( ( (hurt me) ) )

‘All they want is my body.’ How many times have you heard this statement, from young people, and more importantly, especially from girls? The concept of men only wanting women for their body is an old one, a deeply ingrained idea in our society. Many young women and girls only just reaching puberty will most likely relate. In my opinion this is not only a problem of men’s opinion of women, and how they’re raised, but that of another prominent issue, violence against women.

Ahh, queue eye roll from my readers. ‘Violence against women’ is such a frequently repeated statement that it seems to have lost most of his impact. It no longer follows with discussion of how often it may occur, or ways to tackle it, but now by a sigh and that’s it. It’s as if when something gains momentum and publicity, it becomes less talked about, ironically. When was the last time we truly thought about it, this violence. I don’t mean in those brief news articles or television ads about domestic violence, I mean a proper investigation into the background of it, why it occurs, and why it’s still so common.

This violence that I talk about is probably not the ‘violence’ that you’re now picturing in your head. Maybe you’re thinking about a woman hiding bruises from her ‘loving husband’ when she picks up the kids from school, or maybe it’s the image of a young woman at a bar getting grabbed by a stranger without being able to defend herself. Yes, this exists, this is common, but I think it’s important to go deeper than that. Where do these actions come from? Why is it so entwined within a woman’s life that she may not even recognise this violence when it’s happening?

‘Life changing pussy’ is an idea that is thrown around casually amongst friends, young people, groups of boys, memes, and found all throughout current social media. All you have to do is scroll a tumblr feed for 5 minutes and you’ll encounter several posts about how one woman’s ‘sex game’ has changed a man’s life, and even more currently now, he’s decided to turn his life around because of it. What does this mean? Do we not realise as a collective of young people that this is still minimising a woman’s worth to good she is at sex? How good she is to her boy in bed?

It bother’s me, as a girl who hated herself for a long time, being reduced to my body and its physical worth really messed me up. I connected my worth to what boys thought of me in bed. I was only ‘the best fuck’ and ‘her pussy is bomb’ rather than, ‘she is kind’ or ‘she is articulate and intelligent.’ I’ve never had a boy actually like me. I know that I’ll get arguments, but let’s be real. No boy has told me they love me, or even, that they have feelings for me. But I couldn’t count the amount of times boys have told me I’m the best they’ve ever had, and that they could fuck me for days.

When a boy tells me he can’t live without me, it’s because the absence of me equals the absence of my pussy, and my ability to please him. When a boy tells me he missed me, it really means he misses fucking me, and can’t imagine me doing the same with someone else. I’ve had ‘relationships’ with boys, never officially, where they’ve acted more possessively and more manipulatively than what I would call an abusive relationship.

Halfway through last year I was ignored for two weeks, and yelled at, because I’d accidentally matched with a friend of the boy I was seeing. Mind you, I didn’t know they were friends, and I hadn’t even replied to any of the messages I’d received from the friend. Yet, I was in trouble. How dare I talk to his friend? How dare I betray him like that?

That was the problem all along apparently, that I couldn’t be trusted. 4 months later in the relationship that wasn’t really a relationship, just sex, the guy I was seeing informed me he’d been talking to 4 girls the whole time, and he had started seeing one of them. That was it, I was heartbroken, but what could I say? It was different, and it didn’t matter, what was he doing wrong? ‘It’s not like we are dating.’

But if you flipped the roles, I’m sure it would be a very different story.

My sense of self turned into what men thought of me. If I wasn’t validated in some way by them, my existence didn’t matter. If a guy didn’t want me anymore, that was it. I’d begin to become extremely depressed, just because I felt like without their approval or want of me, I didn’t matter. I don’t think it’s right to excuse them either. They purposely go into things with the intent of hurting us. I’m not a special snowflake for thinking this, and I’m sure I’m right. They never have any want to continue the relationship, or invest in the relationship. They just want to be pleased, they want us to always be there at their beckoning call, to please them and make them feel good, but god forbid we ask for the same in return.

Isn’t the deliberate destruction of one’s sense of self a type of violence? That’s what they were doing, and are doing. They took away my ability to feel good about myself, unless I was a ‘good fuck’ or had a ‘good pussy’ that they wanted. Because only then would they text me regularly, ask me how I am, ‘miss me’ and want to see me. It made me feel wanted, like I had a purpose, like I was good for something. Even though that something was just sex.

This has caused me to be in many abusive and dysfunctional relationships, and like I said, never officially. But when they ended, I felt like my world was falling apart. Why? These boys never showed me love, they never showed me happiness, never treated me well. But the choices I made were to please them, everything to try and make them want me.

There’s this lyric in an A$AP Rocky song that goes:

"Head so good, make a nigga feel good,

‘Till the point I wanna marry her"

This contains such common and yet scary connotations, he only wants to marry her because she’s good at making him feel good, only wants to make her his so she’s not sucking any other boy’s dicks? Are women only ‘life changing’ for the way they are in bed, if they are loyal to him with their bodies, and they way they use their mouths?

This physicality shouldn’t exist. The message is that men don’t want us, and that we’re no good if we’re not a good fuck. The only time they want to make us theirs, is if they don’t want us to use our bodies for someone else. It’s not a matter of love, it’s a matter of the ownership of our bodies. They better make us ‘theirs’ before we go use our talent elsewhere. What kind of message is this portraying to us? To our wellbeing?

That we’re worth nothing unless we’re giving a man what he wants. This can go as far back as the argument of virginity. The other side is that in our society, there’s this ridiculous thought process that a man’s dick can be so life changing, that we lose something. The science behind actually losing something is empty. What on earth are they taking from us when we decide to have sex? In my experience, if you haven’t ~lost your virginity~ by the time you’re 18, there’s something wrong with you. If you haven’t had a dick inside of you by the time you finish school, you’re weird and unattractive. It sounds bloody stupid when you put it like that doesn’t it?

But in discussions of feminism, sex and equality, I don’t like to play the victim. Talking about my personal experiences is fine, but it doesn’t cover the half of it. I’m well aware that my thought processes should change, that I shouldn’t put my worth into a boy’s opinion of me, but that’s besides the point. We should be looking at why this type of relationship exists, why boys treat girls this way, and why it’s so common and yet rarely talked about

Going back to talking about my own personal experiences, there are a few reasons behind why I think I put up with it. One is that my own self worth is so damaged that I believe I deserve this type of treatment. I also blame that on some of my relationships with boys, it’s all I’ve known, so it’s all I think I deserve. It’s also a way of self harm for me. I know these boys are going to hurt me in the long run, I know they’ll leave from the get go, and yet I pursue it with everything. I know it’s going to break me, and yet I go for it. Maybe because I know it will reassure my theory of this, that I’m only wanted by boys if I’m using my body.  I was reading through a DBT course book recently and there was a paragraph that really resonated with what I’m trying to say: “The suffering of the woman who submits to dull, loveless sex without saying a word is different only in degree from that of the woman who stays in a relationship in which she was violently raped by her partner. Many women live in such a perpetual nightmare of pain and discomfort that they don’t recognise pain and suffering…This in itself is a painful discovery, for a woman must suddenly confront the fact that she was taught by a culture to accept suffering and pain as natural for her.”