Paris: The Memoir(59)

I know, right?

The world thinks of me as a sex symbol, and I’m here for that, because symbol literally means icon. But when people saw that sex tape, they didn’t say icon, they said slut. They said whore. And they weren’t shy about it. The ironic thing is, because of the abuse and degradation I survived as a teen—and maybe partly because of the way I was raised—I feared sex. I hated the idea of sex. I avoided sex until it was absolutely unavoidable.

Tabloids created this narrative about me sleeping around with a hundred gorgeous guys—not the truth at all! I longed to feel close to someone, to be intimate. If a guy was kind and took his time, I could go on kissing and snuggling forever, thinking, Okay, maybe this time. This time it could happen. And then I would freak out and be weird, and the situation became awkward, leaving me with two shitty options:

I could cut him off and have him dump me and tell everyone I was “frigid” or “a cock-tease” or “a dyke.”

I could fake it—and I was good at faking it, but it felt like getting run over by a minibike a hundred times.



My friends were like, “Oh, it’s so good”—like orgasms all the time. And I was thinking, Sure. That doesn’t even exist. I thought it was something in the movies. I didn’t even believe it was real because that free, playful part of me was completely closed off. I thought orgasm was something faked so sex could be over. I kept trying to make it work. Part of the princess brand is a prince, right? But it was pretty rare for a guy to get past the make-out stage. Some of them waited for months or even a year.

I called myself the Kissing Bandit.

They called me Princess Blue Baller.

Mom always said, “Don’t do it till you’re married. The guy will be obsessed with you if you don’t do it.” That might have worked on Happy Days, but it didn’t work on any guys I dated. They’d be like, What the hell?—and then they’d cheat, and I’d find out, and then drama, drama, drama, breakup. It was a vicious cycle. Like Groundhog Day without the adorable groundhog.

I hope this isn’t TMI. It’s weird to talk about it, but I don’t think I’m the only girl who’s gone through this kind of thing. I appreciate how the conversation around sexual identity has evolved to take in all kinds and to recognize that sexuality is fluid. People grow and change. Healing happens, but damage runs deep. I don’t know if I’ll ever be fully healed or fully who I might have been.

Did I mention Carter has a degree in psychology?

He does. And it comes in handy.

Sex is a thought process for me. It has to start in my brain, or it’s not going to work. Carter gets that, and he lets me know I’m worth the effort. He’s going to be so embarrassed that I’m talking about this—and I’m so embarrassed. Oh, my god, this is so fucking embarrassing! But I promised myself I would be truthful, and I know there’s someone out there who needs to hear that they’re not weird or frigid or dead inside—they’re just who they are at this moment: an asexual person in a hypersexualized world.

The thing is, Mom was right.

(Did you hear that, Mom? I said it. You were totally right.)

Making guys wait, protecting myself, and not giving it up all over the place actually did work better for me in the long run. If I’d been fucking around as much as the tabloids made it seem, what little self-esteem I had left would have been chewed to bits. It’s true; we all want what we can’t have. And back then, this is the thing I couldn’t have. My sexy clothes, music, videos—the whole Carl’s Jr. burger-eating routine—that was my way of reclaiming a healthy sexuality that had been robbed from me. It made me feel alive and playful in a way I wish I could have been when I was in bed with someone I cared about. I have that now with my husband, and I cherish it. At nineteen, all I could do was pretend.

I wasn’t capable of the level of trust required to make a videotape like that. I had to drink myself silly. Quaaludes helped.

But I did it. I have to own that. I knew what he wanted, and I went with it.

I needed to prove something to him and to myself, so I got hammered, and I did it.

Despite the age difference and the logistics of my high-mileage work life, the relationship with this guy went on and off for a couple of years—which is a long time to a teenage girl. Eventually, I got bored and pissed him off. One night, my girlfriends and I were out for karaoke, and ran into Nicolas Cage, who invited us to an after-party. We didn’t go because it was Nic Cage. We would have gone to an after-party at Billy Bob Nobody’s house just as readily. Because after-party! Bring it. So we went to this house where there was a car and a motorcycle in the living room and a shrunken-head collection upstairs, and a good time was had by all.

When I got back to my house, the on/off boyfriend was there, upset that I had not been returning his calls. There was a bit of drama, and that was that. This is actually how most of my relationships ended over the years. I hate confrontations, so I always tried to ghost the person. Sometimes they got the message. Sometimes they got mad. This was definitely not the ugliest scene resulting from that MO. For a long time, I thought that if someone got so jealous they threw a phone at your head or grabbed you and shook you till your neckbones rattled—well, that must mean they reeeeeeally loved you, right?

Ugh.

One weird footnote to the shrunken-head party was that some woman came over to me at a club a few days later and threw a glass of red wine in my face. Not sure what that was about. I’d already moved on.