Consent

by Donna Freitas

  Once after a prom I kissed three different boys in a single night. Two Marks and a Brian. It was exhilarating. The three different kisses, which were really three intense make-out sessions, may have happened within an hour. First, I kissed my date (one of the Marks), then I wandered the hallway of the hotel where the kids at the prom had rented rooms and ran into the second Mark, who’d always made me laugh, and dove right into an enthusiastic lip-locking with him. It was not particularly skillful on either of our parts, but we left giggling and smiling two minutes later to return to our dates. Not long after that on another hallway wander, I ran into Brian, tall, sweet, athletic Brian, who was funny and also somewhat bashful, and found myself reaching up around his neck as he bent down, arms encircling my waist, and shared the most romantic and meaningful kiss of my three-boy evening. That kiss was the beginning of a pre-college romance, doomed once I got to Georgetown and found a new boy I wanted to kiss. But at the time, Brian was lovely.

  My senior year in high school I was a shameless flirt, a zealous true believer in the religion of making out, but I hadn’t always been that way. At that point, I was making up for lost time, since I was a late bloomer in the boy department.

  I’d been a serious gymnast and dancer since I was a child, which also meant that for a long time I had no life at all, at least not socially. I spent too many hours at practice on the bar, the beam, the floor exercise, and the always and increasingly terrifying vault, too many weekends preparing for competitions to ever care to go to a dance or hang out with people after school. But then came an injury and the pain and loss of quitting, and suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands and no idea what to do with it. Soon I discovered the world of “normal” girls my age, a world filled with makeup and dieting and too-short skirts and Friday-night dances and gushing over all the cute boys in my state. (As I said before, Rhode Island is small, so it seemed possible for us to catalog each and every potential crush from towns near and somewhat far.)

  I was fifteen and never been kissed, and then I was sixteen and in the same boat. Competitive gymnasts can fly through the air in death-defying somersaults, but put us in front of a boy and we’ll likely furrow our brow or run the other way. In my forced retirement I watched, I studied, I learned how to be a girl my age through my growing friendships with other girls my age, girls who were long skilled in the art of boyfriend catching, outfit curating, and getting someone to ask them to dance in those dark gyms with music blaring and bright flashing lights. In my dedicated pursuit of High School Normalcy Studies, I learned to be ashamed of my lack of experience and felt lucky I’d told no one that, in my athletic early adolescence, kissing remained a conspicuous and embarrassing deficiency on my social CV. How does one move from never-been-kissed into the ranks of the finally-been-kissed? It seemed a Heideggerian shift of ontological proportions without a rule book or instructions.

  Following a long summer of stumbling flirtations and confusing yet forward banter with an Irish boy who worked at the beach, in the dark hallways of the cabanas I took a deep, courageous breath and proposed to this green-eyed young man that we kiss. I knew he’d say yes, but my heart was pounding. I was concerned about doing things badly, about embarrassing myself terribly. But the kiss happened—it finally happened. It was mostly just tongues pushing around each other in one big, wet mess, but I didn’t care. Inside, I was celebrating that I was no longer a kissing virgin. Hurrah! Mission accomplished, ontological shift achieved.

  I had finally bloomed. Soon I was a big, glaring poppy.

  My kissing career occurred before the existence of slut shaming, at least officially. There wasn’t a term for it then, even though the practice existed. Girls shamed each other, they spread rumors, chastised one another, but kissing felt exempt from what counted as slutty behavior. It was so minor, just lips pressed against each other and maybe a little tongue. Nobody was going to get pregnant from kissing, nobody had to take off any clothes. Kissing could be as brief as a few seconds or as intense as a four-hour make-out session. Kisses were innocent and uncomplicated; they were fun, they were playful, they were exciting, and even when they weren’t fun or playful or exciting or even slightly good, it still wasn’t that big a deal.

  This was the perfect sexual activity for someone like me, because I was innocent. Life was black-and-white. I had close to zero sexual knowledge and was happy to keep it that way. There was no internet to show me otherwise and very few girls around with enough experience to enlighten me (or few who openly admitted they could). My Catholic parents didn’t have a conversation with me about the forbidden subject either, so it mostly remained a mystery, and that was completely fine with me. It was empowering and blissful to run around Rhode Island kissing as many boys as I could find to kiss me back. I was sexually liberated and, somehow, I’d arrived there without having sex at all. The power and freedom came from the joy and pleasure of discovering my own desires, desires that spilled over into the pursuit of the boys I kissed and the boys who chose to kiss me. This power and confidence carried me through college on a thrilling wave that never crashed, even as I expanded my repertoire far beyond kissing.

  I was happy in my body, I felt in control of it, and I expressed this faith in the way that I dressed. I became fashionable, as fashionable as a girl on work-study could be. I was clever at shopping at discount stores and finding designer labels at T J Maxx and Marshalls, a fiend during the sales after Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  My poor mother frequently expressed dismay at having a clotheshorse of a daughter, at my frivolity and obsession with shopping. She also knew it was her own mother’s fault, my beloved grandmother, who lived with us and who planted this seed in me and watered it regularly with our biweekly trips to JCPenney and Woolworths when I was a kid. Shopping was my grandmother’s favorite activity. I watched as she bought cheap blouses and purses (my grandmother could never have enough purses), asked my opinion on this and that one, picking out new colors of nail polish to match her latest outfit.

