My friends were a great comfort, but I might have continued mistaking obsession for love had I not decided that I wanted to set a better example for my daughter. I couldn’t bear to think that I was modeling a broken and dysfunctional version of love to her. I knew that even if I could not heal for me, I had to heal for her. The first step toward change is to acknowledge the problem.
I was chronically addicted to men.
So I got help . . . I read every book I could find on love addiction. As it turns out, there are a great many. I keep spare copies on hand of my favorite, Facing Love Addiction, because I always have at least one girlfriend who is in dire need of it. And most important, I committed to a program that taught me how to not engage with crazy men and also asked me to look at my part in the insanity in a way I wasn’t willing to do before.
Here’s the good news: You can recover from love addiction. I am proof of that. The bad news? It is fucking hard. Like other addictions, you’re always in recovery. My drug of choice happens to have a dick attached to it, which is part of the challenge. You can’t cut romantic relationships entirely out of your life or say you’re never going to have sex again, unless you join a convent or take an oath of celibacy. Learning how to have “healthy” attachments sounds easy, but for someone like me, with early insecure-attachment issues, it was like learning to speak a whole new language, and not Spanish but something really complicated, like Cantonese.
One of the harder tasks is being able to recognize which behaviors in a relationship are healthy and which ones cross the line into obsession. Can you still love someone and not put him or her at the dead center of your universe? Well, yes, actually, that’s the point. YOU should be the center of your universe, and the rest—family, career, significant other, even children—receive your attention, care, and love from that position.
Once I made that adjustment, being alone became less frightening.
Let me assure you, this was not an overnight epiphany. It took years of trying to change and, at times, feeling helpless to do so. True healing takes place slowly and over time. The more I built up my own self-esteem, the more I focused on creating a life I wanted for AMANDA, the more I enjoyed being in my life, and the less I wanted to sacrifice that happiness and balance for anyone or anything.
This freedom has allowed me to be a better and more present mother, friend, and wife. It’s given me the confidence to dream up and create a photography career, The Conversation, #Girlgaze, and even this book. But, most important, I don’t live in that awful, obsessive place anymore.
Not every relationship is doomed because you struggle with this affliction. I was obsessed with, and I will begrudgingly admit to being addicted to, my husband Nick during our first years together. But I was aware of it; I worked on it, as though my life depended on it, and we’ve now been together for sixteen years and married for eleven.
Our relationship has been one long process of healing. It’s taken years for both of our trust issues to calm down. Nick is an intensely private guy and will not be happy with me sharing anything personal about him, so I’ll keep this part brief. All I’ll say is that he’s as good a lover as he is a guitar player, he’s an incredible dad, and he gives me the kind of unconditional love that I now know I deserve. Well, most of the time, that is . . .
4.
I Know Myself Better Than You Do: Some Thoughts on Sex
Disclaimer: Atlanta de Cadenet Taylor, my firstborn daughter, do not read this chapter as it will creep you out. TMI about my sex life.
Contemporary culture focuses so much on the need to have a great sex life. They say sex sells, and it certainly is used to sell everything from hamburgers and cars to vacations and even electronics. Yet when it comes to the way media represents sex—from TV to Oscar-winning films to porn—the pleasure of women is presented as secondary, if presented at all.
It’s no great surprise that when it comes to depicting sex, the male fantasy prevails. After all, the majority of the top jobs in media are held by men, so they control the narrative. The standard sex scene features a guy thrusting in and out a few times, after which his female partner has a loud, satisfied orgasm. The subtext is always that women are there to service men, to offer pleasure like a fast-food restaurant—open around the clock with no questions asked, just like McDonald’s.
It’s not entirely the fault of the male-driven media, as all media is doing is reflecting back the truths of our culture at any given time. And in our culture, women often aren’t taught anything about their own sexual pleasure.
In my opinion, long before we have sex with someone else, we need to be comfortable having sex with ourselves. Eva Longoria said it best when I interviewed her on The Conversation: “I didn’t begin enjoying sex until I started masturbating. It’s a shame I didn’t discover it sooner.” And yet, so few of us do. According to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, only 33 percent of girls fourteen to seventeen report masturbating regularly, and less than half say they’ve even tried it.
Granted, we should factor shame into those self-reported numbers. One of the earliest messages we get as females is never, ever talk about our genitals or our sexuality, especially when it comes to masturbation. Boys have a million words for the act and talk about it endlessly, almost competitively. Many of the most popular terms sound aggressive and violent, like jerking off, spanking the monkey, choking your chicken, or rubbing one out. What do we have? There are far fewer descriptive words for female masturbation, and they’re pretty lame and inaccurate. Paddling the pink canoe? Flicking the bean? Who would want to flick the bean? That’s NOT something I want to do to my vagina.
My ten-year-old daughter Ella came home from school one day with a book on human development. It describes female and male anatomy and genitalia technically. A vulva has the labia, which protects the vagina from infection. The urethra is where urine comes out. But when it came to the clitoris, the book didn’t say, “This is the part that makes you want to do it. This is the bit that makes sex feel good for a girl.” It didn’t even attempt to address this prime lady pleasure center with a bit of biological talk, at the very least referencing nerve endings. It didn’t list a function for the clitoris at all. Just left it blank. And nowhere in that book did it say that sex, aside from procreation, feels great.
