Read Online Sex Object by Jessica Valenti - Free Book Online Page A

troubled girl, he called her—who had made up lies about him.
    I was trying to help her, to tutor her! he said. But because she knew she would fail the class anyway, this is what she said. She is very troubled.
    I felt older and important that he was confiding in us, and it never occurred to me that perhaps a teacher should not be discussing the sexual harassment allegations against him with a sixteen-year-old student. That this in itself was a violation of boundaries escaped me. Because we were so smart . So we just nodded our heads in agreement.
    Yes, she was clearly very troubled.
    STUYVESANT’S BUILDING IN TRIBECA WAS BRAND-NEW WHEN I started high school—ten floors of never-before-used hallways and lockers, classrooms and labs. We walked across a bridge that hung over the West Side Highway to get into the building, on the second floor. Everything was pristine but the escalators were always breaking.
    There was a hallway on the third floor of my school where friends and I would meet when cutting class. Chris was probably the only other student there as much as I was. He kept a pillow in his locker and lay out on the floor, his baggy jeans riding upat the ankle to show off neon socks. He rode a skateboard and carried around a boom box and had huge blue eyes. We joked that we were Cliff and Norm, the regulars.
    One night at a friend’s house party in Brooklyn I watched from an upstairs window as my friend—yet another dancer—performed ballet moves on the sidewalk and Chris helped her, holding her hand. I tried to find a place to sleep, wandering from one room to the next, but none were empty. So I drank a forty-ounce of Olde English and agreed to go to the basement with a short blond guy named Mick. We were both wearing V-neck white shirts. The basement floor was cold, and Mick kept trying to put his hands down my pants. You don’t even like me, I told him. He assured me I was “mad cool.”
    Mick kept pressing my breasts together with his hands, which I thought was strange but would make for a good story for my friends later. It took a few times of his doing this, then his putting my hands on my own breasts, before I realized he wanted to put his dick in between my breasts as I held them together. I laughed at him. Are you fucking serious? I asked. I gave him a hand job instead.
    As he was finishing he picked up a white shirt off the floor, came in it, and handed it to me.
    Sorry, I said. That was your shirt . A look of disgust came over his face as I picked up my clean V-neck and walked up the stairs. Later that night he hooked up with our host’s younger sister’s friend. My friends and I laughed about how he was able to pull it off while wearing a shirt covered in his own jizz.
    A few months later, after Chris and my dancer friend broke up, I hooked up with him during a party at my house. The light was starting to shine through the windows and almost everyone was asleep or trying to be. We were lying next to each other, in a room where there were five or ten other people sleeping. We made out and I gave him a hand job—surprised to find he was uncircumcised—and wrote in my diary the morning after: “I am the woman. I am so fucking fly.”
    He went on to date someone else, breaking my heart, but a few years later I slept with him and continued to sleep with him on and off for a few years whenever the two of us were between relationships or sometimes even if we weren’t. I would hang out and watch him DJ at a terrible bar that let underage drinkers in with abandon until he was done, when the bar closed, and would drive back to his basement apartment in Brooklyn to have sex. He told me he thought about fucking me doggy style when he masturbated and one morning when he drove me home to Queens he stuck his hand down my pants and put a finger inside— I want to think about you being wet on the way back home— so it’s hard to be too sad about how that