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LJ Idol, Week 11: Sexual Healing
Dec. 12th, 2008 02:02 amBettie Page died tonight, far away from me in the neon glow of Los Angeles. Nine days ago she had a heart attack. She was 85. By tomorrow, they will be trimming their bangs and wearing hats with black veils, lighting candles before framed photographs and flowers. She fell ass backwards into notoriety and cultural relevance, in thousands of photographs and America's sexual double standards. I wonder if it balanced out the tragedy of before and after, if she saw girls on the street wearing their bangs cut short and wondered.
I've never had Bettie Page bangs. I remember the first girl I ever saw with them - C., pale as Death with long black hair and blue eyes. She was tiny, and looked almost like a doll but drove a stick shift sports car. She was a dominatrix in her 'real' life, one of two working in my office to have a respectable W-2 form at the beginning of the year. The other was J., who stood almost six feet tall and carried her gear in her high school drill team bag. They were both stunning, gorgeous women in different ways.
Working at the dot-com was one of the best and worst jobs I've ever done. I was paid a stupidly large amount of money and given absurd amounts of responsibility and power for a nineteen year old with no experience. I also worked insane hours overnight while going to the university full time during the day, so I never slept and spent too much time in the office. My monitor was enormous by the standards of the day, there was no dress code and the office was stocked with more soda and junk food than a convenience store. I hated it and loved it, even when we outsourced half the office to India.
During that time I became questionably involved with J., who was my boss. At the same time I was flirting with a married man on the day shift and my Russian professor, letting the creepy guy from New England spank me after work and engaging in a lot of questionable BDSM and sex with my boyfriend at the time. I'm not ashamed of the things I did, but I am embarrassed that I was so artless and so foolish to behave as if I knew what I was doing or that it was in any way clever. At nineteen and twenty, I was raging and arrogant beyond belief. I didn't think much about why I was doing anything I was doing at the time. I did the things I thought I wanted. I fucked and I bruised and I was cruel. That was how I discovered that while lifestyle BDSM was hot I was a lousy submissive and a lot of things were better in theory than practice, that I was terrible at saying what I needed or what I wanted.
In 2001 after the dot-com crashed and I ended my engagement to my boyfriend, I spent a lot of time on my own and had the luxury of free time for introspection. Was all that bondage just some fucked up attempt to deal with being raped, was I just dumb, was it the relationship, was I just permanently crazy from the years before? Was all that pornography warping me? Why was I just never comfortable in anything? It took a few more mistakes before I hashed it all out inside my head. There was no moment of epiphany or clarity, just the slow realization that time and experience make all things change.
Some of it makes me laugh now. I don't think alt.sex.cthulhu caused any permanent scars. I made peace with most of my sexuality eventually. I realized not everything had to be about what happened to me as a teenager and that I didn't actually have to do anything about it anymore. I remembered my obsession with tying up my action figures as a kid and worked on my sense of guilt. I found fandom online and realized I probably wasn't the only person writing sexy stories about David Bowie instead of taking notes during high school. I finally admitted to myself that there were untold numbers of people like me out there - frustrated, hungry, sexually confused, gender confused, and still just people. I was not a totally unique, eight sided snowflake. I fell, ever so slowly, ass backwards into being something closer to fine.
I've never had Bettie Page bangs. I remember the first girl I ever saw with them - C., pale as Death with long black hair and blue eyes. She was tiny, and looked almost like a doll but drove a stick shift sports car. She was a dominatrix in her 'real' life, one of two working in my office to have a respectable W-2 form at the beginning of the year. The other was J., who stood almost six feet tall and carried her gear in her high school drill team bag. They were both stunning, gorgeous women in different ways.
Working at the dot-com was one of the best and worst jobs I've ever done. I was paid a stupidly large amount of money and given absurd amounts of responsibility and power for a nineteen year old with no experience. I also worked insane hours overnight while going to the university full time during the day, so I never slept and spent too much time in the office. My monitor was enormous by the standards of the day, there was no dress code and the office was stocked with more soda and junk food than a convenience store. I hated it and loved it, even when we outsourced half the office to India.
During that time I became questionably involved with J., who was my boss. At the same time I was flirting with a married man on the day shift and my Russian professor, letting the creepy guy from New England spank me after work and engaging in a lot of questionable BDSM and sex with my boyfriend at the time. I'm not ashamed of the things I did, but I am embarrassed that I was so artless and so foolish to behave as if I knew what I was doing or that it was in any way clever. At nineteen and twenty, I was raging and arrogant beyond belief. I didn't think much about why I was doing anything I was doing at the time. I did the things I thought I wanted. I fucked and I bruised and I was cruel. That was how I discovered that while lifestyle BDSM was hot I was a lousy submissive and a lot of things were better in theory than practice, that I was terrible at saying what I needed or what I wanted.
In 2001 after the dot-com crashed and I ended my engagement to my boyfriend, I spent a lot of time on my own and had the luxury of free time for introspection. Was all that bondage just some fucked up attempt to deal with being raped, was I just dumb, was it the relationship, was I just permanently crazy from the years before? Was all that pornography warping me? Why was I just never comfortable in anything? It took a few more mistakes before I hashed it all out inside my head. There was no moment of epiphany or clarity, just the slow realization that time and experience make all things change.
Some of it makes me laugh now. I don't think alt.sex.cthulhu caused any permanent scars. I made peace with most of my sexuality eventually. I realized not everything had to be about what happened to me as a teenager and that I didn't actually have to do anything about it anymore. I remembered my obsession with tying up my action figures as a kid and worked on my sense of guilt. I found fandom online and realized I probably wasn't the only person writing sexy stories about David Bowie instead of taking notes during high school. I finally admitted to myself that there were untold numbers of people like me out there - frustrated, hungry, sexually confused, gender confused, and still just people. I was not a totally unique, eight sided snowflake. I fell, ever so slowly, ass backwards into being something closer to fine.