What I wish I’d known about my sexuality when I was younger
You don’t hear a lot about it anymore, although all those hands going up into the digital air will probably never be forgotten. ‘Me too’, someone said, and then many of us sent our arms up into the ether in agreement. Many of us, too, have been sexually harassed. Some people I know disagreed that this was anything more than a fad and scoffed at it. Secretly I share this disdain: I detest slogans and buzzwords and how they have the power to strip the meaning from people’s experiences, how in their repetitiousness they become invisible or a cliché. Just a cheap strapline. I worry that the cliché will be remembered instead of the suffering behind them. I worry that this victimises people even more because we are admitting to having something ‘done’ to us. Also, instinctively, I feel there are levels of abuse and sexual harassment. How can you compare the experience of someone who has been violently attacked with someone who’s been groped? It’s ok to get a wolf whistle at 16 years old, isn’t it? It’s just a harmless self-esteem boost, surely? And what of the time your boss patted your arse in the post room, when no one else was looking. He chose you, didn’t he? It’s a compliment, if anything. How about being called love or darling, I just can’t bear people who moan about that, I mean who has time to moan about that?
But looking back, I can see I missed the point. All these impositions on our personal space and casual references to us as ‘love’ or ‘darling’ are slights on our existence as whole, full human beings.
When Joan Collins got on her soap box on the cheese fest which is ‘Good Morning Britain’, about our supposed overreaction to nuances in songs and media (she was referring to radio stations in the UK banning the classic seasonal song ‘Baby it’s Cold Outside’, due to it being about a man trying to persuade a woman doing something she doesn’t want to) whose content have a questionable attitude towards consent, my ears pricked up. Firstly I was determined to disagree with anyone who appeared on ‘Good Morning Britain’, secondly I felt angry: these objections are so easy to come out with. They are the verbal equivalent of microwave meals, simple to make but unsubstantiated in terms of their nutritional content. Good Morning Britain is not good nourishment for the soul. And criticism of anyone’s efforts to redress the balance of power is a trick, just a way to subvert our progress. Who is to say what could happen if we took away all the rhetoric in the media, films, songs: that women are malleable, foolish little things who don’t know who they want to go to bed with and just need a little gentle persuasion?
On a personal level, so much of my identity as a teenager and a young woman was bound up with my sexuality and sexual attractiveness. There is nothing like being the focus of someone’s attention when all sources around you tell you that your vocation in life is to be ‘pretty’ or ‘sexy’, and when your hormones, raging, tell you the same. I went through my early teens eyeing boys in older years from afar though. While around me most of my friends were learning about the complexities of relationships through trying to catch each other’s eyes in the corridor, flirting, holding hands, maybe even going bowling together, my need for affirmation that I existed was undermined by my crippling shyness and poor judgement on social cues. I spent hours and hours fantasising about ‘Mikey’, a skater from the cool crowd two years above me, and planning my route through school so it would coincide with his plus ensuring I would run into him in the shopping mall at the weekend. If he’d asked, I would have been his, at any cost.
Meanwhile, teachers seemed to think it was essential for us to learn about Shakespeare, how to conjugate French verbs, how to play hockey, the Pythagoras theorem but my education on these new feelings and influences was sparse. Consequently, at 17, after all my years as a teenager thus far being quite unsuccessful in terms of boyfriends, when I started to go out with my friends, I lapped up the attention I finally got from the opposite sex. But it was to my detriment. I lacked serious judgement in how to exercise self-respect. There is nothing like the recognition you get when this has been lacking for what feels like forever. It’s just that when your stomping grounds are the same stomping grounds as sexual predators, a dangerous thing happens: you end up with the wrong men. My ‘relationships’ were toxic and far from the continual give-and-take tugs that play out in normal, healthy relationships.
One night, I overheard a guy talking to his mates about me and my girlfriends, asking him which one of us he was going to ‘have’ tonight. This should have shocked and appalled me: it makes me physically sick now. If I overheard a man talking like this to his friends now, I would be approaching him and hold him accountable for what he said and not leaving him alone until he took the words back. But it got worse, I was sexually assaulted multiple times right up into my late twenties. I could put my hand up and say ‘Me Too’ way before it became viral.
At 41, it is only now I am starting to realise so many things about the danger of being sexualised from a young age. Age brings an ability to quickly assess situations for their worth: how much time am I willing to give to this person? Is this situation worth my time and worry? It becomes quickly apparent if a task can go to the bottom of the pile and it is clear to me now that I had years ahead of me to do whatever I wanted with any partner I may choose. I am starting to realise that my sexuality was too much to carry as a teenager and putting myself in a position of vulnerability was the breaking of me. You wouldn’t give a mechanical toy to a toddler and expect them to operate it safely, so why do we expect our very young to know how to handle these new feelings? I ended up in dangerous scenarios and with the wrong men: at 17, for example, I hung out with a man 10 years older than me who was into heroine and I narrowly missed becoming an addict too, as well as nearly flunking my ‘A’ levels because I spent half my time in smoky pubs with him or in his flat. Talk about walking before I could run.
The problem is that there are two things going on: gratifying sexual experiences and mistaking these as important or vital to identity. When you realise that being a sexual being can be empowering, not debilitating, it creates a space, which is very freeing, leaving you to turn your attention to other things, like forming friendships with romantic partners first and building trust. There is absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be this way, but it takes time for some and we need to ensure that all our young people understand the importance of self-knowledge and self-respect so that we are confident they are ready to consent to whatever relationships they choose. And I don’t mean we need to teach our girls to be Thelmas or Louises and make big, lasting statements about female emancipation. Just teach them to be aware of changes that are coming their way and how to best manage them.
My experience was both a grave misinterpretation of my own feelings of fragility (so much got lost in translation) and a literal interpretation of sexualised imagery in magazines and on billboards, high-testosterone teen dramas and who knows, maybe subtle messages in songs. There is nothing disempowering about female sexuality. In retrospect, I realise I made the mistake of thinking I was weak, being a victim and being a receiver, at the mercy of whichever man I found myself with. I was not ready. I am still not in many ways, but at least now I know, intellectually, what is right and what is wrong. We can’t jettison comments such as Joan Collins’, but we can urge people to re-assess and think carefully about how consent and self-awareness can be promoted. And we need to integrate our experience in this area into our young people’s education to ensure ‘me too’ is assigned to the archives forever.
