*Featured Artwork: “MeToo” by Elizabeth Casidy
Under the weight of his hand, my head squirms in frigid water. We’re behind my best friend’s cabin at the end of a dirt road tucked next to a Rocky Mountain. No one will rescue me. I giggle, thinking this must be a joke. I pull my head up, gasping for air, feeling a blend of warm tears and frozen river pour down my face. He shoves himself into me. I gag.
He’s always drunk, raging, breaking bottles over his head, beating himself up when he’s not beating up girls around him. His hand forces my head back into the water. I can’t breathe. I should just submit so I don’t have to deal with him anymore. I’m not the only one. All the girls I know have been fondled in their half-drunken sleep or abandoned in the woods after refusing to suck dick.
There’s something wrong with the boys in this town. Maybe their fathers were this way. Maybe their fathers beat up their mothers. Maybe their lopsided strength crushes all gentleness inside them. Maybe they’ve never been able to feel anything because the world believes they aren’t capable of feeling. I want them to cry. I want them to weep. I hope they open up to me, but they never do. They think vulnerability is a disease.
We avoid their touch by pissing our pants on purpose. Boys don’t want to fondle girls who piss their pants. Fucking babies. We hide. We find a way out of the woods, even if it means getting lost, or falling off a cliff. We’ll die running away from them. Or we stay and let them touch us because we don’t want to walk home in the cold.
It becomes a thing, boys picking us up, driving us around in monster trucks, stopping for an hour here and there in the woods, or in basements, in cheap hotel rooms, in laundromats. We suck dicks and when we aren’t sucking dicks we practice on bottles. We build a tolerance for booze and weed and the boys we secretly hate. We suck dicks and blow smoke. We suck dicks and watch mean man faces turn to soothed boy faces. We suck dicks because we’re bored. We suck dicks because we’re drunk. We suck dicks because we think it’s what we are supposed to do. We suck dicks because we hate what we look like and what we haven’t become.
It’s the Fourth of July. I’m going to be a freshman in high school. I’m in the process of graduating from girl to lady. I want it to happen so I can say I’ve done it. My best friends are a year younger than I am and they’ve already lost their virginity. They were twelve when it happened to them. I’m fourteen and it still hasn’t happened. They know much more than I know. They blow smoke rings and wear clothes that show off little girl bodies in big girl ways. Their parents don’t harass them about how late they are when they return home. Their parents don’t ask them anything. They don’t have to sneak around and lie like I do.
The former quarterback of the high school football team just graduated. His girlfriend was homecoming queen. She’s all blond and smiles in her cheerleader skirt and feels innocent with the cross around her neck, even when he touches her premarital pubis. She trusts that Jesus loves her and thinks her boyfriend might love her, but she doesn’t know her boyfriend is out here in the woods with me, sticking his tongue down the back of my throat. I’ve never made out with a boy this old. The stubble on his face feels fatherly. She doesn’t know about him ripping down my pants and shoving his rough fingers inside me, or the boys who stand a few feet away, watching as he smashes me up against a blue spruce tree, as he pulls down his pants and sticks his dick in my mouth until I choke, spitting his semen onto a thin layer of pine needles below. She doesn’t know about him walking away with his friends, high fives all around. She doesn’t know that I’m left alone with the tree.
Eventually he comes back, and maybe she knows this, maybe she’s the reason he does this. He comes back because maybe he has a fraction of a conscience after all, or maybe he realizes that he’ll lose his football scholarship if I tell anyone about what he’s done. But I never will. I take pride in this, him coming back instead of leaving me there. I assume there’s something good inside him after all and he’s decided to reveal this goodness to me. He throws me into the back of his truck and pushes me out on a quiet corner when we get back into town.
I think this is important – I think the concept of blow jobs, now that I am in my 50’s, strikes me as violent. What was sold as a tool of pleasing now has a dominating quality in my mind. By the way, it’s still an early request in relationships, regardless of your age. Ugh, I know that in some minds this makes me a prude. In my mind, it’s about time we talked about a thing that has little benefit for a woman, the thing that makes us feel somehow used.
Thanks for your writing – your honesty – It’s time to talk about this crap.