I’m Not a Prude
How sex positivity turns negative in the face of trauma
Trigger warning: this piece of writing holds a clear, though not detailed, reference to a rape (not mine) and deals with issues of sexual trauma.
Me: Are you working right now?Zach: No.Me: Why not?Zach: Because I started procrastinating.Me: Ah... what's the chosen procrastinating tool today? Other than meZach: You. The Internet.Me: Like, you're trying to Google me?Zach: Haha NOPE!Me: Good. Cause that's our agreementZach: Yup.Me: ...Zach: I just got back from a walk to brunch. Now I have to take my motorcycle out of the garage.Me: Sounds like a really solid work dayZach: Hahahaha really solid!Zach: To be honest I started feeling turned on again which always leads to procrastination. Well...not always.Me: turned on "again"?Zach: Hahahaha! You wish.Me: So when you say, You. The Internet. You mean you're jacking off to porn while texting me?Zach: I hadn't quite gotten to porn and jacking off levels...yet.Me: Ok, just low level arousal. Got it.Zach: Yes. Low level arousal. Oh what a fine line.Me: So, wholesomeness isn't a deal breaker for you? [picking up the thread of a previous conversation]Zach: So you're saying you're wholesome?Me: I'm wondering right now what that word even means.Zach: I think there's this implication of prudishness. You don't strike me as being prudish.
“You don’t strike me as being prudish.”
It was April 2016. I was sitting with my phone on the rug in my tiny trailer home among the snowed-in trees of Manitoulin Island. Zach was procrastinating at work, texting me, and apparently getting ready to take his motorbike out after the winter thaw in Toronto’s Leslieville. At that point I had met him twice, on a trip to the city, after a lively spurt of texting that I had initiated on a dating app. His understated wit and readiness to play charmed me and unleashed in me next-level brazenness. Our spirited banter endured even as I left the city to go back up north.
For someone needing to prove to the world that she definitely wasn’t a prude, his words to me were a small victory.
For someone with more self-respect, this back-handed flirt would have been ground for deleting the number and forgetting the whole thing. We didn’t even yet know each other’s real names.
To my credit, I replied that within a context of sexual violence, trauma, and rape culture, prudishness wasn’t a thing.
To his credit, he agreed and took back the whole thing.
On our first date, we met in a cafe on Queen East. I snuck up behind him, saying “Hi Zach,” boldly and quietly, in his ear, as he spun around. We locked glinting eyes, then hugged, quickly. Half an hour later, as we waited on a traffic light, he told me with kind eyes that he could see that I would be good at my job, teaching art-making to little kids. He was upbeat and endearing, revealing small clips of his creative mind as he talked about his friends, dear to him, and his nephew, then not yet a toddler. How had I been that afternoon? Guarded, quiet? Nonchalant? Engaging? I’m not sure. I just remember listening to him and studying how safe I felt or didn’t feel.
Two days later we met up again, this time for afternoon soup at a restaurant near where I was staying. I wore offbeat, perfectly fitting shoes that I had found discarded on someone’s curb the day before; the only other shoes I had brought on this trip were giving me bad blisters. I showed him the shoes and we laughed together at the magical ways of the universe. Generally though, I felt a bit locked up inside. I liked him. I was nervous. Nervousness makes me freeze.
After the meal we walked around the neighbourhood like tourists, eyeing up the houses, riding the curves of the streets. We were jointly immersed in the experience of the place, taking in the way the light snow textured the grass, the unique barrel shape of a house’s attic, the vividness of dead leaves still grasping their branches in the earliest of springtime. We ended up in an industrial lot where we performed mock parkour (one of us almost losing a tooth) and gave critical analyses of the graffiti. When he looked at me intently there, I coyly turned away. And when he announced he needed to head out to his dinner party, for which he was already hours late, he started walking me home. Passing a serene churchyard tucked down below street level, he sat on a bench and I sat with him. He kissed me there, faces cold, thick down jackets between us.
