I love reading the life lessons this lady learns! (greatcoastal)yaelwolfe.medium.com/you-cant-take-the-slut-or-the-good-girl-out-of-me-d65b66824f23
You Can’t Take the Slut (or the Good Girl) Out of Me
I’ve come back to my wholenessA year ago, I thought I had met my match. It was the first time I’d found myself with a man who seemed sexually compatible with me. His passion seemed to match my own. He encouraged my sexual expression and didn’t seem judgmental or put off by it, like most of my past lovers.
I was excited to let myself run free with him. To see how far I could take it. How much I could be myself without having to hold back.
It was thrilling.
One night, I was so filled with passion, I couldn’t stop dancing around my kitchen. And I decided to do something I had only done for a lover one other time: I decided to perform for him.
I set up my phone on the counter and turned on one of my favorite dance songs. As I did the dishes and cleaned up, I laughed, I swayed my hips, I made sexy faces and laughed again.
It was fun, but scary. Expressing my sexuality in a way that asks a man to take it seriously is overwhelmingly vulnerable for me. Almost every time I’ve done that in the past, I have been criticized and rejected.
The moment I pressed record and knew he would see it, I became filled with self-doubt, embarrassment, fear, and even shame.
What if he didn’t like it? What if he thought I was fat, just like most of my exes? What if he criticized me? Or god forbid, laughed?
He seemed so different than them, however. I had so much faith in him.
So I decided to go for it.
I was overjoyed by his initial response. He seemed overwhelmed with emotion. He kept saying, “I love you” over and over. It made me laugh. It made me cry.
I really thought I had met my match.Not long after, however, he informed me that he was going to use our video message app to keep in touch with his kids when they were with their mother.
“We’re going to have to clean up our thread,” he said with a laugh, in his next message. “Things have gotten a little X-rated.”
It wasn’t that bad on my end. Sure, I’d chatted with him naked after getting out of the shower a few times. But the steamiest videos were the ones he had sent. All in all, I suppose it was, indeed, X-rated.
Despite understanding his desire to guard his children from our sex life, his solution of requesting that I delete any video that might be remotely sexual seemed harsh. I was heartbroken. Afraid. Sad. And
ashamed. Mostly ashamed.
I didn’t know what else to do so I deleted
everything.
Myboyfriend Lee was addicted to video games. He spent most nights playing war games with his online buddies often not coming to bed until late.
Truthfully, I hated this. The evenings and nights were often the only time we had together after long days at work. I wanted to cuddle in front of the TV. I wanted to talk. I wanted to have sex.
On many nights, I would put on a slip with nothing underneath and make my way into his office. I’d have to lean on his desk in front of him in order for him to take notice of my presence, which often had him snapping at me to get out of the way…until he noticed what I was wearing. At that point, he would promptly bid his buddies farewell and chase me back into the bedroom.
I was surprised, however, when years into our relationship, he started complaining that I never initiated sex. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
How many times had I leaned in between him and his computer screen wearing that slip?“Yeah, but I want you to
really instigate sex. Like come up to me, throw me against the wall, and rip my pants off. Give me a blow job in the garage. Jump into the shower with me without warning and start fucking me.”
I reminded him that I
had tried those tactics. I
had grabbed him, I
had yanked his pants down, I
had shown up, uninvited, in the shower. And he almost always expressed his displeasure when I did.
“This isn’t really the kind of woman I want to marry someday,” he once said in response to my advance. “You’re acting like an animal.”
So what was it, I asked him. Did he want my aggressive initiation or was that too much?
“I want you to show me that you want me…just don’t be a slut about it. You have to think about the fact that you’re going to be my wife someday.”
But there was never a way for me to “not be a slut about it.” Unless I walked into his office in my virginal, white slip and requested his presence in the bedroom without actually saying a word, he became uncomfortable.
There was a line, he insisted — I just had to make sure not to cross it.
But where that line was, I could not tell. And he seemed to feel I had crossed it every time.
Lee didn’t understand that he was deeply uncomfortable about my sexuality not because I was “doing it wrong,” “acting like an animal,” or “being a slut about it.” He was uncomfortable about it because he’d been taught, like all of us, that a woman cannot be sexual
and a respectable partner at the same time. She cannot be a wife/mother
and a lover. She cannot be a good girl
and a bad girl.
He wanted my sexuality, but wanting it made him feel like he was doing something wrong — which he promptly shoved off onto me by making it
my fault. And that’s just what he was taught to do.
I can’t pretend to know exactly why my last lover asked me to erase all my videos on our message thread, being as he dumped me a few days later without an honest explanation. He specifically cited his concern for his children when he asked me to delete my videos, but that doesn’t fully reveal how he felt about my sexuality.
Whatever those feelings might have been, his request left me where I typically find myself: being told by a man to
rein it in.
When I first started my Instagram account, one of the things I dreamed of doing was dancing in my underwear. Not to be sexy, but to be
audacious. To own my chubby body and let it jiggle publicly without shame.
Though I haven’t found the courage to strip down to my undies, I have started posting videos from one of my spontaneous dance nights in my kitchen. And in one of them,
I am dancing to the same song I’d danced to in the video I sent my boyfriend last year.
I never intended to post it, but the anniversary of our breakup is right around the corner, and suddenly, I felt overwhelmed with the need to take that dance back. To un-erase it. To refuse to let his actions take away the joy I am capable of feeling in my body.
When I decided to post it, I realized something. I would have been a really good stepmother to those children had things gone in a very different direction. Yes, I am certain of that, even though I did some pretty pervy things to their father and let him do the same to me. (All in good, consensual fun, I might add.) And even though I intended for us to keep being as pervy as we wanted.
Dancing around my kitchen like a stripper didn’t make me less of a person. Less virtuous. Less motherly. Less good. Less respectable.
But I deleted the video like a good little girl, even though I had the feeling it wouldn’t change the fact that the relationship was about to end.
I’m glad for it, in the long run. Because I
hadn’t met my match, after all.
My match will never tell me to tone it down. Pull back. Reel it in.
Erase myself.
My match will understand that I can be a good partner and a good mother and
also a lover. I can be a good girl
and a bad girl. I can be sexual
and respectable.
And goddammit, my match won’t have a strict set of rules over how I should initiate sex in order to not be “too much of a slut about it.”
This is my right as a human —
to be everything I am. To be whole.
My boyfriend might be long gone, but I’m still going to dance to that song and be as slutty and silly as I like. And I will never let myself be erased or split in two again.
