“HERE,” I SAID, AND GAVE HER A PETITE, TOURIST SHOP BELL. “If you’re stressed out, bored and want an orgasm, ring it.” She stared at me and a cascade of emotions washed over her face. “Are you serious?” She asked.
Sitting next to her, I placed it in her palm. “Want me to wear a bowtie and white gloves? You can call me Mr. Belvedere.”
She playfully punched my chest. “Don’t bring up ‘80s television, it was a bad time for everyone.” After studying the bell, she put it down. “Why are you doing this?”
“I want to be on the right side of history,” I said. She shook her head and splayed her hands with a What-Are-You-Talking-About look.
“The orgasm gap.” I breathed in big, then exhaled. “Men get off more and more often. I thought about what you told me about your last partner. I want to, I mean, I think it would be good to try to make up for lost pleasure.”
“My orgasms are not orphans,” she said sharply.
“No, I know,” I replied.
“My orgasms are not runaway kids sleeping under a bridge,” she pushed. “It’s not your job to rescue them.”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course.”
She held the bell up and without looking at me said, “I’m sorry. You know, it’s true, I’m shy about coming. When I do, I look away or bury my face in the pillows.”
I nodded and kept quiet. “It’s always been like that.” She turned to me. “I mean, I love sex.” Her voice lifted in apology and then her eyes lowered, as if sifting the silence for a way out of the awkwardness.
She didn’t ring the bell that day, or the day that followed. I made the daily circle between home and work. Sometimes she was with me, sometimes she wasn’t. The bell sat on the desk. I eventually forgot about it, except when we made love and she buried her face in the pillows.
Under the Silence
Before leaving my apartment, she stuffed her books and video camera into a backpack that hung on her like a giant snail shell. She’s a visual artist and weeks ago, had sent me a link to her work. In one clip, holding her high school diary, she read her adolescent confessionals to a packed room. It was raw, uncomfortably raw. I cringed at the rising panic in her entries until it peaked in a stark moment of her saying, “I am ugly. No one will love me.”
Watching the clip, I heard the audience gasp, then say, “Awww.” They wanted to reach out to her and embrace the hurt, confused, self-doubting young girl, but she was buried deep within the adult who made a career of recreating herself in public.
The power of her performance wasn’t in the exposure of adolescent pain but in the strength to look back and measure its distance. The next day I taught my college literature class, read students’ papers and saw how close those hurts still were for them. Many of those painful experiences had just been lived, and some of the wounds were openly bleeding into the pages of their memoirs. And of course it always hit the women hardest.
I asked the female students if they’d ever felt themselves to be ugly. Nearly all raised their hands. I asked if they or if someone they knew had been raped. Nearly all raised their hands. I asked the same question about secret abortions and sexual harassment. In the tense silence, one of them looked around the room, filled with arms standing like flagpoles and said, “Why is this happening to us?”
The Sexist Gauntlet
On my way home, I heard her question over and over in my mind. And asked myself, what if I was a woman? Same butter pecan complexion, same curly hair. I have big hips for a guy, been told that my whole life. But as a woman my ass and hips would be a swinging bull’s eye for men. Would I straighten my hair? Yes, because I’m vain and ambitious. All in all, I thought, I would be a sexy fucking lady.
[…] included in a hilarious and telling piece about white knights, sexism and sex, aptly titled “Affirmative Action Orgasms,” by Nicholas […]