*The following content is of a sensitive nature and may be triggering to some.
I’m sixteen years old and scrubbing the lingering scent of you off my body in the shower. I am scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing away, trying to get rid of you. I push the loofah down into my skin, harder, and a few drops of blood trickles down into the drain. I don’t feel anything. This is not what I was expecting, not how I was supposed to feel after my first time.
I scrub faster but there is no soap left and I look down to realize I’ve been gripping the sponge so hard my knuckles have turned white. My skin seems pale and I have not eaten all day—to look good for you. I didn’t even realize you wouldn’t be able to see me.
I am sixteen years old and have just lost my virginity and my sanity, but no one told me that it would be like this. No one told me about the various positions or the pain. No one told me that you’d rip my brand new lace panties, or that I wouldn’t stop bleeding for days. No one told me that there wouldn’t be soft lighting, music, or flowers. No one told me what happens in the movies after the lights go down.
I close my eyes and I am back in that room. I’m underneath the stairs where no one ever checks, overlooked by students and teachers alike: the perfect hiding spot. Aw yeah, you like that? Your voice echoes, never checking for an answer. I guess it was rhetorical. But I didn’t like it. No one ever told me if I would like it or even if I should have. No one brought it up, as if it were already decided, as if my pleasure was never even considered. To you, I know it wasn’t.
I lean back, into the rainfall of the showerhead above, and I picture myself there, on the ground. I see myself: bruising my knees, without so much as a kiss, touch, or hint of foreplay. You didn’t want a girl, just a doll. I see an all-too-young memory, a silhouette of myself: tossed and turned, propped up and bent over at your discretion. And in that moment, in that shower, for the rest of that night and that year, I never knew that it could be any different. I wasn’t sure that it could get any better.
* * *
As a young woman, I was taught about sex in two ways: either not at all, or implicitly. What about health class? What about sex-ed? Of course, growing up I had both, but I wouldn’t say I learned about sex. I learned about periods and pregnancy in relation to sex, the act, just being the end to the former and the start of the latter. I learned about ways I could catch deadly diseases or become a statistic for rising teen pregnancy. I learned about date-rape drugs, wearing appropriate attire as to not ‘ask for it,’ and how to insert a tampon. Condoms and other contraceptives were brought up, but again, as part of the patronizing don’t-get-pregnant-and-die rhetoric.
Masturbation was a word I never learned from a teacher, parent, or friend, but instead through the internet and TV. I barely knew it existed, and I certainly did not know it could apply to me, that was just something boys did. My first real introduction to sex didn’t come until I googled Kim Kardashian’s sex tape after hearing about it on an episode of E! News—fascinating. Other than that, all the depictions I saw of sex made up for what they lacked in realism with overblown romantics. I thought I would marry my high school sweetheart. I thought he would love me forever. I thought sex involved some kind of massage oil and a George Michael song. Imagine my surprise when it ended up being a bunch of raunchy Facebook messages and a clandestine meeting in the janitor’s closet.
Imagine my shock when I had never seen a penis in real life, and suddenly had one stuffed down my throat with no warning. I’ll always remember how he didn’t kiss me—not once throughout the entire interaction, and not ever in the countless sexual interactions we had over the course of a year.
The worst part? I always thought to myself, maybe this is just how it goes. Maybe this is just what sex is. Someone else had entered my body before I even got the chance to know it myself; I had never seen my own vagina nor could I even tell you my own sexual anatomy beyond that. And I stayed in that relationship out of the kind of harmful sexual naiveté that made me believe that my own self-worth and pleasure was secondary to satisfying a male partner. I never brought it up, I never asked. I accepted how I was treated because I knew nothing different, and I was convinced it was better to be wanted (even if that meant being used) than to be alone.
* * *
Now, I’m turning twenty and I can look back and understand the abusive nature of that first relationship, both sexually and emotionally. But I have listened to stories far too similar and much worse. I have hugged too many broken young women, crying about boys they thought they could trust. I have too many friends that are survivors of sexual harassment, assault, and toxic relationships; I know too many women who were never taught to value, prioritize, or assert their own sexuality.
Now, it’s 2018 and it’s not enough to stop teaching kids abstinence-only education. What comes after that? Passing out free condoms and avoiding anything that falls under the umbrella of “promiscuous” does not equal liberal sex education. It is 2018 and girls are still taught that sex is meant to be romantic while boys strive to emulate the “harder, faster, aw yeah you like that?” approach of porn. But other paths exist, ones where women are not educated as mothers-to-be-or-not-to-be but instead as empowered sexual beings, exploring and voicing their own sexual interests. There is a future where men are not taught only to dominate, but to connect and communicate with their partners—whether they are sleeping with someone for a night or for a year.
When I had sex for the first time, I did not have sex. Really, sex was had with me. A boy got off from the use of my body, and I gave it to him under the false pretense of love, or at least, validation. It wasn’t assault, it wasn’t rape, but it wasn’t right. If that’s sex, it’s not the kind I want myself, or any woman, to be having. It’s time to move away from the tired binary of love for girls and lust for guys. It’s time to push for inclusive and complex discussion, starting in schools, in sex-ed, in health classes, of what sex is and can be: beautiful, natural, and hot for everyone involved.