In my life, art and pop culture have helped me understand and navigate the confusing world around me. There are few things more intimate than reading, watching or hearing something that resonates with your interior world, but for many of my formative sexual or romantic experiences, I have never found a piece of art that explains the way I feel.
Love and romantic relationships are subjects of some of the most common stories we tell ourselves as humans, and many of these stories focus on the relationships between older men and young women–or girls. Presented as healthy and essentially good, they are also almost exclusively told by men. Where I could discover a way of learning what it is like to have relationships as a girl or a woman, I find only silence.
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Dark and moody and slow, Sting whispers deliberately in my ear, ‘young teacher, the subject, of schoolgirl fantasy; she wants him, so badly, knows what she wants to be’. And when he cries out, ‘don’t stand, don’t stand so, don’t stand so close to me’ I feel it – I know what it is like, that longing and desire, pain that is pleasure, frustrated and consuming – my interior world coming so close to the surface, my skin hot, my breathing heavy.
This is a feeling I only understand now that I am a grown woman with autonomy and desires of my own. I did not understand this when I was a young girl. Sting and the Police understand this feeling as grown men, but they cannot speak to how it feels as a girl. Having been a real-life young girl myself, when I search our shared cultural heritage – books, songs, movies – for a validation of my own feelings, I find only an affirmation of my desirability, and the tantalising question of whether I really wanted it, always answered on my behalf in the affirmative.
But my lived experience is this: in reality, relationships like these force young girls to feel complicit in their own violation.
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When I was twelve years old I was a girl on the threshold of discovering who she would be as a woman. ‘Precocious’, I would describe myself as, because I was a little girl with a big intellect, who had read lots of books and knew lots of words, who saw eye-to-eye with the adults around her.
I wanted my body to catch up with the maturity of my mind, and I knew that more than anything, an intimate knowledge of men would mark me forever as a woman. Romantic love intrigued me, and I wanted ‘sex’ – a vaguely defined concept, the boundaries of which were unclear to me, an idea that made me tingling-excited and also deeply uncomfortable.
When I was twelve years old a boy at my school, five years my senior, told me he loved me and wanted to marry me. He followed me, sent me letters addressed ‘Dearest Codie’, asked me why I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, and on the day before term holiday, tried to kill himself.
I still remember walking past school buses on my way home and meeting him coming from the other direction, blood running in different directions down his arm. Maybe he said something to me- I don’t remember. Do you remember much from when you were twelve?
For a long time, I felt responsible. I realise now that I felt complicit in my own violation. But that is a contradiction. If I was complicit, that means I contributed to it, was a part of it, aided and abetted. It means I wanted it to happen, and a violation is by definition something that you do not want to happen.
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In Woody Allen’s 1979 film ‘Manhattan’, Allen plays a twice-divorced 42 year old malcontent, who is dating a seventeen year old girl, played by Mariel Hemingway. In the final scene, Allen runs through the streets of the city to get to Hemingway before she leaves for London to pursue an acting career. ‘Well, well… don’t you love me?’ he pleads, that awkward, self-deprecating Woody Allen persona. He smiles a searching half-smile.
Her hair falls in front of her face, and he pushes it back behind her ear. Deeply flawed, he opens himself up to this young ingénue, fresh faced and as yet uncorrupted.
She loves him too. Two people in love. Who cares if it’s against the law, if your youth is healthy for an old man’s soul?
—
The afternoon the boy tried to kill himself, the school called my mother. I saw her get a phone call from an unknown number, and I knew what it was. I was sitting on the lounge in my school uniform and when she came back into the room crying, I thought of everything I’d done up until that moment, to get me in so much trouble.
So eager to be seen as the adult I thought I was, I was thrilled to think that no other girl my age – twelve – had a boyfriend.
Mariel Hemingway laughs a little. ‘Guess what? I turned eighteen. I’m legal now.’ The legal system says you can’t say yes, but a man tells you that you’re more mature than some outdated law that knows neither you nor him – who do you believe?
I had wanted it even if it had scared me. I’d thought having a boyfriend meant being scared and being excited and the lines were blurred between the two, and he told me he loved me and I wanted that attention but if I took a little bit; it wasn’t my place to decide when it became too much.
Isn’t this how it is? I wanted to be mature and beautiful enough for an older man to want me, but I couldn’t take it back once the attention became too much. I am responsible.
He sent me emails and I opened them, skimming them, too scared to read the whole thing, although nobody believed me when I said I hadn’t read them. Like the letter he left in my bag – a white envelope with a heart cut out in the corner to reveal orange letter paper underneath. I couldn’t read past ‘Dearest Codie’, but kept it between the pages of a book hidden on my bookshelf. If I thought it was wrong why didn’t I throw it away? Tell an adult? To be courting this attention from an older man, I thought I was the adult.
Twelve year old me knew this. I knew somewhere I had wanted it, even if it had scared me. And that’s why I knew it was my fault.
Who was there to tell me that it wasn’t? There’s no leeway for a girl who is curious or intrigued or excited. To admit to these feelings makes you feel complicit. And if you are complicit, is there really a crime? If you let yourself be violated is it really a violation?
—
For many years I filed this story away. I did not think about it for a very long time – in the few years afterwards I told it as a funny or interesting story about myself, and then it faded from my memory, just another thing that happened to me growing up. Many, many women have these stories. Their formative sexual experiences have taught them that they have no control when a man desires them. No agency over someone else’s desire over you.
Only once I grew up could I look back to that twelve year old girl and realise that all of it was only ever something a man did to me. He should’ve known when to stop. It was never my responsibility. I did not lead anyone on. My short school skirt did not make me a tease. It made me a child.
After reflecting on many of my formative sexual experiences, now that I am a grown woman, there is something that I want to tell my younger self. I still have to tell it to myself and to the women around me:
I am not responsible for the way men feel about me.
