Underground Woman -- On Lust (And Love)

Be warned: what follows is sometimes explicit. If this bothers you, get out NOW, for God's sake, while ye can!!! I have been doing a lot of evaluation of my sexual mores and relationship expectations recently, and I offer this to show you where my mind is these days, and to see if anybody has any better ideas on how to be a womyn while still being a woman. This is going to be an installment piece, which may offer way too much information. We begin (she says stretching out on the couch) in my childhood.

Part One: Mama, Where Do Babies Come From?

My mother was a member of a very conservative religion, one that pretty regularly preached against the evils of "self-abuse," their euphamistic term for masturbation. Like many curious youngsters, I discovered that when I touched myself in certain places, it felt really good, and that if I kept doing it for a little while, it felt really, really good. Better, even, than swinging really high up in the air on the park swings, with all the attendant butterflies. It was the same rush of sensation. It took me a really long time to connect what I was doing with "self-abuse," even though Mom and Dad seemed a little bit upset when they caught me. I just started doing it in private.

Even though my mom was conservative, she did a good job of explaining the "facts of life" to me, once she got past the technical part of demonstrating with her right index finger and circled left index finger and thumb exactly how the penis and vagina fit together, which obviously embarrassed her. She said that sex was a very holy and sacred thing that was meant to show love between man and wife. She said it was beautiful and special and that when I was old enough I would enjoy it. I've always appreciated that. A lot of kids I know were given to believe that sex was dirty or nasty by their parents' reactions to what is, after all, a question that all parents should be prepared to answer well.

I was curious about this thing called sex. I didn't get any answers through movies, since we were not allowed to watch rated R's. (In fact, Purple Rain was the first one I saw when I was about 13 during an overnight sleepover at a friends. We were too embarrassed to watch the steamy sex scene, so we fast forwarded through it.) My dad, however, had a stash of pornography, which he kept well hidden from my mother, but not from an amateur detective like me, with a burning desire to know all about this mysterious world. I read Longarm books from 2nd grade on. Around the same time, I discovered his stash of Penthouse and Hustler magazines, which he preferred over Playboy, although he occasionally got some of those, too. I was fascinated. What was a "throbbing ten inch cock"? It took me a while to figure it out. Thank God my impressionable young mind wasn't contaminated for life by the Longarm crap! In case you've never heard of him, he's a western lawkeeper who goes around bedding women, often with a fair amount of contempt for them. I guess I got the idea from those books and magazines at a really young age about oral sex. I used to fantasize about somebody kissing me "down there" as I masturbated, though it would be a long time before anyone in particular was involved in my fuzzy fantasies. Even my stuffed animals got into the act!

The strongest early erotic experience I had involved a movie. A version of Dracula which turned me on so much that I felt cold and hot and tingly all over. I connected for the first time erotic feelings with a particular person. It was not Dracula that I fantasized about, even though now I do have a residual fascination for vampire mythology. It was Helen Chandler as Mina in the 1931 Bela Lugosi version of the movie. Creepy. The image of her as the transformation has taken place stuck in my mind for years. Vampyres are very sexy, and while not original, this is an ongoing fascination of mine. (I've seen a lot of cheesy vampire flicks.)

When I became a teenager, I began to get religion. This meant that I was a self-righteous brat. I found contraceptive sponges in my sister's closet. I turned her in. I caught my brother smoking. I turned him in. You get the idea. I still masturbated, but I began to realize that it was forbidden. I felt guilt as I struggled against this "secret fault." Struggle I did. Instinct won.

Of course, my ideas on relationships were also being shaped in crucial ways during this time. I read my fair share of romance novels, but they didn't impress me as much as Greek and Arthurian myth. I came to believe in a type of love that transcended time, complete with lovers so devoted to each other that they were willing to die for the honor and wellbeing of the other, or where a lover simply faded away because of an untimely separation. One of my favorite love songs was "Nights in White Satin," which I thought was "Knights in White Satin." On the homefront, my parents were fighting horribly all of the time. I was crushed when I found out that on top of the booze, my father was not entirely faithful. I was disgusted by this. As I grew up, I began to wish that they would just go on and divorce and end our misery, even though I would have felt incredibly sorry for my father if she had divorced him. All of the romance in my world was experienced through books . . . and dreams.

I was a teenager. I felt awkward. I did not know how to attract boys. I was convinced that no one would ever like me. I felt ugly and fat, even though I wasn't. I was in 9th grade when someone asked me out. I turned them down because I found it so hard to believe that anyone would really want to go out with me. I started hanging out with my older sister and her friends. One of her friends had a younger brother I knew from school. I'd secretly thought he was adorably cute and funny for a long time. Well, he gave me my first kiss when I was 17. We started fooling around. We came really close to having sex several times, but always got interrupted. He was actually one of the most sensual guys I've ever kissed. How he made tobacco and Drakar smell and taste good together I don't know, but he did, and Oh! he had the softest skin. To this day, I'd rather smell Drakar than any other cologne -- it means male sexiness to me. My nostrils flare at 500 yards (hehe). With him began a long history of Christy as pal and lover but never girlfriend. I do not know if this is because guys can tell that I'm oversexed and say to themselves, "Why not?" or if it's because I'm so terrified of rejection that I keep them at a distance. My older sister told me once that she thought the problem was that I became too physical too quickly. "Men like mystery," she said. It seems like a form of cheapness and dishonesty to me, though, to deny an attraction that I feel in hope that the man's attraction to me will thereby increase. I want emotional intimacy, but it seems somehow wrong to bargain physical intimacy for it. I wouldn't even know how to begin. The sad part, though, is that I think my sister is probably right. Whether it's genetic stupidity or cultural conditioning, men seem to want that which they can not have. The girl they haven't kissed is always a little more attractive than the one they have.

I digress. After the first one, my playmates were fairly unattractive for a while. At this point, I'd made up my mind that I wasn't going to go "all the way," but that didn't stop me from working on my technique with guys that I didn't really like just for practice and to get off. There was no need to feel bad about doing this, because we didn't really know or want to know each other. That's what teenage parties are for, right? I did feel kind of embarrassed the next time that I saw the boy in question, though. I didn't want him to think badly of me, but I didn't want to repeat the experience (with him) either. We're not talking about a cast of thousands here, by the way, just a few. An aside: in an informal, unscientific survey I did, most women don't consider oral sex "sex." Most men do. Maybe this is because if a woman has a high "body count" she's a slut, while if a man has a high "body count," he's a stud. I didn't count those guys as "lovers."

After working for a couple of years, I decided to go to college. That's what I did. Still a "virgin," still afraid nobody would ever want me. What happened then I couldn't have imagined.