Black Widow, Barbie, and "Carnal Knowledge"

You know I know you know I know you know.

"Even in bed I pose: desire may grow / More circumstantial and less circumspect / Each night, but an acute girl would suspect / That my self is not like my body, bare. / I wonder if you know, or, knowing, care? / You know I know you know I know you know."

"Carnal Knowledge" by Thom Gunn has been my favorite poem since I was fourteen.

When I was fourteen, I had never kissed anyone, I was scared of porn, and I had an eating disorder. I didn't like going to school, but I did like boxing because it made me feel like Black Widow, or Mystique, or some other dangerous and sexy femme fatale assassin character. I wore a lot of red lipstick and daydreamed about going batshit crazy and acting like I was possessed by a demon in my math class.

I remember thinking very early on as a kid that it was pretty rough to be a girl, and the way things were looking I only had two options standing in between me and the deep abyss of social suicide: 1) "keeping up with the boys", or, 2) making sure I was desirable enough that my peers would let me live despite my perceived evolutionary weaknesses.

I was physically disabled, 5'1", and so scared of the Pacer Test that I skipped gym for three months straight to make sure I got out of it. I could not keep up with the boys. Obviously, I went for the second option.

The way I saw it, I was not athletic enough, cool enough, interesting/funny/pretty/etc/etc enough to get away with being myself. Whatever other girls had that made it okay for them to exist the way they were- straight hair, abs, confidence, nonchalance, some esoteric and undefinable quality of likeability that made me delirious with jealousy- I did not have it, and sooner or later everyone else was going to figure it out and eat me alive.

My only saving grace might be if (like some wild animal sneaking through a lion's den or something) I found some way to distract people from the total lack of self I seemed to feel at the core of my being.

That way, it seemed, was sex. If men wanted to fuck you, they would keep you around, and if men kept you around then other women would respect you. It was a win-win. All I had to do was make sure I was fuckable.

It makes sense: growing up, I rarely felt drawn to the main characters of girls' books. They were always so fucking good: they had that naive and happy quality I saw in everyone around me but not myself. People liked them because they were kind and smart and beautiful, and I looked at them- Barbie and Wonder Woman and Cinderella- and knew I wasn't like them at all. There was something wrong with me.

Instead, I latched onto the femme fatales, the assassins, the demons, the sluts, the bitches. They had power too, like those blonde and bubbly main characters, but it was a performance: Black Widow didn't kill her enemies with her genuine and virtuous personality, she seduced them and beat the fuck out of them with her bare hands. I would never be Barbie, but I could learn to be Black Widow, because even Black Widow herself had learned how to be Black Widow. It didn't matter that underneath it all I didn't know who I was. All that mattered was being able to perform.

I spent years researching the psychology behind attractiveness and likeability. I read The Art of Seduction when I was seventeen and covered the pages in highlighter. I wore tight clothes, practiced sitting up straight, miserably tried to change how my body looked, hated my hair, hated my voice, hated my personality. I was desperate to fit into a mold that felt like my only salvation from fading away into nothingness. And it never felt like enough.

---

I am twenty years old now and it still doesn't feel like enough. I have kissed plenty of people now, I'm (mostly) not scared of porn, I'm in ED recovery. I have received far more sexual (among other types of) validation than my childhood self could have dreamed of. I should feel okay.

But it was and still remains my greatest fear that beneath all of my posturing, my dark lipstick and one-night stands, I will never be a sexual creature. The performance isn't enough. Beneath everything, I am terrified that there is still this big fucking hole inside of me that nothing has ever filled; not sex, not food, not drinking, not purging, not attention, not validation. There is no libido and no desire, because underneath it all I barely even feel like a person. There is no pleasure and certainly no joy.

I am afraid I will never feel truly okay. I have spent twenty years running away from what I knew and feared intimately as a child... there is some crucial and important piece inside of me I am missing, and without it I can survive but never live.

I don't actually like sex that much, which is very hard to admit. I don't think I ever really did, but it felt more important to be the kind of person who had sex than whether I was actually happy. I'm trying to hold onto hope there is some version of me in the future who will like it. I'm trying to believe I'll be okay eventually. Maybe I just haven't found the right medication yet, or I just need more therapy, or my dietician is right and I would be alright if I could just get myself to follow my meal plan and eat six times a day. I don't know.

Sometimes it feels like writing is the only thing that makes the gaping emptiness inside of me feel tolerable, so I'm going to keep doing it. Sometimes this is the only thing that makes me feel human. I am twenty years old and starting to give up on ever feeling sexy, so maybe for once in my fucking life I should just be happy to be feeling human, even if it's the bare minimum. It doesn't happen as often as I'd like it to.

If anyone actually reads this one (I can't decide whether I want that or not), I hope somehow this made you feel human too. Or not alone. Sweet dreams, readers.

XOXO, riley

Wow, this is a super depressing and atypical cherrypi post; I'm really letting the brand slip. Yuck.