What if the Slut Shamer is Myself?

Chronicle of an Open Marriage #30

I’ve been getting triggered lately. Slut shaming myself. One memorable time was when I was being penetrated by Captain while giving Hubs oral. I saw the image of the three of us from a birdseye view, as if in a movie, and I wondered, is this woman being used?

That’s an old refrain. The same one that tormented my marriage for almost 40 years. When our sex drives didn’t line up, and when our attitudes about that bloomed toxic, I wound up feeling used while Hubs felt neglected. We tumbled for decades through that destructive loop.

But lately, when my husband and I are both enthusiastically schtupping Captain, when everyone involved is clearly having a good time, I most definitely am NOT being used. So where does the self-criticism come from?

Both men are attentive to my needs, and when I stay in my body, and out of my self-harming mind, I can feel the three of us enjoying our ménage à trois. But because of the social conditioning, I’ve received as a woman, “slut” is the thought that squirrels into my mind.

I also recently read this story by Aza Y. Alam that suggests that Western women were duped by the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s. That struck a chord. I had sex with a number of men in that era — not because it was super fun and I truly wanted to, but because I thought that’s what intelligent women did. That was the message the “free love” culture sent me. Or at least, that was the message I heard. But in my case, in my naive and somewhat traumatized and thoroughly confused mind, the “love” felt more like exploitation.

My first experience of sexual intercourse was rape-y. My second romantic relationship began with a full-on date rape. And moving backward in time, two young men, including the brother of a friend, sexually assaulted me when I was just 12, throwing me on the floor in a dark house and trying mightily to stick their fingers into my vagina. Twelve was also the age when I stopped feeling safe walking down the street. To me, puberty was a transition from beloved person to coveted/despised thing. The rest of my life has been an effort to recover from that blow.

So how am I supposed to foster a healthy attitude about sex?

Alam goes on to theorize that Western cultural messages that tell women to wear sexy, revealing clothing are just as damaging to women as Middle Eastern ones that tell women to cover their bodies from head to toe.

Okay. I can see that point of view. The commonality is that women in both cultures are dressing for men —either to attract them or keep them at bay — instead of for themselves. The big difference, of course, is that women’s clothing choices are not a police matter in the West — at least not yet.

To support her viewpoint, Alam quoted a book by Andrea Dworkin which I’ve never read: Right Wing Women. Dworkin was a radical feminist with a brilliant mind and powerful voice who partnered with right wing women in a campaign against pornography in the 1980s, so it was with trepidation that I hunted down the book.

Would Dworkin chastise me from the grave for my newly-embraced polyamory? Would she challenge my belief that f*cking two men is healthy and good for me — maybe even a feminist act, a strong antidote to decades of cultural misogyny?

Nope.

What Dworkin does say is that people, particularly women, need to investigate and respond to their own unique sexuality — not be controlled by other people or external ideologies.

And isn’t that, after all, the point and privilege of being human — learning who we are and what we can become; making our own unique decisions; constructing our lives; exercising our brains and our free will?

The book is dense, and I haven’t finished it, but here is a passage that stands out to me. Please forgive the lack of paragraphs. Dworkin doesn’t make for easy reading.

