If you ask me, free love ain’t either. It’s not love, and it’s not free. I’ve been paying the price for thirty years.
When I was in the third grade, my babysitter ran away from home to live with us, staying more than a year. Several teenage boys started hanging around, and some girls, adding to the hormonal stew. We called them The Teenagers. Suddenly I had older siblings, and I loved it. I was free to act like a kid, not the responsible elder taking care of my mother. And my mom got to be even more of a wild child-experimental, free and easy. No worries.
One day my babysitter’s friend Ceoff said we should bond. He sliced my hand, then his, and smeared our blood together. I was nine. He was on acid. My new blood brother leered at me when his girlfriend left the room.
My mother’s brother also leered at me, as did a few of my father’s friends. There was nowhere, after I developed breasts, that I was safe.
My dad felt free to comment on strangers’ bodies-even those of twelve-year-olds. And I wonder why I’ve always hated mine?
What I learned as a child of the sixties-fuck everything that moves and let it fuck you-has definitely shaped my adulthood. Want to screw on the beach? Want to fuck under the desk at work? in the alley? on the side of the road? in the car driving eighty miles an hour?
Sure.
My function on earth, said society, said the hippies, said my mother, was to be fuckable. Extremely fuckable. Did I want sex? Who cares? Open your legs and let me in or I’ll call you a square, mainstream, conservative. God forbid.
My brother and I saw our mother say yes to everyone, so we learned to say yes to everyone, even strangers. When I was fourteen, I was molested by a talent agent. When my brother was twelve, he was molested by his best friend’s father.
Sex. Not simple, not easy, not free. And not love.
My mom routinely took us to the Fox Theatre to watch movies. We popped our own popcorn and smuggled in thermoses of Callo wine (unless we were boycotting). Once she dragged us to Performance and something I only remember as Bye-Bye Blackbird. Both rated R, both semi-pornographic. Nuns sodomized and killed. Mick Jagger fucking a starlet.
My brother cried for a month with nightmares, and twenty years later, I still vividly remember those violent images. Some things are too graphic for kids to see, but we saw them, and later tried them, or at least consented to them.
It may be why, years later, I beg a boyfriend to whip me. And, more recently, why I throw up when a new friend wants to shop in a sex store.
No boundaries, no guidance, no protection. Nothing was sacred.
And yet, as a kid, everyone envied me my mother. She let me do anything I wanted. I could roam the streets after midnight on a school night, or fuck a classmate on an open field after a football game. All she wanted was the details, which she promptly passed on to her friends, along with the size of my brother’s dick.
My hippie mother even suggested people for me to sleep with, didn’t understand when I wouldn’t, especially if it was someone she wanted. She saw nothing wrong with the local mechanic taking pictures of me naked. After all, he took some of her.
Neither parent provided protection. I think my mom naively believed that all you do need is love, that love will heal all wounds, that there is no such thing as inherent evil. She couldn’t imagine such evil, so couldn’t guard against it. After a while, in self-defense, I lied to my friends about curfews (that I had one) and restrictions (that I had some). I wanted limits before I got eaten up. But by then it was too late.
I slept with my best male friend (to Pink Floyd, of course). I slept with my best friend’s boyfriend. All this would’ve been fine and dandy except I felt like shit. One of my friends laughingly called me a slut, but I knew she meant it. Another girlfriend wrote me a nasty letter after I slept with a guy I hadn’t known she liked.
As I got older, I did my best to have a protective boyfriend around, someone to fall back on, so I had a ‘legitimate’ excuse to turn people down. As if what I wanted didn’t count. Sorry, can’t menage a trois. My boyfriend, you know.
The fifteen-year-old my mother bedded became my lover fifteen years later. My mother abused him, he later abused me. Instigated by good ol’ free love.
I guess I’m lucky to be alive. I have no STDs, I’m HIV-negative. But free love exacted a terrible price on my family. These days I trust no one either over or under thirty. I have no real friends, no support, no closeness. Neither my brother nor I can keep a meaningful relationship going for very long before it self-destructs. We’ve both been in jail for domestic violence, and we both continue to flail in the maze of our desecrated sexuality.
Free love freely fostered self-hatred, which manifested itself in eating disorders and suicidal tendencies. I became so disconnected from my body that my gynecologist would find objects (tampons, condoms) left in my vagina for days. I didn’t feel them rotting inside me.
I was primed to be the sexiest, the wildest, the least hung up. Liberal. A hippie’s kid. Untainted by rules and regulations. Unconstrained. Free.
These days I have so many hang-ups, I’m surprised I can walk down the street without tripping. And actually, there were years when I couldn’t walk down the street; I couldn’t even leave my house. Nowhere was safe except, paradoxically, my bed. Depression and sex, with bed as part of the disease and the cure.
If you saw me now you’d have no inkling that I used to dance to the blues in such a way that the musicians all had hard-ons, that my favorite movie, after The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was 9 ‘/2 Weeks.
Today I rarely wear revealing clothes outside of the house. I don’t like dirty jokes or double entendres, and I hate Valentine’s Day, with its corresponding message, ‘Everybody copulate!’ Some would call me frigid.
I read self-help books that say sex is healthy, sexual urges are normal, I’m not a slut. But that vaguely echoes what my mother taught me. Sex is good. Sex is fun. Sex is sport.
Nowadays I have only fantasies, because I am too damn tired to deal with people. After so many years of sexual abuse, and being the sexiest slut on the block, ironically, I can’t have sex.
For a period of time, I cried every time I came, and exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I gained weight, wore baggy clothes, shaved my head.
I call myself bisexual, but in truth, I’m asexual. Celibate. Scared even to flirt. Because flirting leads to sex-inevitably, mandatorily, to sex. So I don’t even start. Everyone I know is safely partnered up.
Deep down inside I am conservative. I don’t like multiple lovers, I only want to sleep with one person. I pretended to separate sex from love, but I was only fooling (and abusing) myself. Sex was love for me-a substitute love-not sport, not just fun. Love my body, love me. Simple, easy. Not.
I have a hard time imagining someone really loving me unless I fuck her into the ground. As if sexual prowess ensures love or even monogamy. The well-trained concubine.
Now I am scared of anything sexual, afraid I can’t control myself, that I’ll eke back into my yay-saying ways. I’m afraid to do anything other than write and fantasize.
But I’m lonely. Lonely for love, for companionship, for touch. My body betrays me by craving caresses, coveting kisses, melting under hugs. I am a sensual being. All the ugly, baggy clothes in the world won’t stop my body from responding to smells, sounds, touches, tastes. My sex drive rears its ugly head frequently. Repression only works for so long. Eruption is imminent.