galimatias.

9 versions of Morning on the Seine, by Claude Oscar Monet

i want to see a girl in her mid twenties who has never been kissed

i want to see a girl who is confused because she has literally no experience

a girl that has panic attacks when she thinks of sex and cant stop thinking about what kissing is like while also being terrified of it

a girl who cant figure out her sexuality because she’s never gotten to try

a girl who self destructs because shes terrified of how bigger her baggage gets with age

i’m sick of seeing woman in tv and movies who date and have sex and still have relationship hangups, not because that doesnt exist but because i cant relate to those women

i want to turn on the tv and see a 25 year old woman who has never been with anyone, was genuinely not looked at for a long time and has become terrified of attention, who’s anxiety cheats them out of dating, who greets every birthday with this feeling of dread in the pit of their stomach because they’re getting older and older and it feels weirder and more wrong with every passing year

i know i’m not the only woman like this, but with the way the media is, it’s maybe the most alienating baggage i carry. everywhere i look, it’s weird that this is my experience. i feel ashamed and i feel scared that i one day have to tell a person to their face that i’m am adult who has never had a first kiss. its terrifying and consuming and confusing and awful. you start to believe it isnt meant for you - not just sex, or intimacy, but fucking love itself. because you dont turn on the tv and see people like you. “unlucky in love” means slightly clumsy and loud on dates and fear of commitment. its a quirky girl who probably has had sex with multiple people and just ~cant figure it out~!!!!!

i want a girl who feels so alone because she literally always has been

But may I recommend @rachelhills‘ The Sex Myth? It’s… not the tightest piece of cultural theory work out there, but what it has is a bunch of first-person accounts threaded together with its cultural criticism. 

Weaknesses: for a book about hypersexual culture, has a startling lack of engagement with asexuality. Keeps mentioning polyamory and kink as things that exist and are different from the kinda “adventurous but not TOO raunchy” aspirational cosmo-style sex life, but only has i think one interviewee from either circle. Good secondary resources on mainstream culture, masculinity, feminity, etc, but no secondary reading on any of those three (which seems odd to me: all three of asexuals, polyamorists and kinksters do a lot of thinking about de-centring sex, and, as Hills’ one poly interviewee points out, the latter two often have far less sex than people expect).  Keeps using the phrase “lifestyle kink” to refer to cosmo and fluffy handcuffs, apparently unaware that’s a term for the very opposite end of the spectrum among kinksters.

BUT. For all that, I think I needed this book five years ago. Not, oddly enough, before I started having sex, but around the point where I elected* to stop. I had been pretty happy with myself as a virgin, but had no way of conceptualising a person who had had sex but was not currently sexually active. Spent far too long thinking that I was failing somehow, had been broken, etc, by not following up my first sexual relationship with more in short order.