How can we figure out how to satisfy ourselves when our anatomical pleasure center is excluded from most sex education books? The clitoris is such an incredible little, or sometimes large, knob, a powerful force in a neat package, and named so perfectly.
But I guess this exclusion is not surprising considering that the vagina, or the V-word, for those too afraid to utter its proper name, tends to make people nervous. Strangely, people seem more at ease when using the word as part of an insult, like accusing a woman of voting with her vagina or calling someone a cunt. I do my best to integrate the word vagina into our home vernacular, to normalize it, if you will.
I told my daughter, “You know, your vagina is just another body part, like your eye, your nose, or your elbow.”
“Then why are people so embarrassed about it?” she asked. “If it was the same as an elbow, people wouldn’t be embarrassed and it wouldn’t need to be covered up all the time.”
Not getting ANYTHING by this ten-year-old girl.
I’m passionate about girls empowering girls and that includes understanding their sexuality and feeling confident about it, likely because my own early sexual experiences were confusing, disappointing, and also filled with a lot of slut shaming. When I was in boarding school in England, I don’t think they even had sex ed. If they did, I missed it, as I was too busy making out with local farm boys. My only experiences of sex ed as a girl were looking through a book on Greek mythology that my parents kept in the living room, which contained photos of stone statues having sex. Not very useful, but it did make my vagina beep. And I read a copy of The Joy of Sex handed to me by a pervy neighbor when I was nine, which I knew instinctively to hide under my mattress.
&n
bsp; As it is with many girls, my sex ed was trial and mostly error. I didn’t even kiss anybody until I was fourteen. One summer afternoon my mom took me to her country club, the most upper-class, white place you can imagine. I was extremely awkward and very nervous, hanging out with a bunch of other country club kids. I kept thinking, I just don’t fit here. These are not my people, but goddamn it, I am ready to make out with someone.
The boys made a game of stealing their parents’ glasses of champagne when the adults weren’t looking, then getting drunk and hooking up with the girls. Even though I didn’t feel as if anyone would like me, I was hoping that this particular summer, I would be chosen. I did not know that I could participate, that I had a choice, that I could initiate. I was just a flower waiting to be picked.
I eventually wound up under a rosebush with a boy called Rob. I don’t know if he was really called Rob, but he looked like Rob Lowe, and that has always been my name for him. So Rob and I were under that shrub for what seemed like two hours, making polite conversation while I was just waiting for this cute kid to kiss me. I remember wondering if it always took this long to get kissed. In the end, with his champagne breath in my face, we did have a very wet, saliva-filled kiss, which I have to say was horribly anticlimactic. I have no idea how long we were lying in the dirt, but eventually I climbed out from under the bush with weeds in my hair and scratches from the rosebush on my arms and legs and made my way back to find my mother. I was practically walking on air—I would finally have a kissing story to share once I went back to school.
Next there was a boy I’ll call Tom. I made out with him in my mom’s bedroom while she was out playing tennis at the country club. My most significant memory is of him unbuckling his pants, pulling down his underwear, and forcing my head down, onto his dick. Then he did what all teen boys do: he came in seconds. It happened so fast I gagged. And my mouth was filled with the disgusting taste of what I can only describe as pureed onion. My sexual experiences were going from bad to worse. I’ve no doubt suffered some PTSD from Tom’s maneuver, although back then forced fellatio was written off as regular teenage boy behavior. But actually, it was closer to non-consensual sex, and I was traumatized. After Tom, it took me another ten years to be able to give a blow job, much to the frustration of the boys I was with.
I lost my virginity to my first boyfriend, who I’ll call Augustine. He was in the school band, but of course, and was a sweet guy who sent me funny letters when I was away from him at boarding school.
I was fifteen and considered a late bloomer compared to my friends, who all bragged that they had had sex. I set aside the disappointment I’d experienced over my first kiss, and the horror over my first blow job, and consciously decided that it was my time to do IT.
I took the subway from Fulham Broadway, where I lived, to the end of the subway line where he lived. I walked the fifteen minutes from the subway stop to his house, filled with purpose. I was a girl on a mission to lose my virginity.
I got to his house to find his buddy was also there, lounging on the very sofa I had planned to lose my virginity on. Why is it that some dudes always have a wingman who needs ditching?
But I was not going to let anything get in the way of my plan today. I think I made some lame excuse about being tired and wanting to lay down, so Augustine and I went upstairs to his bedroom. We lay on his bed, me nervously staring at the bright sunlight that was hitting my face and making it hard for me to keep my eyes open. Was I even supposed to keep my eyes open? Or closed? Or to look at him? Or not? Jeez, who knows what to do when you haven’t done it before. He awkwardly tried to take off my clothes, but we gave up after the debacle of getting my jeans and knickers off, and I took the rest off myself.
