Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's ＂Learned＂(12)
18 Five minutes after I pressed send on this email, he called me. “Wait, what?”
“What did you think of it?” I asked. “Do you disagree with anything I said? I mean, if you do just say so.”
“I stopped reading after you said the thing about jerking off.”
On the morning of New Year’s Day, we had sex one last time. I didn’t fully emerge from sleep as he pushed himself against my backside. We were visiting my friends, adult friends, out of the city, and I could hear their children, awake since 6:00 A.M., sliding in socks on the hardwood floor and asking for things. I want children, I thought, as he f*cked me silently. My own children, someday. Then: I wonder if people f*cked near me when I was a child. I shuddered at the thought. Before we could get back on the road, another guest rear-ended his car, and the fender fell off. Back in the city, I kissed him goodbye, then texted him a few minutes later “don’t come over later, or ever.” We do what we can.
19 I would argue this email is funny, just not in the manner it was intended.
There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.
—JOAN DIDION, “On Self-Respect”1
I always run into strong women who are looking for weak men to dominate them.
—ANDY WARHOL
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN ATTRACTED to jerks. They range from sassy weirdos who are ultimately pretty good guys to sociopathic sex addicts, but the common denominator is a bad attitude upon first meeting and a desire to teach me a lesson.
Fellows: If you are rude to me in a health-food store? I will be intrigued by you. If you ignore me in group conversation? I’ll take note of that, too. I especially like it when a guy starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder once I get to know him. As I passed the quarter-century mark of being alive and entered into a relationship with a truly kind person, all this changed. I now consider myself in jerk recovery, so being around any of the aforementioned behaviors isn’t yet safe for me.
My attraction to jerks started early. I spent my preadolescent summers in a cottage by a lake, curled on a ratty couch in my mom’s mind the gap t-shirt, watching movies like Now and Then and The Man in the Moon. If I took anything away from these tales of young desire, it was that if a guy really liked you he would spray you with a water gun and call you nicknames like the Blob. If he shoved you off your bike and your knees bled, it probably meant he was going to kiss you by a reservoir soon enough.
My earliest memory of sexual arousal is watching Jackie Earle Haley as Kelly Leak in Bad News Bears. He wore a leather jacket, rode a motorcycle before the legal age, smoked, and treated his elders with a kind of disrespect I had never seen executed by any of the boys at Quaker school. Moreover, he ogled adult women like a Hefner acolyte. Later, I was drawn to images of angry attraction, I-want-you-despite-myself type stuff, the kind of thing that Jane Eyre and Rochester were up to. You know the way Holly Hunter looks at William Hurt in Broadcast News, like she hates everything he stands for? That was dreamy. Even 9? Weeks made some terrible kind of sense. All of this is natural enough—who doesn’t thrill at a little push-pull, a bit of athletic conversation—but I’m the first to admit I’ve often taken it too far.
It’s common wisdom that having a good dad tends to mean you’ll pick a good man, and I have pretty much the nicest dad in the world. I don’t mean nice in a neutered “yes, dear” way. I mean nice in that he has always respected my essential nature and offered me an expert mix of space and support. He’s a firm but benevolent leader. He talks to adults like they’re juvenile delinquents and to kids like they’re adults. I’ve often tried to write a character based on him, but it’s such a challenge to distill his essence. I wasn’t always easy, and neither was he—after all, artists like to hole themselves up in their studios for days and pitch fits about bad lighting—but the careful, reliable attention of this man has been integral to my sense of security. To this day, the truest feeling of joy I have ever known is the door opening at a friend’s house to reveal my father—in his tweed overcoat—there to rescue me from a bad play date.
Once, when I was five, I was at an art opening talking to a fabulous drunken British lady. It was considerably past my bedtime, and the whole scene was starting to bum me out. I stood next to my friend Zoe, who, at only four, was an embarrassingly juvenile companion. The British lady, trying to make conversation, asked Zoe and me what our parents did if we were “bad girls.”
“When I’m bad, I get a time-out,” Zoe said.
“When I’m bad,” I announced, “my father sticks a fork in my vagina.”
This is hard to share without alarm bells sounding. We’re taught to listen to little girls, particularly when they say things about being sodomized with cutlery. Also my father makes sexually explicit artwork so he’s probably already on the FBI’s fork-in-vagina radar. It’s a testament to his good nature that, after the British lady repeated my “hilarious” story to a group of adults, he simply scooped me up and said, “I think it’s someone’s bedtime.”