  My grandmother worked outside the house for her entire adult life, which was unusual for women of her era, especially Italian immigrant women. She was the first woman supervisor at Raytheon in Newport, a well-dressed, proper lady in a sea of men, put in charge of building submarines. She wasn’t about to surrender her inclination to wear skirts just because she was in what was considered a man’s job, and she relished all the pretty things we saw at the mall. There was no conflict for her between the stereotypical femininity of the day and being a hardworking woman. I learned this from her, and it stayed with me.

  My grandmother was the greatest heroine of my youth. I wanted to be just like her then, and I still do today. She was everything my mother was not—she was relaxed, she was rebellious, she draped herself in costume jewelry to go to the market, she dyed her hair blond. She was funny and quick to laugh, and she moved through a difficult, immigrant life with perseverance and grace. She was stylish, and I wanted to be as stylish as she was. She was the person who renewed my subscription to Seventeen each year. I read it the way I’d later read those novels my AP Lit teacher assigned, avidly, studiously, dog-earing the pages with my favorite ensembles, after which I’d rip them out and place them in a file I kept with the pictures of the other clothes I longed to possess. Sometimes I would show my grandmother this collection of dream outfits, and we would ooh and aah over them together.

  In high school, during my post-gymnastics years, I learned the art of leaving the house in one outfit, the one my mother approved of, then changing into the outfit she would never let me wear. When I used to try to escape through the door in my little black boots and skirts that barely reached the middle of my thigh, my mother inevitably caught me.

  “You look like a streetwalker,” she’d scream, literally scream, her arm pointing in the direction of my room, sending me back to change, an early and fervent adopter of slut shaming. Streetwalker was my mother’s favorite term during my last years of high school, and she would glare accusingly at my
grandmother for these transgressions.

  In college I became more stylish, less Rhode Island guido, more sophisticated young woman of the world, showing off my muscular runner’s legs and my petite frame. My magazine reading grew more sophisticated, too, as I let my subscription to Seventeen lapse, replacing it with Vogue and Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. I loved boots, high-heeled boots, and wore them as often as I could. I loved the way the boys turned their heads, admiringly, as I walked by. I could never have enough of their attention, I was never satiated by it, and I dressed as much for them as I did for me.

  I want to be clear about this part. I dressed for myself but I also dressed for them. Even when I had a boyfriend, which I often did, I wanted to look my best, always. I wanted to be noticed and noticed often. I courted attention. I absolutely courted it, without apology. I was proud of my attention-grabbing looks and outfits and confidence, and I was happy in my sexual prowess. I was stupid with power. I would be punished for it.

  I feel the need to account for such things as being a kissing bandit, for dressing in high-heeled boots and short skirts during college and beyond, for smiling giddily at my professors and showing up regularly to their office hours. This cataloging feels essential.

  First, because for the era in which I became a young adult—the late eighties and nineties—I was as intellectually and sexually empowered as any girl my age could hope to be. This was despite my very Catholic upbringing, which was accompanied by no formal sex education whatsoever. The closest my parents, my mother, ever got to talking to me about sex was during one summer when I was nine or ten. I’d been playing outside with the neighborhood kids and was running up the front walk to go in the house and grab a snack from the kitchen. My mother was gardening in a nearby flower bed, kneeling on the brown scratchy rug she always used, gloves on, trowel in hand, the brim of her floppy gardening hat shielding her eyes. One of the boys we’d been warring with was riding by the yard on his bike, and he yelled some taunt or other at me as I neared the front door.

  I stopped and turned.

  “You SUCK!” I yelled back at him.

  We said this to each other all the time while playing. You suck, he sucks, they suck. I don’t know when it started, but we all called upon the power of suck regularly. It did not seem momentous to be yelling this at one of the stupid, annoying neighborhood boys and in front of my mother. But I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye how she shot up from her gardening rug, trowel still in hand. Uh-oh.

  “Donna!” she scolded, already walking toward me. “Go inside. We’re going to talk.”

  She sat me down on the couch, it was all very serious, and my stomach knotted and reknotted while I waited to see what I could have possibly done wrong.

  “Do you know what suck means?” she asked.

  I shrugged. Then I shook my head. I had no idea where this was going.

  Her eyes did not leave me. “It has to do with sex,” she said.

  I swallowed. Why had I yelled that stupid word? What in the world was she talking about? Now I was stuck on the couch with my mother, still in her floppy gardening hat, discussing sex on this sunshine-filled summer day while the playing between the neighborhood kids went on outside without me.

  “It is something a woman does to a man,” my mother went on, without elaborating what sucking thing, exactly, the woman would do. “It’s against the Catholic Church. And it’s against the law.”

  “Okay,” I said, unable to comprehend what she could be talking about or what she might mean, but I wanted out—out of this conversation, out of this house and into the fresh air, out of this sucky, sucky situation.

