Hard to Get. Leslie Bell
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by the experience, angry at the men who pressured her to have sex with them, shocked that they could be such “assholes,” and sad that she felt so starved for attention that she allowed herself to be in such a vulnerable position. Over the course of the interviews, she reflected that perhaps she reacted against such experiences of exploitation by later using men as sex objects and playing them.
After this experience, Jayanthi’s strategy shifted from being a bad girl who was “up for anything” to being a bad girl who was in control. She began to use men for sex and became the player herself, by which she meant being a smooth talker, acting and talking as though she cared about the men with whom she was involved. But when playing men, she was just after sex and had no intention of becoming emotionally involved. She felt that she had been played by men earlier, but from those experiences she herself learned how to play, so she began juggling people and having sex with multiple partners without becoming emotionally involved. She used men for sex and dumped them when they became too serious or emotionally engaged. And she successfully avoided being hurt herself by steering clear of any emotional connection to the men she slept with. One of the ways in which she remained untouched emotionally was by hooking up primarily with African American men. These men became a solution and a part of her strategy—they weren’t white men, who oversexualized her, and they weren’t Indian American men, who undersexualized her. But they also weren’t “relationship material,” according to her family or herself, so this strategy “protected” her from the possibility of developing an emotional connection with the men.
When doing the playing herself, Jayanthi began to feel more desire and pleasure, and more able to say no to things she did not want. Being a player allowed her to be the subject in sex, the one calling the shots instead of the object responding to another’s desires. When she shifted to being the player herself, she began masturbating and discovering what she liked sexually, and she felt free to pursue her desires when she wanted or did not want to have sex. She would tell partners to stop if she did not enjoy an activity. And she began having orgasms, both through masturbation and with partners. At first she worried about what would happen during an orgasm—would she be scared; would she be loud? She challenged herself to masturbate in as many places as she could without being noticed: in an airplane seated next to people, while driving, or while in bed at relatives’ houses. She felt “bad-ass” about being able to do it, and it excited her at the same time that it relaxed her.
Being a bad girl did open space for Jayanthi to experiment sexually and to be with many sexual partners, despite her conservative upbringing. And it helped her to establish an identity independent of her parents and community. But with some distance, she reflected that those experiences were not driven by desire, and did not give her much sexual pleasure. Later, when she was doing the playing and felt more in control, Jayanthi began to figure out what she wanted sexually, when, and with whom. And she protected herself from harm by remaining emotionally distant. She later worried that her sense of independence and her knowledge of her own desires, so hard won during her “crazy time,” could be endangered by emotional attachment to a man.
STRONG IDENTITY VERSUS RELATIONSHIPS
Jayanthi found it difficult to be in an emotional and physical relationship with a man without losing her identity. In relation to men, she sometimes felt overwhelmingly emotionally connected to them and almost overtaken by that connection. Or she had dissociated experiences of sex in which she was not present. Or she had experiences of sex in which she was physically present and enjoying herself, but the personhood of the man was irrelevant or disregarded. The idea of both herself and a man maintaining strong identities3 seemed impossible—either they merged into one, or only one of them was a subject and the other the object.4 In order to be sexually active, Jayanthi managed this difficulty by alternately being a goody-goody girl who didn’t have sex but considered arranged marriage proposals from her parents, and being a very bad girl who had lots of casual and risky sex.
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