I remember when I was about 12 I began to look/watch more closely at things that I found invoked a newer feeling/emotion that made me feel good (it was the good butterfly feelings in my tummy, the way my skin would tingle especially my neck and thighs). I didn’t have a vocabulary for what was going on, or why I felt this way.

I did understand about sex, where babies come from and how they are made, and my mum was straightforward about physical and physiological development during adolescence. But I couldn’t place what was going on, and because this wasn’t talked about openly in the same way that boys would talk about what was happening to them, I felt I couldn’t speak about what was going on. Especially when I began to feel *that* tingling in more personal places.

I found that, especially in the case of wanting to watch/look at boys, I wanted to be included and valued and looked at by the boys. So I continued to play sport with boys but it became the informal organised variety after school or on the weekends because it’s about that age that sport is sex-segregated where I’m from. The boys would look at me, include me, and value me when I was playing sport with them, that to me at least, this could be transferred off the sporting pitch. And in part it was, especially hearing about how they spoke about their sexual development.

It took a while to work out that what I desired wasn’t quite what I was getting from playing sport with the boys.

And I’ve had some wine, but “hello, how are you? please pass the salt. oh I’m so happy or sad and am driving a car now!” totally cracked me up. Which was nice, in the midst of all these horrible reminders that a lot of men want to hurt me (or at least don’t care if they do).

I mean, why is it that porn has changed sex so rapidly and so deeply in a way that, say, science fiction hasn’t changed anything? Could it be that non-porn fiction uses a vocabulary that is similar or identical to our everyday vocabulary (“hello, how are you? please pass the salt. oh I’m so happy or sad and am driving a car now!” etc) whereas porn uses a vocabulary that is decidedly not everyday language you use in math class; when the consumption of porn coincides with the reality of all these new feeeeeelings, perhaps the language of porn (suck it bitch!) gets used to articulate those not-yet-processed-or-processable feelings?

Is porn talking.

I guess I mean that–say that there’s Boy and Girl, and they both have a single moment where their hormones turn on at the same time. Immediately from that biological moment on, their interpretation and dealing with the socio-biological phenomenon will be different. Not because boys are more genital-sexy than girls, or because girls think flowers and bubblebaths are sexy. But because from the moment they have the feelings, they will react according to their socialization, and our culture’s reaction to sex + boys is seriously different from that of sex + girls. Even if that moment of hormonal switcheroo was exactly the same (which, it couldn’t be, because they’re two different individuals with different histories, self-awarenesses, and body chemistr, not because of their gender), from that inception onwards their gender will be hugely important in their conception of their sexuality.

So even if boys are no more able to process their initial sexy feelings than girls are, as the evolution of their sexuality unfolds the language they use constitutes their sexuality. Since the language available to them is so gendered, their sexuality will be affected by their gender. And boys have a selection of words available to them with which they can articulate that unfolding sexuality, whereas girls don’t.

But of course they do, kind of. Drawing hearts on a trapper keeper, kissing your best friend at sleepovers, wordlessly fantasizing about George Michael’s butt, etc. I think what I’m interested in isn’t even the early ways of articulating sexuality and desire, but of the ramifications of that constituting vocabulary later. Very few 11 year old boys rape, but plenty of 18 year old men do–how does the way the boys were first taught to talk about sex (i.e. think about it, have it) play into their later tendency to rape?

I think I’m thinking about this because when I was in 8th grade and the boys started talking about masturbation ALL THE DAMN TIME, they weren’t doing it to make us uncomfortable. Not all of them, anyway (there was a new kid who sort of began this reign of sexual terror and taught them to talk about this stuff on the bus or whatever). Their talk in the lunchroom was effectively shaping their sexuality; it was coupled with making all their girl friends feel intensely uncomfortable, because talking about jacking off was awkward for us, and we didn’t want to think about our Ken Doll Guy Friends masturbating or whatever. The reasons for our discomfort are, for the moment, beside the point. Later, all these dudes were creepy, rapey motherfuckers in high school. I was friends with them until 8th grade, when it all changed. By 12th grade, I hated them with all my feminist soul. Because what began as “whoa masturbation I’m 13 holy shit ORGASMS AH! we need to process this by talking about it all the time!” + making the girls uncomfortable eventually became “I get off on coming on your face, grabbing your hair and shoving my dick down your throat, talking about you like you’re my thing, and generally making you uncomfortable.” Are these things related? How?

…I guess? But just because one has words (and good lord, words like “chubby”?), and one can point to one’s genitals and go “oh, that,” doesn’t mean one has any capacity to process what it (that weird tingly feeling in your pee-pee called “getting a chubby”) means.

If we believe that girls have better language skills and are more emotionally mature than boys of a similar age, I don’t think we can assume that boys, even with the cultural benefits (?) that surround their sexual development, have some magical clarity about their bodies.

That’s not to deny that most sexual language is male-centric, which is less than ideal for girls and women. But, just to clarify: I feel like we’re not quite all talking about the same thing.

I had sexual desire as early as 10 or 11. I recognized it as such. I recognized it had to do with whatever was going on down there between my legs. That doesn’t mean that all of my desires vis-a-vis boys and sex were of the “oh yeah put it in me” variety. Almost none were. I knew that babies and diseases were the result of doin’ it, and that neither of those things were options. Yes, I wanted so-and-so to make me a mix tape, and to go to the dance with such-and-such, but the entire gamut of sexual activities from holding hands to PIV, was very appealing, and registered both in my head and my loins, even as I knew that some of it was off-limits.