When I was 14 I gave three guys blow jobs all in one sitting, all three of them together in one night. They were all friends of mine…well two of them were, one was just a guy I knew from school. I was a freshman in high school.  They all were too. It was at my house on a Saturday night.  I was having a party at my parents’ house while they were away.  There were a lot of people there. There was a lot of drinking going on. It was late. The blow jobs took place in a room in the basement. It was dark.  Or maybe my eyes were closed.

The next week at school, everyone knew.  Seniors. Sixth graders. My little brother. There were 5000 students in my high school. My name was written on walls near the pay phones. In the boy’s locker rooms.  It was 1980. I was the school slut.  I lost girlfriends. I gained attention from a lot of boys though. I had a lot of popular boys asking me out. Two years later the cutest boy I had ever seen wanted me to be his girlfriend. I gave him my virginity. He broke up with me soon after that.

One day a girl in the hall said she heard I was I was a real “nymph”.  I thought she was referring to the mythological character and that it was some sort of compliment. It was years later before i realized she was talking about the word nymphomaniac.

My reputation as a blow job queen followed me throughout high school and into college. In college, I had one boy I was dating break up with me when some guy from his fraternity, who I vaguely knew from high school, told him my blow job story.

I engaged in a lot of promiscuity and risky behavior around sex with men. Strangers in the front seat of my car. Sex with IV drug users. Multiple booty call partners. Destroying relationships of others. I had multiple elective abortions. I allowed over 70 men to put their body parts inside me.

For many years, I thought men just wanted to fuck me, that I was not much more than a vagina, that getting men to want to fuck me was the only way to matter. My brain, my body, my face, my smile, my cleverness, my contributions, my ideas, my humor; all just vagina wrapping.

I went on to approach my relationships in unhealthy ways, making myself invisible, erasing myself, no boundaries, chameleoning myself to their lives, making my self-worth solely about my attractiveness to them.

But here’s the thing.  I didn’t actually give three guys blow jobs that night. What actually happened was that i was sexually assaulted that night.  What actually happened was that three boys came in to the room where I was passed out drunk and stuck their dicks in my mouth, probably without even coming, and then bragged about it. What actually happened was that three boys committed sexual assault and lived their lives with no consequences.

I never told an adult at the time.

There was no vocabulary for that being sexual assault in 1980.

There is barely vocabulary for it today as Chanel Miller and Brock Turner’s story illustrates.

This is the problem of the penis…of the gender that can produce an erect member…those boys did me a lot of harm.

Maybe I would have had all those partners and abortions and bad relationships and issues and done all that anyway, even without that night.

Maybe I would have not done any of that if those boys had not decided that their misguided bravado-fueled idea to put their dicks in the mouth of their passed-out friend and then tell everyone a half lie about it was more important than her humanity.

—–

I have this idea for a story of a society where humans evolved so that procreation did not rely on the male orgasm but on the female’s…that the existence of the human species did not revolve around 3 seconds of male ecstasy.  That everything else was the same, men got erections and had the power to push their body part in women’s bodies, but the purpose of that relationship was flipped…it was not to produce the friction that created THEIR orgasm and spew sperm to try generate life, but to use their erection to explore the mysteries of the G-spot and the clitoris to try to get that egg to release via the female orgasm…that that was how babies were made.

What then would the world be like…

—–

So, this thing actually did happen to me…and since then:

• I always felt that because i didn’t actually remember it, it didn’t count.
• I always felt that because i was drunk, it was my own fault.
• I always felt because it happened at a party i had at my parents’ house while they were out of town it was my own fault.
• I always felt being a victim was worse than taking responsibility
• I always felt past trauma having impact on your life was basically bullshit

But several things happened to change that.

• I started noticing patterns in my relationships and the men I loved
• I spoke to some people who taught me to think differently about my history and how trauma affects people
• The world became more open to the concepts of trauma and sexual assault
• I got braver and more introspective and older

I wonder if, when those boys that assaulted me heard about Brock Turner, they were outraged. I wonder if they thought of me.  I wonder if, when they saw his mugshot everywhere, you can picture it now, they imagined their own 14-year-old face mug shots everywhere.

I wonder if they think about what they did. What they did that night, but worse, what they did after.  The braggy half lie thing they said about me. Blow jobs? Really? Did my 14-year-old passed out mouth really perform oral sex? What was it like for them? Were they all in there together unzipping their young cocks and forcing their dicks into me while the others stood there gawking? Did they take turns?  One of them really was a friend…in my circle, he even tried twice to friend me on Facebook in the last 5 years.  Did he give it a moment’s thought to spread the story? To be so careless with me? Did it affect how they feel about themselves? Their relationships? Their daughters or sons? Did they tell their wives? Confess in a dark room after sex one night?

Because here’s the thing.  I like men.  I know many incredible wise brave men. Men are humans and like all of us are good insightful creative beings capable of making deep beauty and music and art and solving problems and innovating and all sorts of amazing stuff.

But the human race will fail if the men among us cannot escape the force of the biological imperative of their three seconds of ecstasy that too easily conflates with power and domination and justifies stupid-ass brutality on all levels; from the  micro systemic buffoonery of my friends’ awful, tepid sexual assault and compounding demeaning  self-aggrandizing rumor mongering of me, or Brock Turner’s rape of Chanel Miller; to the overarching hatred that causes lynching by police of Black men or that caused the Holocaust, Tulsa, Apartheid, and endless slaughter and enslavement of indigenous peoples again and again.

Men do not have it easy.  I do not say they do.  As a woman who grew up with a face that met many modern standards of beauty, I know those “advantages” come with a cost. I know power and privilege don’t come cheap and it is easy to get drunk on them.  And many, many, maybe even most, men are not brutal or power hungry or unable to manage themselves…and I am not asserting women are perfect…. we are not…. but facts are facts.

We are a species that relies on three seconds of male ecstasy to survive. Male ecstasy.  Not female ecstasy. Male ecstasy. Male ecstasy, most typically earned by pushing a body part in a woman’s body. That is the design of the human sex act. Sure, we have a gajillion permutations. But to procreate, that is how it is done. Three (if they are lucky) seconds of male ecstasy. That fact cannot be without consequence.  It cannot be without impact on the brain, the body, the social constructs, governments and religions we have grown and nurtured and manipulated and corrupted and improved and designed and redesigned, from the beginning.

And one way or another, that fact creates some fallout in the world that we are going to have clean up, men and women together. Or we are not going to make it.

I know those boys were not trying to do me harm.  They were not.  But harm me they did.  Which goes back to the question I pondered above…did they have their three seconds of ecstasy when I “gave’ them their three blow jobs? Or did they lie about that? Would they really have had it in them to orgasm in front of each other? That would have taken some…balls.

Maybe the whole reason those three seconds of ecstasy have, over the course of human evolution, gotten so conflated with power is because they are moments of true vulnerability, and that is the where the answer lies.  That is where we need to focus as humans.  Three seconds of connection.  Three seconds of true openness and vulnerability. Maybe that is what too many men and too many women are actually afraid of.  Maybe that three seconds is how we know we are all the same. Maybe everyone in the world is having the same thoughts about what they really want and need right now. Maybe no one is alone.

I hope so.  And to you three boys…. I, in a profound, thoughtful, measured and healthy way…choose not forgive you and I know it was not my fault and that I did not deserve the