Initiation.

Faulty conditioning.

“It wouldn’t fit,” Sadie typed into the group chat one day in our junior year of college. The three of us had kept this particular group chat going since the 8th grade. 

“What does that even mean?” Molly replied first. I waited because I was equally confused. 

“I mean he tried to put it in and it didn’t fit.”

“Don’t they say ‘lay back and think of England’ for a reason? Does he not understand anatomy?” I asked. I didn’t bring up the fact that even I didn’t understand female anatomy and even though the very thought of ever having sex sent me rigid, I figured so long as you master the art of dissociation you were in the clear. But if even the man didn’t know what was going on? Never crossed my mind. 

“Hurt too much. James and I are going to look up some proper sex education videos on YouTube. Nothing graphic, just informative.”

Around a week later, Sadie messaged in the group chat again. 

“It fit!” 

“Congrats? I think?” I said.

“Now that I’ve done it, I don’t get what all the hype is about,” Sadie replied. 

“Never believe the hype,” Molly said. 

Sadie and James are getting married this October. 

Throughout my middle, high school, and college years, it was my understanding that sex was for men. Porn was for men. Masturbation was for men. I did not know women had the capacity to feel sexual pleasure. Like heels, piercings, and meticulously done hair, I thought sex for women meant pain in exchange for male approval and societal security. I didn’t think this because I was stupid. I thought this because that is exactly how it was always described. For the very same reason, I thought the same when it came to dating.

For me, men and boys were always offputting. Even the interesting ones only remained that way from a distance like popular actors, musicians, athletes, or fictional characters. And for all the girls and later women around me complained about the male species as a whole, I believed these feelings to be mutually held between us - the short relationships that would happen during high school a symptom of wanting to mimic what they had seen adults do long before the age marriage would even become a consideration. 

Coming of age in the era of marriage equality debates, sexual orientation in and of itself wasn’t a topic of conversation amongst my peers save for the art kids who collectively decided they were bisexual because they watched too much Glee. At the boy’s school, “gay” was commonly used as an insult but at the girl's school, it was met with eye rolling because it was considered dumb to use that word in such a way. Tribal lines were still largely drawn around who you tended to get along with which tended to line up with what kind of music you liked which had a big impact on what clothes you’d wear… which didn’t mean a whole lot in a school with uniforms. Pride flags had yet to become accessories even amongst the known lesbians (none of whom were the art kids). 

As a teenager, the far-off concept of marriage, sex, and childbirth (both on their own and in that order) was decidedly unpleasant. In the rare times I’d dwell on it, I likened my peers and I to a field of flowers where we’d be torn from the ground one by one to never see each other again, slowly wilting isolated in a vase in some man’s house until we died. The benefits to us were taxes, overall finances, and, if you were lucky, a man who was actually enjoyable to speak with when he wasn’t forcing himself inside your body.

In the sheer magnitude of its perceived inevitability, it lacked any notion of intimacy. I thought any attempts to paint this as an intimate scenario were simply a coping mechanism to continue the systemic domestication of women. And because I didn’t want to violate the bodies of my friends either (not like I knew what sex between two women even consisted of, I just knew that sex - and sexuality by extension - was violence), questions of my own sexual orientation status were brief. In a scenario presented to me where I had to align myself with a type of relationship I wanted no part in, I was straight because I’d rather be destroyed by a man than hurt my friends. And as long as my stem was covered with enough thorns, no man would take me. 

“You’re embarrassing me!” my sister yelled at me after I’d planted my feet and burst into tears in the mall begging not to be taken into Victoria’s Secret to get my first bra. 

“A boy will change you someday,” my grandmother told me later in middle school, frowning at the baggy t-shirt and cargo pants my father had dropped me off in. “You’ll want to be pretty.”

“I’m tellin’ you, you’re gonna have to pay a man to take her off your hands,” an uncle said to the table on Thanksgiving, continuing a by then long-running family joke. He leaned over into my space. “And he’ll still have to beat you.” 

“You’re too old for this,” my father said angrily at my sister’s law school graduation reception after I told him to stop putting his hand on my lower back to guide me around. “What’s wrong with you?” 

Jenny sits at the table in our hotel room vigorously filing down her new set of fake nails trying to formulate her next response. She thinks our fellow crew member has been flirting with her. She doesn’t like how he keeps touching her even when she tells him not to. She does like the attention he gives her though. 

“I’m not like you, Anna. I have needs.” Jenny and I had never explicitly spoken about sex before but I figured that’s what she was alluding to then.

“You just said you don’t like it when he touches you,” I said. 

“I don’t. But I like feeling taken care of. He asks about my day, saves me food, and is always finding things I definitely would’ve left behind if he hadn’t double checked for me.”

“And I don’t do any of that for you? I’d actually argue our relationship consists of a whole lot more and you’re not dating me.” 

She looks at me like I should know better. After calling me for help upon walking out on her ex-fiancee in the middle of the night less than a year prior, I thought she knew better. 

“There must be an issue in your brain,” my grad school roommate pondered after probing me about my personal life. “Like with hormones. Or the way it’s wired. Not sending any signals to your body.” If I were younger, in that moment I would’ve felt like a sideshow. 

“I’ve been thinking maybe you should look into getting an autism diagnosis,” my mother said to me on a long car ride to the Outer Banks. “You know, just for peace of mind.”

“My mind is quite peaceful,” I said. “Like laying in a field of flowers on a warm spring day.”

I sit in the small, fenced-in garden behind Molly’s house with a glass of water. I have a gut feeling that it is the last time I’ll ever sit out there. She’s selling the house, quitting her job, and switching to online school to move to the desert with her boyfriend. Her only regret is she’ll need to give up rowing, her favorite pastime around which she has enjoyed the company of a community of women for several years. She’s not angry when she speaks to me after I point out my objections. If anything, she was amused. 

“I don’t expect you to understand but this is normal, it’s happening, and I’d like you to be happy for me.”