F*** Anyone You Like
Jennie Lightweis-Goff
Word Count 437
I never got the sex talk; mostly it was campfire stories. The older women in my life regaled me with tall tales about near-misses with dangerous men. Forgetting to rotate your tires could land you with a flat, and that was a reliable route to being bound and gagged in some man’s trunk. Going home with one willingly was not much better; you would not be there at your own pleasure, but at his fatal whims.
A therapist once asked me to walk her through an abbreviated account of my sex education. I held out my arms like Lady Justice: in one hand, Our Bodies Ourselves, and in the other, the collected works of the crime writer Ann Rule. Bound as doctors are to the question why, she looked at me as though the mystery of my drives and attachments had been solved by the equal sign of my nearly-level arms. “So fuck anyone you like,” she said.
I did. On the balcony above a restaurant’s chaotic dining room, with a stranger who put his hand up my shirt at a concert, with a man who ordered me to his hotel room like room service, with men who I called to my front step like pizza, with men half my age who I treated with kindness but thought of as junk food, with men a continent away from home by COVID’s remote work, with men I would have fallen in love with under other circumstances, with men whose eyes I wouldn’t meet later in public space, with men I felt a shot of lust for six years later from two blocks away, with men I felt disgust for days later as we embraced.
I have loved some women, but seldom fear them enough to fuck them after a few minutes’ conversation, to drain away the terror or transform it through sex’s embodied alchemy. The narrator of Susan Minot’s Lust, thinks that a petal gets plucked with each boy she meets in bed or under bleachers or stretched across backseats. For each man, I get a year back…. a year of my life between 15 and 23, during which I was so certain men would kill me that I could scarcely kiss one I liked. The perverse fact of it crashed against my life: thanks to my fear, I spent my late teens less likely to have the sex I wanted because of an abject terror of having a knife between my ribs. Only the truly terrifying men got through my barriers with the stealth tactics of distributing guilt, shame, and indebtedness. Plucked down to the disc petal, I decided, at forty, to steer.
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Jennie is a writer and flaneuse who splits her time between Memphis, New Orleans, and, in luckier times, Beijing. Through myriad catastrophes, she has failed to shelter in place.