Sexual intelligence would have to be rooted first and foremost in the honest possession of one’s own body, and women exist to be possessed by others, namely men. The possession of one’s own body would have to be absolute and entirely realized for the intelligence to thrive in the world of action. Sexual intelligence, like moral intelligence, would have to confront the great issues of cruelty and tenderness; but where moral intelligence must tangle with the questions of right and wrong, sexual intelligence would have to tangle with questions of dominance and submission. One preordained to be fucked has no need to exercise sexual intelligence, no opportunity to exercise it, no argument that justifies exercising it. To keep the woman sexually acquiescent, the capacity for sexual intelligence must be prohibited to her; and it is. Her clitoris is denied; her capacity for pleasure is distorted and defamed; her erotic values are slandered and insulted; her desire to value her body as her own is paralyzed and maimed. She is turned into an occasion for male pleasure, an object of male desire, a thing to be used; and any willful expression of her sexuality in the world unmediated by men or male values is punished. She is used as a slut or as a lady; but sexual intelligence cannot manifest in a human being whose predestined purpose is to be exploited through sex, by sex, in sex, as sex. Sexual intelligence constructs its own use: it begins with a whole body, not one that has already been cut into parts and fetishized; it begins with a self-respecting body, not one that is characterized by class as dirty, wanton, and slavish; it acts in the world, a world it enters on its own, with freedom as well as passion. Sexual intelligence cannot live behind locked doors, any more than any other kind of intelligence can. Sexual intelligence cannot exist defensively, keeping out rape. Sexual intelligence cannot be decorative or pretty or coy or timid, nor can it live on a diet of contempt and abuse and hatred of its human form. Sexual intelligence is not animal, it is human; it has values; it sets limits that are meaningful to the whole person and personality, which must live in history and in the world. Women have found the development and exercise of sexual intelligence more difficult than any other kind: women have learned to read; women have acquired intellect; women have had so much creative intelligence that even despisal and isolation and punishment have not been able to squeeze it out of them; women have struggled for a moral intelligence that by its very existence repudiates moralism; but sexual intelligence is cut off at its roots, because the woman’s body is not her own. The incestuous use of a girl murders it. The sexual intimidation or violation of a girl murders it. The enforced chastity of a girl murders it. The separation of girl from girl murders it. The turning over of a girl to a man as wife murders it. The selling of a girl into prostitution murders it. The use of a woman as a wife murders it. The use of a woman as a sexual thing murders it. The selling of a woman as a sexual commodity, not just on the street but in the media, murders it. The economic value given to a woman’s body, whether high or low, murders it. The keeping of a woman as a toy or ornament or domesticated cunt murders it. The need to be a mother so that one is not perceived as a whore murders it. The requirement that one bear babies murders it. The fact that the sexuality of the female is predetermined and that she is forced to be what men say she is murders sexual intelligence: there is nothing for her to discern or to construct; there is nothing for her to find out except what men will do to her and what she will have to pay if she resists or give in. (54–55)

The way I understand this is a key element of healthy sexuality is to recognize that your body is your own. But that’s very hard for a woman to do! So many cultural messages and actual laws deny us true possession of our bodies — including the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade — that declining sex sometimes becomes the only way available way to assert sovereignty.

But I don’t want to decline sex!

Do I really have to deny myself healthy physical and spiritual connections just to prove that my body belongs to me? That seems like a self-defeating trap, and one I’ve fallen into before.

I think that trap fostered my depressed libido during much of my marriage. And it’s probably responsible for the difficulty I have in achieving orgasm, too. Hubs and Captain can both cum easily and often. But me? It takes a lot of luck and intense concentration for me to be able to achieve that goal.

Since opening the marriage, my libido and ability to achieve orgasm have been all over the map. For some of the time, my pussy was constantly wet and I felt like it contained an atomic bomb, the sexual energy was so explosive and powerful down there. That was when I first started having sex outside the marriage, and the shock of breaking that taboo also broke open my bad habits of mind. But other times, like right now, I’m beset with doubt and worry. Questions that rattle my brain include: Does Hubs really love me? Is Captain playing me? Am I making good choices? Am I being used? And Whatever happened to my delicious orgasms?

Serendipitously, Captain said something relevant while we were fucking just the other day. I was on top and controlling the rate of penetration and the angle of our bodies’ friction, changing it up at will.

“Use me,” he said. “I love it when you use my body to give yourself pleasure.”

Whoa. That gave me a different perspective.

Why do I consider being “used” a bad thing, anyway? If the person “using” me is a good and decent human being — someone I care about, and someone who I know cares about me — how does the idea of “using” even come into question? Isn’t that just another trick of my self-defeating mind?

It’s something I’m thinking about, as I chip away at the misogynistic ideologies that infect and cripple my brain, and as I try to develop true sexual intelligence — that hardest intelligence for a woman to achieve — to discern and construct a sexual life that makes me happy and serves me and my lovers well.

What happened next? Read Chronicle of an Open Marriage #31. Find all of my stories about opening our marriage on the list below, or about sex in general on this one. Get an email whenever I publish. And have a restorative day.