I’ve been thinking about my sexual history because I’m thinking about my infertility book (that keeps morphing into this and that and something altogether different and then back again). I always feel like infertility memoirs I’ve read so far don’t talk much about the non-procreational kind of sex unless they’re high-lighting the great irony of using birth control in the past and using birth encouragements in the infertile present. This seems so incomplete.

For me, my infertility experiences brought back a lot of my teen-age shame about being a sexually active 15-year old who was trying to be responsible and getting lectured every time she put her heels in stirrups. That is a bigger irony in my mind — chastising the teenage girl for keeping her pap smear appointment and paying for her own birth control. No wonder most of my friends didn’t bother.

Anyway, I read Jenna’s and Angela’s recent entries in this mindset of my angry teenage self and it got me thinking.

There’s this part of my history that I have never, ever, ever written on blog and I rarely talk about it because it’s probably the thing that I feel most ashamed about and it’s complicated and not something I’ve ever really figured out. But reading these entries made me feel like I knew what I wanted to say about it although I’m not sure how much I’m going to share. (I’ll know when I’ve written it.)

When I was sixteen I hooked up with a guy who was twelve years older and had sex with him although I didn’t want to. It wasn’t date rape because I said yes but it left me feeling violated.

Part of the reason I allowed this to happen is that (as many of you have experienced for yourself), if you’re a teenager and having sex then you’re already a ruined kind of person and it seems unreasonable to say no to this guy since you have already said yes to that one. This is something huge I want to get across to my kids: You can say no even if you’ve said yes before. But in the teen world of the 80s (and one assumes in most other decades), once you’re deflowered you kind of give up your right to play virgin. The best example of this I can think of is a male friend of mine who was a virgin and who said to me, “Why won’t you have sex with me? What’s the big deal when you’ve already done it?” And I thought, “Is he right? Should I just do it?” And this is really what happened with this guy who was 12 years older only his arguments were more complex and more flattering.

Afterwards, I felt like crap and I felt used and I was angry that I’d betrayed myself with this guy (and betrayed my friend who was dating that guy, which was a huge part of it all for me and profoundly changed my self-perception). But I also felt responsible and so I tried to pretend like it was ok and tried to pretend that maybe I even liked him and this was a further betrayal of myself. And it really wasn’t until I met Brett and confessed all to him that I felt absolved because Brett helped me see that I was 16 and I was up against someone smarter and not very principled whether or not he realized how manipulative and underhanded his behavior was. I’m sure if I told this guy (if I could remember his last name because I’ve truly blocked it out) that I felt he took advantage of me that he would be totally surprised and that his version of events were that he met this randy little 16-year old and we enjoyed a fun evening together way back in the fall of ‘86.

Part of me really wanted to go with what was surely this guy’s version and for a long, long time I tried to see it that way because the other option (to call myself a victim) seemed like a lie and also who wants to be a victim? But what I didn’t see until my confession to Brett was that it was possible to find a middle-ground, which would acknowledge the complications of sexuality and personality and that this middle-ground also understood the limits of culpability.

There are many versions of truth. It’s true that this man was much older than I was and that this gave him the upper-hand. It’s also true that I pulled my tights off myself. It’s true that I was responsible for my choices. It’s also true that I was in over my head. (I’m trying to write this while Madison slurps mushy raisin bran and slams a metal car on the table next to me so I keep losing my train of thought.) These things are all true. I had to figure out how to reconcile truths that ran into each other and made a lot of confusion. How could I be responsible yet still feel so victimized? How could he be the bad guy when I walked willingly into that apartment with him? It seemed lose/lose. I couldn’t figure out how to recognize his coercion unless I lied to myself. (He didn’t hold me down or steal my clothes or force me to do anything.) But thinking about it made me want to throw up so surely something bad did happen?

That’s how I managed to slip into shame and blame. It was my fault. I was a bad person. A bad slutty person, actually, so I may as well start wearing my skirts shorter and laugh it off, right? Only I wasn’t laughing.

Jenny Garp fictionally wrote, “I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me a sexual suspect.” She may as well had written, “I had a vagina. That made me a sexual suspect.” The older I get the more I realize how complicated sexual roles are and how easily we fall into things and then twist ourselves up to make it all fit. I couldn’t maintain the personal contortions it took to make sense of what had happened. When I told Brett (who somehow managed to see me inside the situation, unlike other boyfriends who couldn’t see past the stereotypes anymore than I could) he helped me see that lots of things could be true; that I didn’t have to succumb to any paradoxes.

I think of this when I think about first moms who don’t know they have the right to grieve regardless of how complicit they were in their adoption decisions. Sometimes it seems like if we tell ourselves it’s all right to cry, we have to give some of our power up first. But if we give that up in order to have the grieving privileges of being a “victim,” we deny the truth of our experiences and then we can’t find comfort.

I remember a friend of mine who had been raped when she was 13. The first time she told me about it, her story was that she’d been gang-raped and beat up. But as we became closer it turned out that what happened is that she was raped by her crush and that at first she was a willing participant. Why did she change her story? Because when she told people that she went with him, that she wanted him to kiss her, that she liked what was happening at first, who would care about what happened afterwards? The lie was her protection but it also betrayed her. It made her a liar and it made her a sneak and it made her feel guilty all of the time and it made her, ironically, feel more responsible and more complicit in the rape but what choice did she have? The world is not nice to women; she was already a sexual suspect just by showing up.

It’s easy to get in so deep that we don’t feel like we can turn around and go back. We have to learn how to forgive ourselves for making choices that lead us someplace we didn’t want to go. Sometimes we say “yes” because we don’t know how to say “maybe.” And sometimes when we say “maybe” the world hears “yes” anyway. Sometimes we have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into.

We don’t have to accept the narrative that’s thrust upon us because people assume a predictable trajectory. Saying yes to a man, saying yes to an agency, saying yes at the hospital or in a dark apartment doesn’t mean we don’t have a right to our regrets. We don’t have to apologize to anyone (except perhaps — lovingly — to ourselves) for being too naive or too young or too ill-informed or too willing because we were doing the best we could.

Maybe that guy didn’t victimize me but that doesn’t mean that I knew what I was doing. He doesn’t have to be a bad guy but I also don’t have to be a slut. The truth is more complicated and ultimately it doesn’t matter how the world sees it as long as I make sense of how I have to see it. I was in over my head. That’s all there is to it. I wish it never happened but it did. No good things came out of it — no great wisdom or great compassion or the kinds of things that make a trial worth it. Still, it happened. It’s part of my story and I forgive myself for it. I acknowledge my responsibility but it doesn’t take away from my acknowledgment that I was also an injured party. It’s the big challenge, isn’t it? To live with those paradoxes.

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