When I was 14, I wanted to have sex more than I wanted anything else in the world. Let me be clear: I did not want to have sex because the media told me I should or because my friends were doing it or my boyfriend was pushing me. I wanted to have sex because my body was flooded with hormones whose entire reason for existence was to make me want to have sex.Emily turned for reassurance to her high school's Health & Development class, but something was clearly missing. She learned about ovulation, menstruation, tender breasts, swollen nipples, and everything else that "would allow me to one day experience the miracle of motherhood". Health & Development emphasised the messy, painful, uncomfortable aspects of burgeoning female sexuality; in particular, oddly enough, the "testosterone [that] was surging through my body and might cause me to feel 'strange'." However:
Boys would not feel 'strange': they would feel horny. They would be distracted by sexual thoughts and feelings. Their genitals would engorge with blood for no reason at all. They would feel a deep, low-down ache, which could only be eased by sexual release. They would have erotic dreams from which they would wake to find they had messed up their sheets and pyjamas. I am a boy, I thought, my face hot and my thighs pressed together.Newflash: teenage girls get horny too, but it is near impossible for them them to pursue sexual fulfillment in a culture where 'good girls don't' and it is assumed that the 'bad girls' who 'let boys use them' are merely suffering from low self-esteem. Emily describes her initial acute frustration as she began to appreciate the somewhat mythological nature of relentless male sex drive:
But the teenage boys with one-track minds evidently went to a different school, and the men who coax innocent schoolgirls into bed must have done their seducing in another town. Every day I stepped out into the world exuding sexual heat, and every day I was ignored. Each time I willed someone to touch me and they didn't, I shrunk just a little.Eventually, coached in the farcical techniques of seduction, Emily began to be pro-active is seeking sexual fulfillment, but sadly was unable to do so without incurring all the usual consequences of being a girl with a reputation.
I was reminded of this article when reading some of my medical records, and noting a reference to 'an illicit sexual liaison in a park' that allegedly took place while I was hospitalised. This report was made by a community psychiatric nurse some time after my discharge, and I am unsure of what permutation of Chinese whispers resulted in its precise formulation. Just for the record, I'm pretty sure that I didn't have sex with anyone in a park, although there was a park up the road from the hospital in question. I do, however, recall having sex with a fellow patient under the fire escape of a nearby hotel and up against the wall of a nearby factory later that night.
Like Emily, when I was a teenager, I was incredibly curious about sex, and just dying to try it, under the right circumstances of course. Like just about any other girl, I wanted to meet a boy, fall in love and fuck like a rabbit. However, the probability of this happening to me was just about nil - I was the friendless, brotherless town freak in her grandmother's hand-me-downs, the walking dictionary, encyclopedia and calculator, and yet somehow already hearing the word slut hurled at me from left right and centre. One the other hand, some people literally thought that I lacked the most prosaic bodily functions, let alone sexual urges. Needless to say, my curiosity was not about to be sated as a fifteen-year-old.
The situation eased a little when I moved to a co-ed school - in fact, a couple of the boys there began 'courting' me, carrying my books from class to class and walking me part of the way home, but I was too dumb to see this for what it was, and tended to respond with polite bemusement. And by that time, of course, I was already a veteran of psychiatric inpatient facilities, where, er, there were men to experiment with.
The man who introduced my by then already deflowered self to various new manoeuvres under the hotel fire escape was in his early forties, and I first met him when I had to apologise to him for falling asleep while he was 'sharing' in group therapy. He was a mechanic and an alcoholic, built like a brick shithouse, told me I reminded him of a young Germaine Greer and played Creedence Clearwater Revival over and over on his walkman. I'd already had my eye on one of the other patients, but after some progress, he took up with my room-mate, and they went back to his place to shag on his black satin-sleeved heart-shaped bed. (Ew!) So I turned my attention to Tim, and asked him if he felt like going for a walk one evening. We returned to the ward as pissed as parrots at about 1 a.m, and the rest, as they say, is (psychiatric) history.
OK, so this is all pretty funny to look back on now: but let us ask: who was the slut back then? Who was inadvertently confirming her keepers' diagnosis of her as bipolar, as borderline, just by being a horny and curious teenage girl, who had no other outlet or opportunity for sexual experimentation because most of her contact with the opposite sex came via her hospitalisations, contexts in which most of her fellow patients were older and had outgrown the tendency to slot their peers into sluthood? Yes, most psychiatric facilities frown on sexual relationships developing between patients (I won't even begin to rant about the blind eye they can turn to relationships between patients and staff), and drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities often have a flat ban on them, that must be signed off on during admission. But throw a lot of bored, miserable, drug-disinhibited people together and what do you expect?
I was over 16 - the age of consent. As a matter of logic, I could not have had an illicit sexual liaison in a park.
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