Towelhead

This post is totally disjointed, but that's what you get from a 3 a.m. post after I finished reading a pretty heavy book, when I'm alone in the middle of the night.

I went shopping this afternoon, on my first Saturday off in several weeks. I bought a pretty dress and a few other items. I spent too much money. The time before last that I went shopping, nothing was fitting me, I looked awful in everything, and I left Target so pissed off I didn't buy a single thing. Which was a first. Today, I guess I was feeling hot--everything I tried on seemed to look good. I like days like that, but it means I spent more money than I should've.

After I bought a bunch of clothes, I saw that it was nearly 4, and I was to be at a friend's house for a cookout at 6. So I wandered into Walden Books, to buy a book--I thought I'd find a coffee shop and read in the interim. I picked this book off the shelf, having never heard a thing about it. The title caught my eye, and I thought "Arab-American girl trying to deal with her sexuality while growing up with her old-fashioned father?" Yup, sounds like a book I could relate to. Turns out the book has already been made into a movie, which is coming out in limited release next month.

It's a quick read--I finished it in about 3 and a half hours, total. But I don't know how to feel about it. It was interesting, obviously, or I wouldn't have just plowed through it in one evening. But. It's got graphic depictions of sexual activity involving the protagonist, who's only thirteen. It's got physical abuse. And it's all coming from the perspective of the girl herself, which means there's no "here's the lesson, these people are bad" moralizing. And given that I strongly, strongly identified with the character, I took on her desires. Which sometimes were to have sex with her much older neighbor. Which felt odd, to say the least. And wrong. And because it felt transgressive, it was kinda hot. In a bad way.

At the same time, it's one of the best, most authentic representations of female sexuality I've seen, ever. She actually has desires--and they are complicated. She wants for want's sake, and she also wants to be wanted. It made me remember what it was like to be a teenager. One reviewer complained that it presents 13-year-olds having sex as if it were normal. Thirteen year olds having intercourse might not be normal, but thirteen year olds obsessing about sex certainly isn't.

I think back to spring break of my eighth-grade year, where I had the chance to spend the days with the boy I had been dating for several weeks. We had started "going out" after I asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. He was extremely cute, although he wasn't popular and I was. But I had a big crush on him because he was the smartest boy in the grade. The night of the dance, he gave me a valentine, and we slow-danced. After the dance was over, he walked me home, and at the end of my street I told him he should turn back because I didn't want my dad to see us. He kissed me, and though it wasn't the first time I had french-kissed a boy, it was the first time I'd really enjoyed it. We didn't kiss again until over a month later, when I spent the day at his friend's house. The friend's mother was never home, and so we could hang out there and do what we wanted. All day for a week, we would make out while his friends played video games.

I remember that my body was out of wack with what I wanted it to do. I heard later from a friend of his that he'd said I'd had an orgasm, but I didn't remember that happening. I remember that I tried to give him a handjob and I was terrible at it and I knew I wasn't doing it right. I remember thinking that 13 was too young to give a boy a blowjob--I wanted to do it, but decided I would wait until I was 14. By the time I turned 14, we had broken up.

Being a teenager was weird. I liked boys, and I wanted them to like me. But even though I wanted to do sexual things with them, it was like my body didn't know how to respond. I wanted, and I wanted to be wanted, but everything wasn't quite in place. Towelhead did a great job of representing that contradiction, and a lot of it felt authentic. When I was a teenager, I didn't want to have sex with adults, but I do remember that I wanted adult men to want me. And I don't think I was particularly unique in that regard. Reading the book made me remember how trying it was to be in that position, of having so many competing forces try to define your sexuality. Forces of repression trying to deny it, boys your age trying to exploit it, adult men sexualizing you but also acting like you needed to be "protected."

It made me realize how nice it is to be a grown-up. Even now, I think about years of my adult life that were spent dealing with aspects of my sexuality that were corroded from adolescence. There will probably be still more of those years to come.

I just don't know--what is the best way to deal with adolescent female sexuality? Sometimes it seems that the perception that teenage girls are so fragile, so endangered, does the most harm of all. Technically, I wasn't "ready" for those makeout sessions in the spring of my eighth grade year, at least, my body wasn't ready to respond. But did it hurt me? I actually have nothing but fond memories.

It helps that the young lad I was frolicking around with did nothing but get smarter, more interesting, and more attractive as we got older. I still dream about him sometimes. And then I wake up to my boyfriend, and I wonder what would've happened if we'd met as teenagers. Most of the time I think we met at the perfect time, when we had both already had several significant relationships, that taught us things that have made us able to be open and connect with each other in a way I couldn't do when I was younger.

But man, if I'd met him in high school, I'd've been all over that shit.