girl sex
May 4, 2003 06:03 PM

I picked up Subway Series yesterday and had to read it twice. It painted such a sharp image, a reminder.

The utter banality of being a sexual girl.

A lot of that memory gets covered up in our thinking how stupid we were then. Or how taken advantage of we were, of some state of victimhood. Too depressing to think that's just how things are. Nothing was wrong, just nothing was exactly right.

Every woman of my generation seems to have the same stories, similar to the girls who came before and after us.

I'm fifteen and a boy slightly older, a clever boy, slides my hand down his jeans. And it's pleasant, alright, being next to him. And it's awkward and depressing and he smells and there are other people right there, I'm loathe to be embarassed, revealed as a prude. A girl who's too good.

And I might be a bad girl. Might be making out in the back of the theatre with a man who ought to know better than jailbait but who knows if nothing else the right way to caress a neck. To grab an ass. Not awkward at all, whole other sexually charged roomload of people with the same agenda, same sense of awkwardness everywhere else.

Or I'm sixteen skipping classes and going to the park with a boy who will think no one's looking when he slips his hand up my shirt while I try to pull away from him, knowing they will see and I'm not that interested, or we're lying there naked and I realize it's like he has scales on his back or something and there's no way absolutely no way I'm touching that or any other part of his wormy little body ever not ever. But he likes me.

As if that matters.

But it will matter, over and over again, for girls. To be good in so many different, conflicting ways. Good enough to eat.

Is it good enough to dance half-clothed on a bed and kiss girls? You're good if everyone else knows it. An aspect of the sexual games of adolescence is this ability to experiment without being alone and undefended. Yes, undefended, without the barrier of others to protect from losing it, something so supposedly valuable and yet for what?

For getting rid of it, getting it out of the way, now or wait for later when you're maybe old enough to know better or not.

So we looked at the boys, or the girls, and we thought no, later. Later than bending backwards across a kitchen counter or a picnic table or the hood of your car. Bending over backwards for - not for you, the boys who weren't good enough to take to coffee with my friends but were fine for groping with your parents downstairs - for us, the girls who would learn to control when and whose hands were sliding up and down.

So most of us eventually got good enough. Skillful and smart and rid of that embarassing, awkward banality of feeling like we ought or ought not.

And all of this is - it just is. It isn't sad, or tragic, or even that stupid. It's just how it is. How it was.