Read Online Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture by Chelsea Cain - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Chelsea Cain
Tags: United States, Fiction, General, Social Science, History, Literary Criticism, Girls, 20th Century, American, Biography, Essay/s, Literary Collections, Social History, Social History - 1960-1970, 1960-1970, Hippies - United States, United States - History - 1961-1969, Hippies, Girls - United States - History - 20th Century, Girls - United States
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bisexual, but in truth, I’m asexual. Celibate. Scared even to flirt. Because flirting leads to sex—inevitably, mandatorily, to sex. So I don’t even start. Everyone I know is safely partnered up.
Deep down inside I am conservative. I don’t like multiple lovers, I only want to sleep with one person. I pretended to separate sex from love, but I was only fooling (and abusing) myself. Sex was love for me—a substitute love—not sport, not just fun. Love my body, love me. Simple, easy. Not.
I have a hard time imagining someone really loving me unless I fuck her into the ground. As if sexual prowess ensures love or even monogamy. The well-trained concubine.
Now I am scared of anything sexual, afraid I can’t control myself, that I’ll eke back into my yay-saying ways. I’m afraid to do anything other than write and fantasize.
But I’m lonely. Lonely for love, for companionship, for touch. My body betrays me by craving caresses, coveting kisses, melting under hugs. I am a sensual being. All the ugly, baggy clothes in the world won’t stop my body from responding to smells, sounds, touches, tastes. My sex drive rears its ugly head frequently. Repression only works for so long. Eruption is imminent.
Eventually I’ll have to reconcile this with the sex abuse. Every month (probably hormonal) I get horny, masturbate, then feel extraordinarily degraded and ashamed. Bad.
Not good.
I’ve taken to writing violent pornography which offends my feminist sensibilities, but for some reason ( Bye-Bye Blackbird? ) keeps coming up. I read porn too, and it shames me.
Ten thousand dollars in therapy bills later, the love I gained through sex, or free love, is nonexistent.
The cost of ‘free’ love? Self-esteem. Happiness.
A few things have changed. The Beatles are still gods, but my mother has had plastic surgery. And I am slowly healing from my parents’ fling with free love. I guess the pendulum had to swing to the other extreme for me to achieve balance. I’m learning that not everything is black or white. I can grab the grays and define them. I just hope I recognize the happy medium when it hits.
When I come out of my promiscuity backlash, my own little frigid movement, I hope to feel safe and powerful and sexual. Something I can almost imagine. But not quite.
I am learning that I am free to choose. I can choose whom to kiss, whom to embrace, whom to love. Just because someone likes the looks of me doesn’t mean I have to jump in the sack. I can decide how it’s going to go. And it’s not an all or nothing proposition. I can explore a few feet down that path, then stop and turn around.
My parents, happy practitioners of free love, didn’t teach me safety, or boundaries. But I am teaching myself these things. Out of love—the real stuff.
Carin Clevidence
Seeing Belize
W hen they fished the dead man out of the Rio Hondo we were surprised that he was yellow. One of the fishermen from the village saw him floating in the river; by the time they brought him to shore, at the far end of San Antonio where the houses gave way to jungle, most of the village had turned out to look. My mother, the only one with a camera, was asked to photograph the body. My little sister Shelly and I tagged along, but at the edge of the field we hung back, peering out from behind a banana tree. The man was naked. He’d died from machete wounds to the groin, a fact we learned much later. The men from the village carried the body past us on a sheet of canvas. He had been in the river long enough for the water to bleach him yellow. ‘Look at his ears,’ Shelly whispered. His ears were nearly gone, chewed away like his nose and his fingertips by the same fish that nibbled our feet when we played in the shallows.
They buried the yellow man in my uncle’s experimental field. Shelly and I had helped to plant corn there with our cousins, one of us making a hole with a stake, the other following behind and dropping in the kernels. Now the
Deep down inside I am conservative. I don’t like multiple lovers, I only want to sleep with one person. I pretended to separate sex from love, but I was only fooling (and abusing) myself. Sex was love for me—a substitute love—not sport, not just fun. Love my body, love me. Simple, easy. Not.
I have a hard time imagining someone really loving me unless I fuck her into the ground. As if sexual prowess ensures love or even monogamy. The well-trained concubine.
Now I am scared of anything sexual, afraid I can’t control myself, that I’ll eke back into my yay-saying ways. I’m afraid to do anything other than write and fantasize.
But I’m lonely. Lonely for love, for companionship, for touch. My body betrays me by craving caresses, coveting kisses, melting under hugs. I am a sensual being. All the ugly, baggy clothes in the world won’t stop my body from responding to smells, sounds, touches, tastes. My sex drive rears its ugly head frequently. Repression only works for so long. Eruption is imminent.
Eventually I’ll have to reconcile this with the sex abuse. Every month (probably hormonal) I get horny, masturbate, then feel extraordinarily degraded and ashamed. Bad.
Not good.
I’ve taken to writing violent pornography which offends my feminist sensibilities, but for some reason ( Bye-Bye Blackbird? ) keeps coming up. I read porn too, and it shames me.
Ten thousand dollars in therapy bills later, the love I gained through sex, or free love, is nonexistent.
The cost of ‘free’ love? Self-esteem. Happiness.
A few things have changed. The Beatles are still gods, but my mother has had plastic surgery. And I am slowly healing from my parents’ fling with free love. I guess the pendulum had to swing to the other extreme for me to achieve balance. I’m learning that not everything is black or white. I can grab the grays and define them. I just hope I recognize the happy medium when it hits.
When I come out of my promiscuity backlash, my own little frigid movement, I hope to feel safe and powerful and sexual. Something I can almost imagine. But not quite.
I am learning that I am free to choose. I can choose whom to kiss, whom to embrace, whom to love. Just because someone likes the looks of me doesn’t mean I have to jump in the sack. I can decide how it’s going to go. And it’s not an all or nothing proposition. I can explore a few feet down that path, then stop and turn around.
My parents, happy practitioners of free love, didn’t teach me safety, or boundaries. But I am teaching myself these things. Out of love—the real stuff.
Carin Clevidence
Seeing Belize
W hen they fished the dead man out of the Rio Hondo we were surprised that he was yellow. One of the fishermen from the village saw him floating in the river; by the time they brought him to shore, at the far end of San Antonio where the houses gave way to jungle, most of the village had turned out to look. My mother, the only one with a camera, was asked to photograph the body. My little sister Shelly and I tagged along, but at the edge of the field we hung back, peering out from behind a banana tree. The man was naked. He’d died from machete wounds to the groin, a fact we learned much later. The men from the village carried the body past us on a sheet of canvas. He had been in the river long enough for the water to bleach him yellow. ‘Look at his ears,’ Shelly whispered. His ears were nearly gone, chewed away like his nose and his fingertips by the same fish that nibbled our feet when we played in the shallows.
They buried the yellow man in my uncle’s experimental field. Shelly and I had helped to plant corn there with our cousins, one of us making a hole with a stake, the other following behind and dropping in the kernels. Now the
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