he wasn’t looking at anything, really, when he felt a light kiss on the back of his neck.
She apologized for being so forward and said she didn’t generally do that. If she’d been more honest, she would have told him that anytime she’d sat in the grass with a man before, he had immediately put her hand on his crotch, so she wasn’t accustomed to having to get things started herself. A lot of women don’t meet the quiet boys, the non-sex-crazed boys, the shy boys, or the timid boys because those boys don’t meet a lot of women. If you think about it, it seems obvious.
But back at his room, she just expected to move straight to the bed, and that took him by surprise. Of course, he didn’t know that she’d taken some amount of speed earlier and was sort of buzzing around, not really in a relaxed mood, if you get my drift. She got the speed above board, more or less, because doctors are always willing to prescribe it for weight loss. They feel sorry for the chubby girls and want to do their part to help them be more desirable.
So that’s how you end up with a pretty well withdrawn young man going at it with a even-less-inhibited-than-usual somewhat chubby woman pretty much screaming and laughing as if she forgot they were in a fourplex with old and uninsulated walls. He felt embarrassed and awkward, but she didn’t seem to notice, so never mind. She was just in a routine, and he was out of his comfort zone. We don’t always end up where we expect to be, do we?
When women reveal that they first “had sex” at the age of 11, we call it rape, even if it was consensual, and rightly so. Often, these same women will go on to detail a life plagued by self-loathing, substance abuse, reckless behavior, and failed relationships. It may not be absolutely right to blame every single problem on these early sexual experiences (surely verbal abuse, physical abuse, and other factors play a role), but most of us agree that this is not the best way to become a healthy and satisfied sexual being. Having sex as a child is absolutely to be avoided.
Unless you are a boy and the person having sex with you is female. The latest in a long line of men bragging about their early sexual experiences is Josh Brolin, who says he “lost his virginity” when he was eleven to a girl named Greta. There is no mention of how old Greta was at the time. Men’s Journal also says that he stole cars and smoked heroin as a teen. His life follows a pattern we might associate with victims of child rape. He was most recently arrested on New Year’s Eve for public intoxication.
I certainly don’t know the facts regarding Brolin’s early experiences, and I don’t claim to know anything about him beyond what I’ve read in these reports, but I can’t understand why journalists can blithely report that a boy “lost his virginity” at the age of eleven. I can’t imagine anyone saying the same of a woman without at least mentioning the age of the person who had sex with the child or the possibility of child rape.
It is time to view sex with young boys in the same way we view sex with young girls.