I forget how many weeks passed before I came back to Toronto and saw him again, but it was cherry blossom time, or maybe just after. I came to his apartment. He was going to make me dinner. Before I could take my shoes off he had me on my back on the floor, pinned down, kissing me. My body went stiff as I followed along, and it showed enough that he backed off, silently. We had just spent weeks texting constantly, all flirt, all playful, often sexy, but somehow in person it didn’t transfer for me. Not like that. My body felt numb and my mouth was dry. Maybe I was being a prude.
It wasn’t the first time I froze. Sex seemed too big for me. I don’t know if I had ever felt safe enough to let my guard down and yield to intense desire. I daydreamed of a lover so strong and so safe, someone gentle, present and completely authentic, unconditionally loving. Someone I could trust just enough (a very big amount) so that I could open up a crack: Oh the ultimate turn on.
A decade earlier, in my mid twenties, it had occurred to me that I seemed to display the symptoms of someone with a history of sexual abuse. To my knowledge, I hadn’t been abused. I puzzled on for years, until the missing piece was dropped in my lap. I was 30 years old and out for lunch with one of my mom’s closest friends and colleagues. Ginette was an energy healer, and I was under her tutelage that day as a Reiki Level 1 student. We took a break midday to eat, and conversation quickly turned to my mom, just 4 months dead. The conversation went like this:
Ginette: Your mom struggled a lot…
Me: Oh yeah?
Ginette: She never did get over her rape …
Then, upon seeing my ghosted face: Oh… I thought you knew. She said her family knew.
I didn’t know. I grew increasingly shocked as she filled in the details. Sixteen years old. Repeat rapes. Summering at her sister’s in New Brunswick. Her brother-in-law. Nightly visits to her room.
So many thoughts shot through my head. Did my dad know? What about my siblings? No wonder my mom had seemed so curt when she talked about that sister, that brother-in-law. No wonder she cursed specifically him when that sister died under strange circumstances that the police never resolved. No wonder my mom was always so jumpy and distant and unsure of herself. No wonder a constant din of all-is-not-well echoed, barely audible, within my childhood house. I re-imagined my mother as a perpetually frozen 16-year-old girl, shaken, scared and alone.
I spent the rest of the Reiki workshop rewriting the past in my head, filling in gaps where I hadn’t even been aware there were gaps. As I did, it dawned on me that my mom’s trauma, unresolved as it was, had rubbed off on me. Her emotional absence, her vacant eyes, her subdued personality, her social isolation; all marked for me how to be in the world. Her real screams and tears that time I playfully sneaked up on her in the basement. That’s how I was mothered: In a world unsafe and unfriendly that barely went beyond the edges of the field behind our house.
Over the next months, I scoured the internet for articles on inter-generational trauma. All I found was an academic piece on genetic markers. I didn’t know where else to turn, and I asked myself, repeatedly, how do I heal from a trauma that isn’t mine?
In the meantime, I continued to be guarded and uneasy with sex and trying very hard to hide it. I wanted in on the tide of sex positivity trickling through my peer groups. I too wanted to be carefree, loving, fun, pleasureful, sexy. I wanted to be spiritually and sexually evolved. And if that wasn’t possible, I wanted at least to appear so.
For Zach to say that I didn’t strike him as being a prude meant that my feign was a success, at least in that moment, at least in text. But as much as I was made smug by his comment, I was also deeply, quietly hurt. My body felt the heat of shame, society pointing its finger at me and saying, if you don’t do sex when we want, how we want, you’re useless and disposable. Don’t be a prude. It was a personal affront, an insult to my sovereignty and salt in the existing wound of sexual trauma flowing down my motherline. A memory flashed in my mind — my mom, in dress pants, substitute teaching in my high school music class. She’s helping a student while another waits his turn behind her. This classmate, one of the taller, stronger athletic boys, looks at his friends with a grin on his face and reaches his hand down in front of him for a mock ass grab. My mom unaware. He then felt my gaze and our eyes locked for a strange moment. The grin was gone.
Had my grandmother suffered rape? And her mother? And what about my grandmother’s grandmother? Shame straddles across generations, muddying identities, persisting in blood, the spiral of lineage always cycling back and back and back. It nudges at the sleeping mass of anger in my chest. As the anger stirs, and as I’m denied my own sex positivity from the inside, I come to realize: it is my trauma. It is my trauma to heal.
