Who Gets to Decide What Liberation Looks Like?

Dear Rebecca,

I read your response and, the way I see it, have three choices. 

I could stay inside the argument. We could keep going back and forth about equity and desire, and whether driving three hours to see a younger man because I wanted to was me finally shaking off a lifetime of Mormon shame or evidence that I was giving too much away. There’s plenty to argue about there. I could argue that wanting to give something doesn’t automatically make the giving desperate. You could argue that wanting something badly enough can make a girl really good at explaining away inequity. We could probably do that forever.

Or I could tell you that something about your response hurt me.

Or I could do what I think Girl on Girl is supposed to do and tell you both.

More than anything, I want this column to be a place where two women can tell each other the truth without turning it into another set of instructions for how women are supposed to live. I want us to disagree, call bullshit, change our minds, hurt each other’s feelings sometimes. And keep going.

I spent most of my life being told what my desire meant. Mormonism told me it was sinful unless it belonged to my husband. My body was treated almost like community property. The church had rules for it. Men could be affected by it. A future husband had a claim on it. A bishop could question me about it. My clothes had to manage it. My sexual behavior had to preserve it. Everyone had some jurisdiction over what happened in and around my body except me.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out which ideas about my body are actually mine. After a lifetime of other people telling me what my desire means, I want to be the one who gets to decide. Which makes it especially weird to be pushing back against you about my sexuality, because you are one of the people who taught me I was allowed to decide for myself in the first place.

For decades, you have written about female desire with a candor almost nobody else has. You have said things about sex, marriage, motherhood, grief, and wanting that women are still punished for saying out loud. You moved the fence for me. I am more comfortable inside my own desire because I watched you refuse to be ashamed of yours.

Which is what makes the next part uncomfortable. Before your response was published, you sent it to me. I loved it. It was brilliant and raw and I thought you’d leveled up the entire column. I had two notes. One was that I wanted a sexual detail removed. You immediately said, “Okay, deal.” And you did remove it.

But then I read: “all of the driving with nary an orgasm to be found once you arrived at your destination. And no, his doesn’t count.” And I was flooded with shame.

It wasn’t anything you did. You removed the specific detail I had pointed to, even if the orgasm math still pretty much gave the game away. But what I was trying to say, and wasn’t clear about, was that I didn’t want the sex between us itemized at all. We misunderstood each other.

At first, I was a little pissed. I didn’t say anything. I sat with it. You’re going through your own shit over there, grieving someone you loved in high school, and at some point I thought, Jesus Christ, maybe we should be writing about that instead, because are we seriously still talking about the fucking guy in the band?

But I think I finally understand why we are.

Because we were never really talking about him. We’re talking about us. And when I say us, I mean women. And the stories we’ve been handed about what it means when we want sex, especially when wanting it makes us look foolish or reckless or like we gave more than we got. 

A man drives three hours to fuck a younger woman and nobody convenes a panel discussion about his self-worth. Men get to have a dumb, horny adventure they brag about. Women get a diagnosis and shame.

Meanwhile, I’m almost fifty years old, trying to live however the fuck I want, writing a column with one of the most sexually fearless women I know, and somehow I’m still over here having a Mormon shame spiral because the world now knows I drove three hours to hook up with a guy in a band almost twenty years younger than me.

I’m realizing the shame spiral embarrasses me more than the sex does.

So fuck the guy in the band. At this point, he’s basically the lab rat who can be released back into the wild. I want to interrogate the shame.

Was the shame coming from what you wrote? Was it Mormonism, still teaching me that there is something degrading about a woman wanting sex on terms that don’t look respectable or reciprocal from the outside? Or did the orgasm accounting take something I wasn’t ashamed of and put it inside a story where I suddenly looked desperate?

I genuinely don’t know. I suspect it’s some combination of all three.

But there’s a version of me I’m becoming who wants to say: “Yeah. I drove three hours and gave a guy a blowjob because I wanted to. If you feel some kind of way about that, I probably don’t need you in my life.” I like that version of me. And Rebecca, you’re helping me become her.

I wasn’t ready to put that particular detail in print. Freedom has to include deciding what belongs to me and what I’m ready to give away. But now I’m wondering how often I’ve called something private when what I really meant was shameful. Am I protecting something because it belongs to me, or hiding it because I’m ashamed? 

Strip away the shame, and the story gets a lot simpler. I want the version of this story men have always gotten. You’re fucking right. I hooked up with a guy in a band almost twenty years younger than me. High five. Moving on. No shame spiral. No endless analysis of what it says about my self-worth. Just a dumb, horny adventure I had because I wanted to have it.

You looked at that Sunday and saw inequity. I looked at it and saw myself wanting something and letting myself have it without needing it to become anything else. It felt like fighting the old Mormon instructions. You wanted to protect me from giving too much of myself to a man who hadn’t earned it, but I wanted the freedom to decide that what I gave wasn’t something he had taken from me. You were trying to protect my power while I was trying to tell you what having power felt like to me.

That doesn’t make your concern wrong. Women have spent centuries doing emotional, domestic, sexual, and physical labor for men and calling it love. You are right to interrogate that. Always. I desperately need women in my life who will look me in the eye and say, “Monica, what the fuck are you doing?”

But I also need them to leave room for my answer.

Because there is a difference between saying, “I look at what happened to you and I see inequity,” and saying, “What happened to you was desperation, regardless of how you understand it.”

One invites me into the conversation. The other hands me a conclusion. And I don’t want Girl on Girl to be a place where the argument is ever over.

I don’t want us replacing one set of commandments for women with another set stamped LIBERATION across the top. I don’t want either of us telling women that sleeping with a guy is feminist or not sleeping with a guy is feminist. That driving three hours is empowered or staying home is empowered. That giving a blowjob is liberation or evidence of our own abandonment.

I want us to ask harder questions than that. What did you want? Why did you want it? What did it cost you? Would you choose it again? Did you disappear? Did you feel more like yourself?

Let’s compare notes without deciding our answers have to be everyone else’s. To argue and question and weigh them against the women we are and the lives that made us. 

Rebecca, if I’m going to do that with anyone, I want to do it with you.

I love you,

Mx