In retrospect, I didn’t really want to be a slut. What I wanted and needed was a therapist who would consent to fucking me, but I doubted my parents’ insurance would have covered that. I had a lot to figure out for myself and I did that by making poor decisions that summer. If some wise, authoritative adult could simply have explained why I wanted to do these things and then done some with me, I think I would have refrained from most of my sexual misadventures...
More than that, the thought rattled uncomfortably in my child brain that I would one day become one of them. My body then was sexless. Though I had seen the curves of adults, I couldn’t fathom the chrysalis that would turn my featureless body into something with heft and gravity, curves and the inclination to use them.
He wants to use my body, to take advantage, and I want to let him. I want to be someone’s one night stand, some blithe slut... I want to allow myself to be like all those women I pretended to look down upon all my life, but whom I secretly envied for having the guts to have their legs spread by strange men in smoky bars.
If you aren’t ready, you spend your whole life perseverating on that one situation, getting it wrong time and again. I like to think I am a woman who learns her lesson, but the trick is that you can only ever understand your life backwards, but you live it forward.
I know my father blamed himself, since he is the one who discovered me pawing through his pornography in the basement as a child. Even then, I marveled at the strangeness of the women in the magazines, their hair feathered in a style I struggled to believe was ever in fashion.