the habit of being

Sometimes I am still surprised by how smutty (erotic?) my writing tends to be. I wrote pages and pages on my first kiss and I just never really changed. The loss of my virginity spawned a piece I’d think of as my best for years. My travel journals are full of accounts - sex under the needle tree in Arizona, sex under the overpass in El Paso, under the train tracks in St. Louis, in storm after storm after storm. With everything that was going on in my life then, and not even having an audience to seduce, I still wrote frequently about sex. I make all sorts of resolutions not to write this stuff anymore, but hardly ever succeed for long. Sometimes I wonder if it’s some sort of addiction.

An old friend/lover recently complained to me about discovering that some of his ex-girlfriends kept online slutumentaries . He was shocked and appalled. I tell myself he didn’t mean me - I was never a girlfriend afterall - and he probably didn’t mean me, but what’s the difference between me and some trashy LiveJournaller really? Diction? Is it any less gross for me - at only seventeen, only eighteen, only twenty - to be writing about what seemingly should be so private, because I make an effort to make the writing good?

When I was in college, my mother stumbled on something I had posted online, said I sounded like a jaded whore and sent me straight to a therapist. I had probably had sex five times in my whole life at that point. She thought my boyfriend had done it to me somehow, given me this sick and affected desire to sound exotic. I didn’t write anything at all for months after that. I knew that, to a degree, she was right. I was just gross.

I grew up in an online culture that embraced this grossness, this openness. Young girls posted their rape stories and gained cults of sympathetic worshippers. Sexual experience, good or bad, had a lot to do with what made someone interesting. Writing all about your sex, your abuse, your whole young fucked-up life made you real, raw, authentic, cool.

I was chatting about sadomashocism to online friends before I had come anywhere near a naked man. My budding sexuality was, quite literally, a form of online written expression for me, through years of a long distance relationship conducted primarily through instant messenger.

Most people have innate boundaries about online expression that I just don’t have. Most people have some understanding of the privacy issues involved.

People still compliment me, frequently, on my “honesty”, but I wouldn’t want my mother reading a huge portion of what I’ve written over the years, and I don’t like having to feel low about my writing, about having to make rules about what to write about, trying to figure out what makes me a word-slut and what’s pulp non-fiction and what’s okay.

It’s not even so much that I’m worried about what other people might think of me. If I weren’t so sure that my writing on this is at least partially motivated by some odd pride I have in my sexual experience and ability, then it probably wouldn’t bother me so much. I don’t think the average person would think of hitting the 40’s in the purity test before hitting legal drinking age as a major accomplishment. It might not be proper by any definition of the word, but I seriously do.

And maybe that makes me adventurous and uninhibited and liberated and Comfortable With My Sexuality. But maybe it just makes me kindof slutty and gross. And maybe my Writing Self, always so concerned with beauty and blah and blah, doesn’t want to acknowledge that sometimes, and it gets me really concerned.