Ten Men (eBook)

BEFORE THE TEN

At ten years old, I pulled up my jeans and walked away from my first sexual experience.

It felt like everything in my head had been rearranged. One moment, the boy down the street was asking me to be his girlfriend. The next, we were crouching in the bushes at the bottom of a field, and he told me to touch his penis. ‘This is what girlfriends do,’ he told me.

I tried to get out of it, insisting again and again that I didn’t want to.

‘Why?’ he asked.

I scrambled around for an answer. For some reason, ‘I don’t want to’ didn’t seem to be enough.

‘Well, what if someone sees?’ I shrugged.

‘They won’t, I promise. No one can see us here.’ His tone turned urgent. Dismissive. ‘Come on.’

I continued to shake my head, but he refused to take ‘no’ for an answer. After a few minutes, I decided that I had no choice – I’d do what he asked and get it over with. This turned out to be something close to oral sex. Then he asked me to pull down my trousers and underwear so that he could repeat the act on me.

Buttoning my jeans afterwards, I felt the worst feeling I’d ever felt. The ground beneath my trainers felt strangely unsteady, the trees leaning at funny angles all the way home.

When I got back to my bedroom, every stuffed animal and doll seemed to know what I’d done. How I’d ruined myself with no return. Their faces, once so cheering, now seemed to look away. Getting into bed, I tried to forget it with immediate effect.

But I couldn’t. Not entirely. And, without really realising it, I became obsessed with the idea of ‘purity’ from that day onwards, clutching at mine like a flimsy cardigan the wind was trying to pull away. During the transition from pre-teen to teenager, then teenager to young adult, I grimaced at the thought of kissing strangers and one-night stands, thinking that this represented resilience and lofty morals. Some feminist streak in the face of the hyper-sexualisation of women. I would never be like that, I told myself. I’m not that kind of girl.

The actual source of my disdain was fear, confusion and, above all, shame.

As I entered my early twenties, I began to cotton on to the fact that this rigid attitude was rooted in guilt and anxiety. Finally, I came to terms with the fact that something bad had happened to me years ago. Something which was wrong and that shouldn’t have happened. Most importantly, I understood that it was something I no longer needed to feel ashamed of or push down or ignore. I didn’t need to bury it. The shame wasn’t mine to bear.

I finally realised that the experience had made me sex-averse not, as I once thought, because I was principled, but because I was traumatised.

Moving through this trauma was like walking through mud, each step sinking a little deeper than I had anticipated. The epiphany came, at first, like a light bulb moment; a switch flipped inside my head. I’d been watching a documentary about sexual assault survivors, and unexpectedly found myself relating to their experiences. To the misplaced guilt they felt; to the way they retreated from loved ones; to the black hole of misery that threatened to swallow them up. Feelings of shame had been tormenting me for years, and in the space of a few minutes they dissipated. I realised that, like those people, I had nothing to be ashamed of. I had done nothing wrong. I didn’t need to keep the assault a secret anymore.

So I told people close to me, and the relief was incredible. The more I processed, the lighter I felt. In those first few months, sex gradually stopped being a frightening, impure thing. Unfortunately I couldn’t afford therapy, but through conversations and self-reflection, I was able to separate sex and shame, sex and fear, sex and secrecy, and started to look at it anew. Far from an ominous threat, sex began to morph into an exciting, tantalising prospect. I had to take it day by day, but as the months passed I felt secure in my newfound attitude.

2018 ended, and as 2019 began, I had one goal, one New Year’s resolution: to stop being so precious about who I had sex with. I decided to have sex with as many people as I wanted to. To taste different mouths; to feel different bodies. There would be no more clutching of the pearls.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), it was during this time that I started binge-watching Sex and the City. Samantha became my shining example, with her upturned nose and flicked blonde hair; her hand around a man’s tie as she pulled him inside. As Samantha declares in one of her most iconic speeches, I told myself that, from now on, I would blow whomever I chose.

No more guilt. No more self-loathing. No more self-limitation.

It was quite the baptism of fire. I’d only lost my virginity two years prior, and I’d felt very differently about sex back then.

