/You Say Taboo, I Say I Do

As it turns out, being raised by wolves in the wilds of Vermont doesn’t work to creating taboos. Nor does it help that I was raised by a woman who hit the sexual revolution running or that she had a fast and loose relationship with her childhood faith, which was Unitarianism and therefore more a list of manners than an actual faith. Given that the role models who around me were hippies, freaks, geeks, junkies and jazz musicians, I wasn’t surrounded by models of the moral majority. Sex was something one did, apparently, and did early and often. My mom’s first major piece of advice to me was this: “It’s ok to touch yourself as long as your hands are clean.” I’ve lived by that motto; it has served me well, childhood into adulthood.

 

When I discovered to my hairs and my horror that I was freshly pubescent, I also found I'd missed the message that one was supposed to ration out one’s sexuality like water in a drought. This message continued inscrutable into my teens. It seemed to me that it was a lot more interesting to make out at a beer bash than it was to drink, and I was far more likely to suck a random cock than to wrap my lips around a bong. Sex was fun, more fun than most things were in the Green Mountains. It was also cheap, mostly because my friend stole my Ortho Novum from the drug store where she worked. And thus bored, poor, free and frisky, I was a teenage slut.

 

The wattage of my slut-bulb burned bright through college and into young adulthood. My one long-term relationship—six years—lasted so long because both my boyfriend and I took a blind eye to one another’s cheating genitalia, except for when the drama of discovery served our operatic emotions. We cheated until we could cheat no more, and then we drifted, and I fucked my way around this glittering isle of Manhattan. Slouching toward my thirties, I slept with men; I slept with women; I had one lame threesome; I fucked on tarmac, in parents' bathrooms, in dorm-room bunkbeds with roommates sleeping below. I had oral sex, anal sex, sex with ropes (albeit naively), sex with food, and sex with inanimate objects. I fucked people married, single, and some purgatory between. I felt no shame, and rarely did I feel guilt. I felt no frisson that what I was doing was somehow naughty or wrong. It was sex, and sex was sex was sex, and all of it was created more or less equal, even if not uniformly pleasurable.

 

So, no. It wasn’t my childhood that gift-wrapped my taboos, nor was it my adolescence and young adulthood; rather, it was stripping. It took sex work for me to make sex verboten.

 

Stripping is, among other things, wrapping your libido in a shiny platinum package and holding it up for others to admire. It is, of course, about a lot of other things too, things like flirting well with men you find repugnant and believing you're worth $5.00 a minute and having seriously good hair, but for the purposes of this consideration of how and when I got my taboo on, it's about auctioning off your own libido, or a facsimile thereof, over and over, night after night.

 

I coped with stripping and all the attendant unpleasantness of it by imagining myself in a land of Mattel-doll humans. All of had bodies marked not with musky declivities, dusky protuberances, smells and hair, but smooth, clean gently rising bumps. Every once in a while, I'd pull to the fact that I was sashaying in a room thick with hard-ons, and I'd feel shock. By the time I quit stripping--like my longest love relationship, my relationship with stripping lasted six years--I'd grown alienated from the things I'd want to go bump with in the night.

 

I sought solace in a boring man who liked toys shoved up his butt. It was a terrible relationship, and it lasted two years, which was about 28 months too long. But when it was over, I emerged like an erotic phoenix from its flame and found that I had desires, and those desires were strange.