Memoir of the High School Slut
By: Sadie Lee
Tags: Trauma, Mormon, Personal, Heartbreak, Sadness

Pexels: Snapwire

My mom explained all the body parts to me when I kid. She also told me what a period was, how to use a tampon, and that having a boyfriend was a healthy milestone that I would experience one day. My mom herself was sort of shy and reserved about sex. But she never let me know that. She encouraged me to be safe and explore.

I had my first kiss at ten. At fifteen I had fooled around with more than a handful of guys at the school. I had a few boyfriends. But I also liked keeping who I was hooking up with a secret. Looking back I think I was paranoid about the judgment I would receive if people knew who I was fooling around with, for better or worse. It didn’t help that most of my friends were Mormon.

My best friend was dating a gay guy, everyone knew except my friend and him. She was upset that he wouldn’t kiss her after almost a year of dating.

Meanwhile, I was trying to recreate every movie I had ever seen about high school relationships.

I fooled around with guys behind the school.

Flashed guys in the gym sauna.

Teased girls about fooling around in the school showers.

Flashed guys in the school stairwell before math class.

I had rules. They were sort of born out of fear to being found out or being that foolish girl who made a mistake. I wouldn’t do anything that could give me an STD. Which meant mostly hand stuff. I also never sent nudes, I didn’t want a child pornography charge. And I didn’t want a pregnancy so sex was out of the question unless I was on birth control, monogamous, and they wore a condom.

Outside of the rules, I found hooking up was, well, fun. It was all under the table, not on top of it.

I remember one Spanish class I was sitting at a four-person table with assigned seats and I had fooled around with the three boys I was sitting next to.

Pexels: Ivan Samkov

See I had a balcony that led to my room. There was a pull-up bar outside against the balcony a guy could leverage himself upon if they were strong enough. That was the bar. Literally and figuratively. Was my booty call strong enough and quiet enough to hoist himself up into my room? I don’t think I explicitly realized this, but there must have been a part of me that knew I could scream and my parents would hear me. I always felt in control.

It was a huge rush to constantly be texting a guy. To have them text me back. To have them text me out of the blue. To wear a sexy outfit and get a comment on it via text with a message like, “God your legs look sexy today, meet me in B hall?” I fooled around with other girl’s guys. It usually meant they were better about keeping the secret. There wasn’t really a limit. It was fun. The attention. Novelty. Secrecy. Footsie in between classes. It was all damn good.

Pexels: Anna Svets

I couldn’t keep the secrets forever. The rumors about my bisexuality spread first. Every single one of my Mormon friends dropped me. I was left with one atheistic libertarian, my true best friend and I made it through the rest of high school.

I was the first of my friends to have sex. By years. Some of them are still waiting on their first kiss.

In college, I rebounded from friends with benefits into a stable relationship with a 30-year-old. He was our camp and climbing instructor to help us transition into our first year of college. I think he told himself I was at least twenty but he quickly found out I was just 18. “You're mature for your age,” He would justify to his friends and family. His friends who were all later twenties and thirties wouldn’t even look at me at barbecue night. We didn’t have sex for that entire first semester of college. We also broke up the first few months in. I called things off with him.

Pexels: Andrea Piacquadio

The rest of college was me keeping men at an arm's length and resorting back to friends with benefits. Men in college were pushier about sex and I was stuck doing “hand stuff.” There’s some feminism wrapped up in this. Feminism in men feeling pressured to sleep with women, and me feeling pressured to sleep with them. There was also my own attempts at self-protection with involved me refusing any sort of cuddling or sex.

I started to feel out of place again. My friends were unapologetically sleeping around. And I was the girl on campus who didn’t have sex and didn’t have a boyfriend. And again, I wanted everything to stay a secret.

I emerged from college as someone who was in several polyamorous relationships. The point time I didn’t feel shame for my sexuality. The only time I felt safe and accepted. And I wasn’t having sex in all my relationships. Just some of them.

When I met my current boyfriend, his ultimatum was I had to break up with my boyfriends and girlfriend of several years. I did. I entered a relationship with someone who would have probably have been one of those mean high school boys of my youth. He was pragmatic and a late bloomer like many of the boys in my high school friend group. I worked through stuff with him. A lot of stuff. I yelled I cried, I was vulnerable, I communicated, and for the first time, I knew the relationship could last if I wanted it to.

We are still together.

Pexels: Rachel Claire

I was texting my friend, the one who dated the gay guy, and who was the atheistic libertarian. I was raging to my boyfriend about how she wasn’t texting me back fast enough. He was going on about how rigid I could be sometimes. Then other stuff about she and I started coming out. “This is bigger than this one text message, isn’t it” He asked me in that tone guys ask then they realize they hit a huge emotional landmine and didn’t bring in back up.

I felt like that girl in the Jane Austen book club film whose boyfriend says, “Highschools over sweetheart” and the bookworm who was teased in high school retorts, “ High Schools never over.”

My high school friends drink and smoke pot now too. They are openly gay. The Mormon ones are having sex, in wedlock, but still.

I am still so wrapped up in the fear. That my bisexuality was attention-seeking like everyone thought it was. That I should continue to deny or delay sex because it could lead to STD and pregnancy even though I am a grown-*ss woman with health insurance.

I feel like a toddler with an open wound. Just pointing at the bully who pushed her in-between sobs, even though she was the one who tripped.

I just want to lecture my friends about the dangers of drinking and drugs. I want to insist my Mormon friends remain celibate. I want to shove and chain my gay friend from high school back in the closet and yell, “You didn’t make it easy for me, so why should it be easy for you!”

I’m not fun, I’m not youthful, I’m not a sexually empowered woman, I’m wounded. I’m angry. I’m bitter. I want revenge. Even though everyone says that doesn’t help the hurt. I believe I must be the exception to the rule.

I blame my mother for my healthy sex education. Why couldn’t I have just been kept in the dark like all my other friends? I blame my Mormon friends for shaming me. I blame my friend for not kissing her boyfriend sooner and helping him realize he was gay. I blame him for not coming out of the closet sooner. But I also blame myself.

I wish I had waited. I had waited for months or years. I might have been fun. I might have joined a sorority and lost my virginity to a really nice guy named Chad. Not the first kid I met off the internet named Terrance.

I might have been able to parse out the fact that my sexuality was an aspect of who I was and not the slut label that had been absorbed onto me.

I was the girl the gay kids came out to first. The girl my Mormon friends would confide in when they had been dating or kissing and should not have been. I was the girl the Mormon boys fooled around with because they knew I could keep a secret. But somehow I was the piggy bank for everyone else’s sexuality secrets. And the bank was breaking.

The first step to healing is identifying the problem and I am cracking it open like an otter to a clam. But now I am left staring at the pearl of my trauma, and I have no idea what to do with it.