How a White Slip Helped Me Find My Forgotten Sexuality

As women, it’s so easy to shut this part of ourselves away…

Last night, during an evening thunderstorm, I went into my bedroom, dug into the back corner of a drawer I never open, and pulled out my white slip. I don’t know why I did this. I haven’t worn that slip in over five years.

As the sky sparked with lightning, I took off all my clothes — even my underwear — and slid the slip over my body.

I bought that slip twelve years ago, for the purpose of wearing it beneath a sheer dress that I loved. But I don’t think I ever actually wore that dress, and therefore, had no practical need for the slip.

Instead, I found myself letting it shimmy over my body when I was feeling aroused. I would slide my panties off, so my body could be viewed beneath the sheer fabric, and let one strap fall down my shoulder, my breast barely covered, and I’d walk into the kitchen, the office — wherever my partner might happen to be — and put my hands in his hair or on his waist, making him turn his head.

The first time I did it, he rocketed out of his chair and grabbed me, hiking my legs up around his waist, carrying me to the bedroom. He’d gotten the message quite clearly.

Later, it was a slower seduction, the way he’d bring me to him with an unrushed reach of his hand, touching the silky fabric over my thigh, inching it up a bit.

I didn’t like to wear the fancy lingerie he preferred. Those synthetic fabrics, though often smooth and soft, don’t feel good against the more sensitive areas of my skin. There’s a halting drag and almost stiffness to some of them that catches at the tender skin of stomach, breast, and bottom.

The lace and underwire can be so uncomfortably stiff, trapping me in, giving me sensations that I don’t want to experience, especially not when I’m in that kind of mood. I hated the thongs he found so sexy most of all — I couldn’t stand to have fabric grating between my ass cheeks.

That slip gave me a way to express myself that made me feel beautiful and desirable. I loved the way it felt on my skin and the way it looked on me.

And I loved that he loved it, too.

I looked in the mirror last night — me in that slip. I looked the same as when I wore it back then — though of course with a few mores lines around my eyes. And somehow, my body looks stronger.

I thought maybe I looked pretty.

I wasn’t sure, though. I’m not sure I’ve ever known what I look like. I’ve spent most of my life seeing things in the mirror that other people tell me aren’t there. I struggled with eating disorders for nearly 20 years that left literal scars all over my body.

Every curve and line is a map of my insecurity, old patterns of self-hatred, distorted vision. You can see the marks of my inability to see and know myself so clearly all across this expanse of skin and bone.

It was always so hard for me to let a lover touch this. To see it. I couldn’t even imagine anyone would want to.

“What is this?” one partner once asked me, tracing the sunburst patterns of stretchmarks that climb up the sides of my hips, reaching toward my waist.

How could I explain to him that, years ago, I had purposefully gained fifty pounds in a two month period of time, my skin stretching beyond its capacity, in order to make myself undesirable to the boys at school who were daily bullying and assaulting me? How could I ever put into words the pain — both past and present — those marks represented?

Did he think they were ugly, those white, tapering fingers that striped so many parts of my body? Could I ever be beautiful to him? Or anyone else?

I didn’t know that the last time I picked up the rumpled slip off the floor of our bedroom, after a tumble in bed, that it would be the last time.

My partner left me for a woman nearly half my age. After he moved out, I went through a series of my own relocations, most of my possessions stashed away in boxes during the transitory limbo of the years that followed.

When I finally bought my own house and settled in, I put that slip in the back of my drawer, tucked away into its shadowy depth. I thought briefly about getting rid of it — for what purpose would I use it now? But I left it in the drawer, where it sat for two years.

And then, inexplicably, I needed to put it on last night, as the thunder rumbled and the strong wind made the curtains around the open windows whip and billow.

I watched myself in the mirror for a long, long time. My body felt so stiff, as if a calcified shell had grown over my skin. I turned to look at my butt; I slid my hands beneath my breasts. Then I went and laid on my bed, putting my arms around myself.

I was suddenly aware of how very tight my whole body was. I knew the blow my heart took when my partner left — there was nothing that so consumed my attention in his absence than tending to that pain.

I hadn’t realized that my body had taken such intense impact, as well. It had been so viscerally wounded that, like a tree, it grew bark around the damage, sealing it off, protecting it.

I spent the years following the breakup in a state of constant physical overwhelm, working 60+ hours a week, sleeping less than four hours a night, working out twice a day.

There was virtually no physical pleasure. And no thought of it.

I dreamed of dating again, but in the most clinical of ways — have drinks, go to dinner, fall in love, have sex. It was just a sequential series of tasks on my hypothetical to-do list.

Of course, I never checked any of it off, despite coming close a few times. How could I have? A huge part of myself was locked away. Forgotten.

As I lay there on the bed in my white slip, holding myself, listening to the thunder outside, feeling the wind pouring through the open window across my skin, I remembered something.

I am a woman. A human. I am a sexual being.

I remembered that I want to be loved. Yes, I want to experience sex again, but more than that, I want to be loved. Desired. Wanted. Heard. Seen. Held.

I remembered how much desire used to pour through my body. How I would channel it when I put on that white slip, going to my partner, asking without asking.

As a woman — as a human being — I needed that connection. Someone’s hands on my skin. An embrace. Intimate union. The chance to drop my masks and bare a bit of my soul to a trusted companion.

I cried as I laid on my bed. I was a woman, I kept thinking, not a machine, and not a forgotten piece of debris. I needed love. I needed touch.

I had almost let myself forget that in the wake of my last relationship. It was frighteningly too easy to box up that part of myself and stick it in the back of the closet.

Later, when I went to bed, I took off the slip to put on cozier pajamas that would keep me warm during the cool, stormy night. I left the slip where it lay on the floor in a rumpled heap, to remind me of desire satisfied.

I want to slide out of this calcified cloak around my body just as easily as that slip fell to the floor last night.

© Yael Wolfe 2019