Take me

Warning: graphic descriptions of sexual activity; references to genitalia.

During puberty, I was obsessed with sex, even though I had no idea how it worked. I thought about sex as something that would be done to me rather than something that I would do. Often, I thought of it as violent. No one has ever known this about me.

My second "boyfriend," one of the ones I'm told doesn't count, fingered me for the first time. I was seventeen. I didn't fully understand what he was doing or why he was doing it, and I definitely didn't understand how it made me feel. He also cheated on me with a mutual friend because I refused to give him a blowjob. To this day, I have never completed a blowjob, and I don't know if I ever will.

My freshman year of college, I slept around without ever actually having sex. I told one boy that I didn't think I'd ever had an orgasm, and he said, "You'd know if you'd had one," then told me he would give me one. I faked it unconsciously. Take a second and reread that. I faked an orgasm without being conscious that that was what I was doing. It took me three years to realize that I'd been faking, that telling my sexual partners that I don't know if it's possible for me to climax is actually telling them that they don't need to try. I still don't think I've ever had an orgasm.

I have never let anyone eat me out.

The first time I touched myself in a way that was not violent, not transactional, not intended to make me fall asleep more quickly, I was twenty-one. I have a vibrator that I have used once; I held it against me for half an hour, and ended up exhausted and overstimulated. I don't think my clitoris works the way most people's do.

I have thought that I am kinky, that most of my kinks involve giving my partner power over me. Not only this, but also that several of my kinks involve allowing my partner to be physically violent toward me. I don't know if this is true anymore. I'm not sure if it's real or a coping mechanism designed to deal with memories of the physical abuse I experienced as a child. Perhaps it's both.

One of the reasons I had my nipples pierced was to make them off-limits to potential sexual partners, at least for a while. This was because I had discovered that the line between "this feels good" and "this is too painful" was disappearing, and that frightened me.

Another reason I had my nipples pierced was to rid myself of the sensation of them rubbing against my sheets when I was sexually assaulted.

I don't like sex.

Sex, to me, is a transaction. It's ownership. It's someone else collecting payment for the time they have given me. It's a performance. It's me giving him emotional support after he barely fingers me enough to get me wet and then finishes four thrusts in. It's me telling them that it's okay not to be hard enough to fuck me right now, even though they were the one who initiated it. It's me leaning in when I want to pull away, laughing when I want to cry, letting them take instead of making them give.

When I was twenty, I had sex six times in twenty-four hours, because I didn't know when I would see them again. I was sore for a week. They broke up with me after six weeks. Three months later, I heard that they sexually assaulted someone. I pick the good ones, evidently.

The first time I had a penis inside me was between midnight and 1 AM on my sister's seventeenth birthday. Three times that night, and it would have been more if he hadn't run out of condoms.

I understand that having sex with a condom on is like eating food with a rubber glove wrapped around your tongue, but my depression is bad enough without the crapshoot that is hormonal birth control, and I don't have money for antidepressants or therapy, so how should I pay for an IUD?

It's not just that I won't let anything near my ass. I won't let anyone's mouth near my vulva. When one person doesn't ask, it ruins the whole experience.

I am learning to love my body, but this love feels entirely divorced from my sexuality. I have not had sex in sixteen months. I can't tell the difference between physical/aesthetic attraction and sexual attraction. I used to know what my sexuality is; now I'm not sure.

Sex = reproduction. Reproduction = dysphoria. I would die a thousand slow, torturous deaths before pushing another human through my vaginal canal. I have never been on any form of birth control. This is body control; the society we inhabit doesn't like the idea of people who are not cis men having sex for pleasure. Transaction. Violence. I don't remember ever feeling like I was an equal participant in sex. Some of this was my doing; I gave them the reins, taught them how to bend me to their will. I thought I wanted it. I did want it. Sometimes we want things that aren't good for us.

I let them fuck me because if I don't, they'll leave. They leave anyway, but if I put out, they might stay a little longer.

Nothing feels good anymore. Maybe it never did. I don't trust myself. I can't trust anyone else. I don't know how to take my body back when I gave it freely, blithely, without understanding that there would be consequences. I don't know how to ask for what I want, because I don't know what I want, because it has never been important to me to understand my own sexuality apart from the context of someone else's dick.

The first time I looked at myself was when I trimmed my pubic hair for the first time, age twenty-one. I was using my phone camera as a mirror. The hair was still too thick to see anything, even after I'd trimmed it.

Sometimes I dream that I'm falling into a void, with my vulvae standing over me, screaming. I'm sorry I haven't been listening.