Cat Damon—Slutever’s newest over-sharer—chronicles her hilarious cumming-of-age, from sexual anxieties, to therapeutic masturbation, to the wonders of a round brush.
“Is it possible to hatefuck yourself?” I thought with my hand down my underwear at 10 PM on a Thursday night. I was three months into graduate school and two months into being single for the first time in four years. I was one-handedly searching for aggressive lesbian porn while fending off my cats from my bed with my foot, my other hand exhaustedly trying to fuck myself to sleep. This was the third time masturbating that day, not a record but a fairly regular number on a stressed day. I smoke cigarettes and drink cheap red wine but nothing takes the edge off my anxiety like a frantic orgasm on a weekday. My cats howled and headbutted for attention, grossly needy and constantly reminding me of my spinsterhood, but I kept my hand on my crotch and squinched my eyes half-shut for the ideal combination of fantasy and visual stimulation.
This had been my normal routine since I was 15. I took all AP classes in high school and thought that sex would make me crazy or result in the death of my deflowerer, so I fucked myself with the handle of the round brush I used for blowing out my bangs and did my Latin homework after coming. Frank conversations about sex and bodies were the stuff of movies, given that I hadn’t been aware of the fact I had genitals until Family Life in fifth grade. I remember asking my mother, with this painful combination of pride and horror after that first class, “You did that? with HIM?” referring to sex with my father. Her brazen lack of shame was hugely foundational to me. Considering the fact that I didn’t know what a vagina was until three days earlier, my beautiful mother’s unblushing ownership of hers was a shock too great for me to handle. I judged her, I withdrew, and then I got curious.
“I’m not like the other girls,” I told myself as I pressured my beautiful high school boyfriend to give me head in the back of his deep pink Ford Taurus. “Someone will see I’m a secret deviant,” I thought as I watched erotic wrestling after finishing my senior-year homework. When I went to college at 18, I realized that I liked drinking and being outgoing. I was mildly wild and fairly promiscuous and drunk on the success of being weird-looking with big breasts. I wore secondhand sailor dresses to date functions with boys named Harrison and Hobby and unironically carried a cigarette holder.
Men had been the object of fascination in high school— now they were ripe fruit waiting to be plucked off trees. My virginity felt like a palpable, tantalizing object of interest to film students and fraternity boys. I fucked for the first time when I was blackout with a 23-year-old bass player from LA I handpicked while not blackout. All I knew from movies and Sunday School was that I had done something bad that would either make me go crazy or cause his untimely death. The reality was that he ignored my drunk texts for two months and I was so nervous about my potentially bad sexual performance that I didn’t have sex for another year until I met Thomas at 20. He had a fashion mullet and a nose ring, a North Carolina tattoo on the back of his right calf. I was so anxious about sleeping with him and also about his nonchalant kindness that I completely lost my shit. I replaced food with sex and sleep with fear dreams. I lost twenty pounds and found the shape of a future husband in his lanky body. We dated four long and stretched-out years. Tattoos and motorcycles were coverups for his conservative agenda; breastfeeding in public was out but pinup tattoos on his biceps were very okay. Up until the day he broke up with me (for the third time), I thought hazily about our wedding. I would pick the music, obviously, and wear an Acne dress, but his friends would make the party cooler.
At 24, when Thomas and I broke up, I was getting my PhD at the same place where I went for undergrad, no longer having sex with someone who couldn’t get off while facing me. My one sober sexual partner had been squeamish and picky and delicate, bossy and easily wounded in bed for four years. I willingly, even happily, gave up masturbating in an attempt to be more sensitive for him, shaved my cunt, quit shaving my cunt, bought underwire bras, threw them out, put perfume in my hair, flossed my teeth, faked orgasms, cried during sex. I felt like a balloon when we broke up, sexually untethered but ready to pop. The fear of insanity and illegitimacy came back— who could I fuck if it wasn’t the man who kept my instability at bay by promising to marry me? If I wasn’t sleeping with The One, how could my delicate nerves handle rejection? Grad school and being alone seemed like huge obstacles; I returned to my true deflowerer, kink.com, for solace and relief.
I had a 20 page paper due at midnight. My friends were done for the semester, drinking margaritas and eating nachos. I wanted to light them on fire and go back to being a florist. I wanted a boyfriend, even Thomas, to make me dinner and have a nice quick stress fuck. I wanted to be home in North Carolina, eating pimento cheese toasts and sneaking cigarettes. Instead, I watched Ultimate Surrender and finished my paper after I came, sticky in bed and covered in paperbacks.
Read Cat Damon’s previous post, Dating an Orgy Organizer, HERE :)