How Sexual Confidence Showed Me Who I Am.

His name was Mohit and he drove a blue car. Personally, I think colourful vehicles are distracting, cars should be black or white, but I wouldn’t want to impose my very limited sense of aesthetics on other people. I met Mohit because I decided I was going to be a slut. I didn’t know the terminology at the time, I just knew that I wanted to sleep with lots of people, but there was a problem. I didn’t know how to do that. My very limited life-experience at the time included some non-consensual sex, invisibility to people my own age and general oblivion to the norms of dating. While I wasn’t shy, I was certainly doubtful about my desirability as a sexual partner. The only feedback I had ever received about my physical beauty revolved around the fact that I was overweight and not quite as pretty as my mother. I wasn’t “cool” either, I think I could have been classified as a “weird nerd” but even to know that you would have had to speak to me, and no one really did, I was always saying strange things. My friends were all “good girls” who were saving themselves for marriage, and sexual empowerment and liberalism hadn’t actually made it to our town. I would not be surprised if they still haven’t.

Of course there were some women, in school and around town, who had the reputation of being sexually active but they were discussed in the most denigrating ways. The men who slept with them slandered them in public for being so loose as to sleep with them. The women othered them, talking about them like broken, undesirable objects who were harming themselves by being openly sexual. My friends used them as cautionary tales as they guarded their reputations like the assets upon which all future mortgages would be based. The environment made it very clear what I wanted to do was wrong and would impact every aspect of my future somehow because — Who would marry a girl everyone in town had ridden? As it is I was not good looking, too out-spoken and seemed determined to have a(n) (odd) career, making me a liability on the marriage market. My mother recently said to me, jokingly, one would hope, that she is really glad I turned out to be an independent decision maker who found love, family and marriage for herself because she couldn’t even fathom how she would put me out into the arranged marriage market, since I am such a hard-sell. Annoyed, I told her the option to “put” me anywhere was never open to her and she said, “That’s what I am saying, thank goodness I didn’t have to do that! Woman will insult and praise you all in one sentence and still believe she did neither. Bless her.

I wanted to add slut to that repertoire.

It wasn’t an identity thing, it doesn’t really mean much to me to be a slut, it is neither empowering nor demeaning, just descriptive. It just meant that I wanted to fuck lots of people, in lots of weird ways. I was horny! And sex, in an all its versatile glory, seemed like a really fun hobby. When I wasn’t having sex the conditions of my life weighed heavy on me. All of this happened a little bit before I understood that I could leave that town, I could escape my abusers, I could claim myself at adulthood and do whatever I wanted. In some vague way, I knew that I would go to college, get a job and be far away, and that is what I worked towards all my life, but that didn’t get real until it was only a year away. Prior to that, it sometimes seemed like wishful day-dreaming, and those years felt so long in comparison to the years I am going through now. The way we distort time seems such an interesting thing, the clocks don’t change, but they move faster somehow, when we seem to move slower. Life felt so fast those days, yet it took so long, everything seemed to change every single day, and no matter how hard I tried, nothing seemed in my control. I have control now, but time slips through my fingers like cheap satin sheets that leave more static charge behind than comfort. Maybe, if I were less inclined to tragic amusement, I’d be depressed.

I would argue that the fact that I enjoy the sexual aspects of life so much probably kept me from embracing the depression about my situation, I don’t know if that is good or bad, but it seems plausible. So, I was actively on the lookout for people to fuck and that is how I found Mohit. I’m actually not sure where I found him, I would guess that the internet was involved somehow, but in my conversations with him, I took on the persona of the slut I wanted to be. She was so confident. She was completely clear about what she wanted and she stated that with militant openness. She abandoned all apologies about who I thought I was, and most importantly, how I looked. It was easy, over the phone, and in words, but when the prospect of meeting him came up, I was nervous. I should have been nervous about being murdered or raped, but I was nervous that I could only be this sexually confident, cocksure woman on screens. I had to do it though. I wanted to do it so much. So I scheduled to meet him.

He picked me up in his blue car outside the French institute. I was wearing a white sweatshirt with a zipper and black lettering, a little denim skirt and sneakers. I sat in his car and he began driving us to a quiet part of town, behind the lake, where people went to makeout and have secret dates. Initially, we were quiet, but as the silence passed he began to talk about how I was “not like other girls,” but he didn’t even mean it in its usual offensive way, he meant it as criticism. He asked, because he was concerned, whether my behaviour was motivated by the circumstances of my household. The answer to that is yes and no, but the answer to the way he meant it, was no. I was attracted to him, I wanted him to pull my hair and put his dick in me. I said that. I actually said that out loud and I couldn’t believe I was capable of uttering such words, so openly, without disclaimers and amends. He parked behind the lake and continued talking to me about the usual nonsense of how he could see the sweet innocent girl inside me. I listened, but my mind was focused on plucking up the courage to make the first move. I wanted to be the one to do that. I had to be the one. I had to take my sexuality into my hands, maybe even in a misguided attempt to defeat what another man had done to me. He talked and talked, and I oscillated between finding and losing the nerve, until finally, I grabbed his arm with a grip so tight, I didn’t know I had it in me. I looked him in the eye, and I felt the everlasting equality of sexuality glaze me over. It all fell away. Am i attractive or not? Am i interesting or not? Am i desirable or not? Who gives a fuck? We are all people and it is open season on who is attracted to whom and why. I didn’t focus on how he looked to determine his attraction, I found that in how my body felt in response to him, so why then, was I so determined to assess my sexual value on the basis of stereotypes?

I just went for it.

“Do you want to fuck me?” I asked him, holding his gaze with an intensity that I came to love.

“Yes,” he answerer.

I unzipped my sweatshirt, grabbed him by both arms and pulled him towards me.

“Then stop talking and fuck me,” I said, putting my mouth right beside his ear and my palm against his beating heart.

What came after was so natural and easy that I lost all fear of approaching people, having sex with strangers and exposing myself as a sexual being. Sex was so easy when you chose it. It was so much fun. It made me feel good, not about myself, but in my body. What a tremendous feature to have pre-installed in your software. Such endless discourse you can have with another person, if you just stop talking. That was the only time I slept with Mohit, that’s about as long a conversation as our bodies wanted to have with one another. The next day he told all his friends about this loose girl he has fucked.

I fucked them all.

I had so much fun that my ears turned deaf to the accusations and allegations against my character that were made by the same men who put it in me. Why should I bear the burden of what they think about me after all? I had so much confidence that I learnt how to silence men when they brought their judgement of me to me and expected me to cower and change. I felt so much power in that moment when a person’s body embraced mine in abandon, that I could not fathom why I would ever hide this side of me. The worries about what people would think about me washed away alongside my worries about my desirability, I just fucked and fucked and fucked. I had a blast. And all the men who had to grapple with their issues with my morality, that was just icing. And more importantly, it was their fucking problem.