I will at least give him a gold star for proper consent etiquette, as he did ask me if I was sure I wanted to do it. I could barely squeak out the words, “Yes, I think so.” I also nodded, which was his invitation . . . to roll on his condom, climb on top of me, squeeze his penis inside my virgin vagina, and come in about twenty seconds. He then pulled out, rolled the condom off, and hopped off the bed, leaving me in the same position I was in thirty seconds earlier. Still blinded by the sun, except minus my knickers and, most important, my virginity.
No blood, no orgasm, just confusion. And another disappointment.
As I walked back to the subway station a short while after, with an uncomfortably agitated vagina and damp underwear, the overwhelming thought was why I would ever want to do that again. (Sorry, Augustine.)
I should’ve known then that sex was not going to be anything to get excited about until much, much later. In all fairness I have never heard of a girl having an orgasm during her first time. If that is you, then I want to hear from you, please!
In my early twenties, after being married, having my first child, and then getting divorced, I discovered the joy of the one-night stand. There are times when having sex with someone for only one night is NOT a bad thing. Some of my favorite sexual experiences have come from one-offs—people I never wanted to see again but whom I’m incredibly pleased I spent the day or night with. Of course, I try to avoid making decisions I’ll regret the following morning, like not having safe sex. What I’ll also say is that, having been married to the same dude for eleven years, I think the benefits of sex in a long-term relationship far outweigh the one-night deal.
However, the sex I had in an NYC hotel room with a semi-anonymous guy was among my top ten sexual experiences. He’d somehow got my email address and had been sending me incredibly sophisticated pornographic poetry. I didn’t know anything about him other than the guy could really write.
Via email, I arranged to meet him in New York, at the Gramercy Park Hotel, with the instructions: “I will leave a key for you. Just say you’re my boyfriend.”
I woke up at three in the morning with this guy going down on me. We fucked, and I didn’t even look at him until we were done, which wasn’t until the sun came up.
“What are you doing later?” he asked me, postcoital.
I told him I was busy.
“Do you want my number?”
Did I ask for it?
I never expected to see this guy again, but I did run into him one time, ten years later, walking up the beach in Malibu, married to a girl I knew.
If you are inclined to choose the option of one-night stands, then there are ways to do it that have worked well for me.
I have three rules:
1. Stay away from other people’s partners. There are enough people in the world. I feel really strongly about that. If someone says, “It’s fine! My partner doesn’t mind!”—get that partner on the phone because you’ll find out what’s up right away.
2. Be safe. You don’t want to leave with more than you arrived with. Unfortunately, there are no birth control options designed specifically with women in mind, so I know the choices don’t seem too appealing. If men could get pregnant, then I am certain we would have some better alternatives. However, given that, I always go with the “just DO it” motto, meaning “rubber up”—because taking a risk for a night of fun was just never worth it for me.
3. Be age appropriate. When I was thirteen, I looked much older, so I had men in their thirties try to sleep with me, and just because I had B-cup boobs, it was somehow acceptable. A fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl is not emotionally equipped to manage a guy in his thirties. These men were interested in me for sex and sex only. Let’s not be confused here. These guys are total creeps.
I think I learned how to flip the script with men as a way to combat and avoid being mistreated, as I so often was. One of my first LA girlfriends, Stacey, was ten years older than me and taught me a lot about men, including how to give a great blow job, which she literally demonstrated on a cucumber for me to watch and take notes.
Stacey lived with her pit bull in a Winnebago she bought with money made from stripping across America, and she was as badass of a woman as I’d ever seen. She was gorgeous, sexy, and blonde, bu
t God help you if you fucked with Stacey. I’ve seen her get a Glock out of the glove box at a red light and aim it out the window at some dude who had catcalled her.
I met her when I first moved to LA, and we bonded over riding motorbikes . . . and boys. She is one of the most loyal, loving, incredible women I know. So much so that one year on my birthday, she gave me the most insane gift that only she could give me.
“Go to this address after one a.m., and don’t ask me any questions,” she instructed.
I trusted her with my life, so I went to the address and rang the buzzer. A guy I recognized as a super foxy guy she had been having a fling with answered the door.
“Hi, you’re Amanda? Stacey told me you’d be coming. Come on in. I’m your birthday present.”
WEIRD. I wanted to leave, but I also wanted to stay.
“How do I . . . what do I do?”
“Come in.”
Alrighty then. I don’t even remember much of it; I must have been drinking still, but I remember just having the craziest sex in a room that had mirrors everywhere. It was truly a surreal but excellent experience.
Afterwards, all he said was, “Well, happy birthday.”
“Thanks, dude,” I said, and put my clothes on and left.
It’s hard to define the difference between sexual empowerment and tricking yourself into thinking it’s empowerment when actually you’re just finding a way to get validated. There’s a whole sex positive movement right now where people are staying out of any kind of committed, monogamous setup and having sex with whomever, whenever. Which I fully understand. At the same time, it’s really hard to know what that line is between feeling liberated and starting to feel bad about yourself or shamed in any way. If you start to feel empty and used, that’s probably a sign that something isn’t working for you.
It's Messy Page 4
