A story that’s about much more than just sex.
Hey, I didn’t say it wasn’t about sex at all, y’know. Onwards.
I was first inspired to write this piece when a 19-year-old woman I used to wait tables with asked me: “Bridget, have you ever regretted having sex with a man?”
I laughed. “Yeah. All of them.”
That’s not entirely true. There was my first love in high school. And my first husband. But if I’m honest with myself, of the dozens of men I’ve been with (at least the ones I remember), I can only think of a handful I don’t regret. The rest I would put in the category of “casual,” which I would define as sex that is either meaningless or mediocre (or both). If I get really honest with myself, I’d say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized. And worthless.
I wouldn’t have said that at the time, though. At the time, I would have told you I was “liberated” even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hook-up didn’t call me back. At the time, I would have said one-night stands made me feel “emboldened.” But in reality, I was using sex like a drug; trying unsuccessfully to fill a hole inside me with men. (Pun intended.)
I know regretting most of my sexual encounters is not something a sex-positive feminist who used to write a column for Playboy is supposed to admit. And for years, I didn’t. Let me be clear, being a “slut” and sleeping with a lot of men is not the only behavior I regret. Even more damaging was what I told myself in order to justify the fact that I was disposable to these men: I told myself I didn’t care.
I didn’t care when a man ghosted me. I didn’t care when he left in the middle of the night or hinted that he wanted me to leave. The walks of shame. The blackouts. The anxiety.
The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empowered.
I lost my virginity at 17 to my boss at a restaurant where I worked. And a year later, I experienced my first sexual trauma. I felt damaged and dirty and I blamed myself. Everyone responds differently to these situations—I dealt with the overwhelming shame by becoming hyper-sexual and promiscuous.
The Culture was right there to pick me up and dust me off. I doubled down on being a proud slut and internalized the biggest and most damaging lie: that loveless sex is empowering. I basked in the girl-power glow of that delusion for decades, weaponizing my sexuality while convincing myself I was full of the divine feminine.
I was full of shit.
I told myself that because I could seduce a man, I was powerful. But as Perry says in her book, “…women can all too easily fail to recognize that being desired is not the same thing as being held in high esteem.” Deep down inside, I knew that to be the case. But as a defense mechanism, I crafted a man-eater persona. My mantras were rigid.
- You can either have a career or a relationship—but you can’t have both.
- Intimacy is creepy.
- Motherhood and children are a trap.
- Sex is only about power.
And there it is, right there in the above list, clear as crystal for anyone with eyes to see: this regretful lass wasn’t victimized, traumatized, and misled by sex. No, at the end of the day t’was Leftist cant that led her astray, manipulated and took advantage of her, and robbed her of both her dignity and her self-respect.
Those four bullet-points she cites are indeed a rigid mantra, but it isn’t one original to her, and she is by no means unique in having adopted it. Each one of those four lies long predated her attainment of the age of sexual majority; they were lurking in the proverbial “grey areas” of a sabotaged moral code just waiting for her to wander by, a trap baited and set by the Left generations before so as to ensnare impressionable, vulnerable young naifs such as herself.
Update! Meant to include this part, and almost forgot it.
I’m not speaking for all women. I know many women with a solid sense of self who happily have loveless sex. This piece won’t make them defensive. But a lot of women will read this and bristle, just like I did, when I used to read something that pushed back on the lie I’d built my entire identity around.
Or maybe you’re a trans or nonbinary person reading this, thinking “What quaint ideas about gender and sex this old trad con has.” And to that I’ll say, it makes sense to me that the generation of young women who have experienced and borne witness to some of the worst side-effects of unyoking sex from consequence and love that Perry meticulously outlines in her book, “rough sex, hook-up culture, and ubiquitous porn”—would take a look around and decide:
I’d rather be a man. Or more accurately, I’d rather not be a woman.
But maybe it’s the inevitable conclusion to the sexual revolution. Today’s youth are being fed an even more dangerous lie than the one that I was fed about loveless sex. I was told sex doesn’t matter. They’re being told biology doesn’t matter.
This is a tragedy.
No, it’s a crime—an abomination, an act of pure, unleavened evil, that’s what it is.
(Via Ed Driscoll)
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And vice-versa, cupcake. They were “just filling a hole” for you. You’re taking some responsibility for your past actions but don’t even think of playing the victim card.
Casual Slut(s): FIFY. YW.
The sexual revolution (sic) didn’t just mess women up. There is a reason the Bible says one man one woman until death. Yea there was polygamy but it always ended bad.
Not just polygamy, but polyandry as well!