  “We do not say that word in this family. It’s a bad word about a bad thing.”

  “I won’t say it again,” I told her. “I promise.”

  My mother stood. “Good,” she said, and that was that.

  I got my snack, she went back to her gardening, and the subject of sex never came up again between us or with anyone else in my house.

  That was the extent of my sex education—an impossibly vague sexual association with the word suck. Only years later would I realize that my mother was referring to oral sex, and by the time I figured this out, I thought the whole thing was hilarious. But in so many ways, this lesson was indicative of how the rest of my sex education was and would continue to be—a sort of learning by doing on my part, a figuring out how things worked by trying them out or thinking enough about them that I would eventually understand how and if they were something I thought I’d like, would want to try, or if they sounded appealing or unappealing. But I had no fear, no hang-ups, mostly just an insatiable curiosity and interest and excitement about the mysteries and pleasures of sex and all that went with it, much like the curiosity I had for everything in the world and history and life. Sex was just one more thing to investigate and enjoy. I experimented with glee.

  So, I got to this place of sexual empowerment through sheer experience and trial and error. I came to know my limits, my own desires, through practice, and I drew and withdrew boundaries accordingly with my various partners and with respect to my own volition. I had zero anxiety about saying no to someone, and an unbending faith that my nos would be respected by my partners when I did. My expectations for sex, for pleasure, for what would and wouldn’t happen, for how I was to be treated and not treated, were expressed clearly and openly and with total self-assurance on my part.

  This does not mean that my life unfolded without pain, without difficulty, without heartbreak or setback or disappointment. It had all of these things, and plenty of them. But these common occurrences in the life of a young woman did not sway or shake or dismantle the sexual confidence with which I left high school and then Georgetown and went out into the world of work and graduate school. When things happened with a partner that I found I did not like, or if a partner behaved in a manner that seemed problematic or unbecoming of someone I wanted to be with, I had no qualms about ending things, about telling this person what I thought, about turning and walking in the other direction. The trial-and-error aspect of my sexual education did not harm me in any irreparable way. I had an unbreakable sense of certainty with respect to my sexual decision-making, an unshakable enthusiasm about sex and sexual experiences. I was happy and sure of myself in this regard.

  This confidence I possessed, the reason I emphasize it, is not to brag or pat myself on the back. It’s because I think that we believe, or we hope—I certainly have hoped—that raising young women to be empowered sexually, certain in the drawing and withdrawing of boundaries, exuberant in their yeses and nos, will somehow save them from the experience of assault and harassment. That it will shield against or at least soften such experiences, temper the force of tragedy, protect girls and women from the worst of what can happen. This didn’t prove to be true in my case. No amount of sexual liberation, freedom, confidence, intellectual talent, joy, or voracity would save me from going through what I did with my mentor. When it happened to me, no amount of sexual empowerment could have prevented me from becoming the silenced, anxiety-ridden, nearly destroyed young woman that I became further on in my graduate-school years. The girl who began to blame herself for everything that happened.

  It was in graduate school that my life split in two. One life continued to be one of total and utter sexual empowerment with the young men I hit on, dated, went out with, kissed, had sex with. I was studying feminist theory, eating it up and loving every second of it. I was thriving intellectually, and as usual, my professors loved me as much as I loved them. But as time went on, that second life emerged, utterly divorced from the first. It was a life of fear, uncertainty, of self-condemnation, of second-guessing and third- and fourth- and fifth-guessing and so on. In that life, I questioned everything I was, my decision to attend my professors’ office hours, every stitch of clothing I put on my body when I went to classes.

  Who did I think I was, showing up to graduate school each day dressed like I’d stepped off a magazine page? What
did I expect would happen? Did I really not know that older men might pay attention? What was I doing, going about the world kissing and dating and having sex with all the boys I wanted? What is the punishment for a young woman with sexual and intellectual confidence? Doesn’t she know that the world sees this as hubris, that it will not allow her to thrive for long? That the world in fact is far better at crushing such qualities in a woman?

  The more pressing questions I have now, in hindsight, are these: Why didn’t feminism save me? Shouldn’t it have functioned like armor, to ward off what happened? Why didn’t it transfer from the pages of my books and studies into reality, like fictional characters who leap to life in a movie?

  In the end, there wasn’t enough feminism in the world to save me from the situation in which I eventually found myself. I maintained those two conflicting identities day in and day out: the sexually empowered young feminist among my fellow students and men my age, and the utterly sexually disempowered, shattered young woman with one man far older and more powerful than me. The second identity I hid from everyone. For a long time, even from myself.

  4

  One day, maybe a couple of weeks after that outing to the theater, I found a newspaper clipping in my mailbox at graduate school.

  It was an article about the basketball team I grew up cheering for, about the unexpectedly successful season that they were having and that might land them an NCAA bid later that year. An article about basketball was out of place in my TA mailbox. It made me smile all the wider when I saw it, this reminder of home, of family, of nights seated next to my dad at the gym where URI played, screaming at the ref, praying for those last-minute half-court shots to go in, trying to negotiate the superstitions that haunted my family in the silliest of ways, use them to help our team make foul shots and win possessions and turnovers.