There had been plenty of tension building up to the night Matt and I slept together (and I finally lost my virginity). Eight years of it, in fact.

I met Matt when I was in Year Nine at school (aged fourteen), locking eyes with him on the other side of the common room. Glancing down at my hot-pink iPod, I quietly filed away his thick, dark curls and yellow-brown eyes, eventually mentioning him to a friend. I tried to sound casual, but she saw right through me.

‘He has a girlfriend,’ she told me mournfully, and I shrugged off my disappointment. Oh well, I thought. That’s that!

Years later, however, I saw on Facebook that he was starting his master’s at Edinburgh University at the same time I was. Some quick sleuthing (read: stalking) also revealed that he was single. So, I dropped him a friendly, casual message, my heart in my mouth.

Ten minutes later, Matt replied.

Thus began the pointless ping-pong of messages: ‘How are you?’, ‘How’s life?’, ‘Kept in touch with anyone?’ All the questions neither party really wants the answers to, until someone finally plucks up the courage to ask the other person out. At last, Matt asked if I wanted to go to a gin bar near George Square. We spent one night at this bar, the following Friday at a restaurant, and the Thursday after that in an Old Town pub.

He didn’t kiss or touch me on any of these dates. But every time I took the bus home, silently concluding that our relationship was platonic, he messaged and asked me out again. For our fourth date, he suggested that we go to an Italian restaurant a stone’s throw away from his flat.

We could go back to mine and watch a movie afterwards, he added. I could hear the tentativeness in his voice, even over text.

Go back and watch a movie? I repeated to myself, raising my eyebrows as I looked down at my phone. I may have been a virgin, but I knew what that meant.

A week later, we talked about our friends and childhoods over a carbonara, attempting a breeziness which felt forced. I revealed my own anxiety by dropping a knife on the floor with an almighty clang, streaking pasta sauce across a waiter’s shoe. He revealed his when the same waiter asked him to tap his card and he tossed it between his hands, eventually dropping it into his lap. The poor man must have been glad to see us go.

When Matt and I finally left the restaurant, it was with a shared nervous energy that was hard to ignore. It hummed beneath our tipsy conversation and quick, sidelong looks.

‘This is a nice area,’ I said mildly.

‘Yeah. Very nice,’ he told the pavement. ‘No complaints here.’

‘Quite far from campus, I suppose?’

‘Yeah, true. There’s the bus, though.’ Matt jabbed a thumb in a vague direction. ‘The 21?’

‘Oh, yeah. I know it. I think I’ve been on it once. Can’t remember why.’

As we climbed the steps to his stone-grey townhouse, my nerves reached a fever pitch. Did I tell him I was a virgin? I wondered. Could I, at the age of 22, or would he run a mile? Maybe he wouldn’t be able to tell. If that was the case, I’d say nothing, I decided, my mouth a straight line.

Heaving open the door, Matt let us in, the sound of our footsteps bouncing around the high ceilings inside.

‘Oh, wow. Big in here,’ I observed, craning my neck. With a nod, he led me up a set of tiled stairs, rooting around for his key.

His face lit up when he finally found it.

‘In we go!’ Matt exclaimed, holding the key up proudly. I glanced at the back of his head as he unlocked the door, registering how enthusiastic he sounded. Strained, almost.

God, my heart was straining too – desperate to spring out of my chest and patter down the hall. Stepping over the threshold into a boy’s flat for the very first time, I looked around the cavernous hallway. More high ceilings, the walls a dull grey; white mouldings at each corner. A muddy bike leant against the wall, and I could hear faint rumblings of a movie from a flatmate’s bedroom. This had probably been nice once, I thought. Fancy and Georgian with a piano tinkling away in the living room. It was so studenty now, ghosts probably didn’t bother haunting it. The whiskey bottle line-up along the floor was too depressing.

‘That’s my room, go on in.’ Matt pointed to a door at the end of the hall. ‘I’ll be in in a second.’

Drifting into his bedroom, I took stock of the red candles and white tea lights scattered across his desk and...