The Missing Pieces of Me(at)
I was raised to believe ‘sinful’ sex would fragment me
As a young girl, my father told me that, were I to have sex with multiple people I would cleave myself up into separate pieces. For each person I slept with, I would give a part of myself away. As a result, I’d become fragmented; reduced to a lesser version of me.
I grew into adulthood imagining myself a piece of beef tenderloin; one whose value, were I to allow anyone to feast, would rapidly decrease. With each nibble into my juicy flesh, my stocks would fall, until eventually, they’d crash.
I learned that my worth as a woman was tied to my virtue. I was sold that sex, especially of the extramarital kind, takes something away from me; that it will dirty and break me in irreparable ways.
On the contrary, I was never told what would happen to the men, were I to give them a piece of me(at), but as implied, I assumed that while I dwindled, they’d expand proportionally. I read between the lines that a man’s worth increases at best, and, at the very least, remains unaffected by their body count.
My father’s words stayed with me. I stored them somewhere along with the other dogma that I never fully embraced—at least not intellectually—yet they managed to seep into every fiber of my emotional body. As much as…
