Before my first meaningful sexual encounter with a boy, I called one of my best friends across the country. Calling her at her East Coast liberal arts school felt like serenity as I walked past the Social Sciences Building, lost and exhausted in the first month of my freshman year at UC Berkeley.
I was coming from the loving arms of lesbianism. Throughout high school, I’d only dated non-men and consequently identified as a lesbian. That is, until I met one boy the weekend before I left for college, who I now had to make this phone call about before he visited, feeling embarrassment through my cheeks at the utter newness I thought I had graduated from years prior.
So I called her. She was in her dorm with her roommate, and they decided to give me a joint conference. The advice was exactly as you’d expect: mostly platitudes to assuage my anxiety and very minimal practical directions. But something my friend’s roommate said stuck with me for the past two years: “He’s not even going to notice if you’re nervous. Honestly, it doesn’t even matter what you do. He’ll just be happy to be there with a hot girl.”
After I heard that, I said a quick thank you. Hung up. Burst into tears.
He’s not even going to notice if you’re nervous. This was the scariest part to me — that it was completely normal to have sex with someone who was expected to have the perceptual capacity of a toddler. In fact, his lack of awareness was supposed to be for my benefit and would help me excel, as if this were a performance and my audience were senile.
Sometime two years later, my lesbian friend asked me for hypothetical boy advice. I prattled off a list of platitudes and very little practical information before saying, “He’s just a boy. He’s just going to be happy to be there.”
Is it not absolutely terrifying that these women I loved, women I respected, were entrusting their bodies to the subhuman? Were interfacing with beings they gave less dignity to than their dogs? Was it not terrifying that I had become one of those women?
Every woman I am friends with is emotionally intelligent, sweet, articulate and beautiful. And no matter what, each and every one who dates men has had her heart shattered by the callous actions of a teenage boy. But if we ascribe agency to those boys, we acknowledge a suffering that is impossible to reconcile. No wonder we continue to soothe ourselves with the thought that we are naturally better, that they don’t know what they are doing.
“He’ll just be happy to be there” is a sentiment that is much easier to stomach than the idea that he can perceive you as you perceive him, and he still hurt you. This coping mechanism is used on a whole gamut of interpersonal evils, from a boy not remembering the color of your eyes to being sexually violent (“Boys will be boys” is perhaps the most classic form of this rhetoric). It works out wonderfully for them, shirking responsibility. And it “works out” for us — if we keep our expectations low, they can’t fail us.
But implicitly, this line of thinking devalues us, too, even if it is meant to protect us. When we place our trust in boys who we don’t view as fully fledged human beings, we imply that we deserve subpar treatment. It is dangerous. It is terrifying. And it is borderline dystopian.
Engaging in intimacy with a person who you don’t think would notice if you weren’t into it, if you wanted it to stop, a person who you unequivocally think is less empathetic than you are, is guaranteed to end catastrophically. So why do we keep putting ourselves in this position?
Because of course we do, because of course I do, because of course everyone does. But I think in this case, the reason many women make these choices is because our value is supposed to be derived from our appearances.
Imagine your friend is left by her evil, manipulative, low-commitment, high-intensity hookup (this goes across the gender spectrum). What goes in your pep talk? I’d guarantee one of the things you’d say is something like, “They’re ugly anyway.” In exchange for the other person’s lack of kindness, we comfort ourselves by asserting how much better we are in our most precious asset: our looks.
Personally, I cannot count on my fingers, toes or hairs on my head the amount of times in my life I have been consoled for my insecurities by being told, “You are so out of their league.” Being out of someone’s league is presented as a saving grace, as if one will be healed by the knowledge that their sexual commodity value is high. In this paradigm, girls are asked to ignore their feelings and relish in their value as sex objects — the most depressing consolation prize for heartbreak.
I will speak for myself in this conclusion because I’m not Carrie Bradshaw, this isn’t an advice column and I don’t have an answer to any of these questions. I didn’t write this to disregard the violence that women experience from men. Women make assumptions to keep ourselves safe, and we will continue to do so. But in this endless cycle of thinking men are beneath us, there is no winning, and there is no love.
When I gave that advice to my friend and repeated what had terrified me two years prior, I realized this line of thinking was getting me nowhere. Why would I continue to be interested in people who I didn’t even think were capable of caring about me? No amount of vanity or superiority could give me a satisfying answer to that question. By devaluing them, I was devaluing myself.
The worst realization has been that if I’m ever going to fall in love, I’m going to have to consider the other person my equal. I must have faith that they’ll notice if I’m anxious, that they aren’t just happy to be there. To get the gift of humdrum reciprocity, the daily exchange of feelings that occurs between equals, I will have to believe that everyone has the same capacity to hurt and to care. So the next time someone asks me for advice, I’ll say, “For better or for worse, he’s not just a boy. So good luck.”