The Fantasy of the Girl Corrupted!
on age gap relationships, the weaponized burden of agency, and the chronic boredom of teenage girls.
the insurmountable tragedy of being eighteen is that the world becomes accessible to you, gates to prohibited proclivities that were earlier forbidden open up, the doe eyed mindlessness crosses the threshold of jailbait and wearing this dissociation is de rigeur, like a shiny medal around my neck looking to be gleaned and polished. The naivete of eighteen does not transcend the brazen fucking stupidity of it, the sheer gall one possesses when the arbitrary crescendo of the number game is reached is infallible, or so it was to me.
immediately after I turned eighteen, I caught myself going on so many dates, with ever so slightly older men. At eighteen, you think you know the world and the full expanse of human emotion, and then twenty staggers along like my drunk father on my birthday eve and the what the absolute fuck!!!!-ness of it all sets in. even the memory of being eighteen feels like a distant dream, floating over me like a blacked out night, another thing of frequency in my eight-teen’s. the alarm bells at eighteen sound like beckoning calls, the death knell? sweet sound of music glossing over conversations. Rayne fisher’s essay on The Pain Gap is painfully resonant, for when i look at pictures of myself at eighteen, a pungent odor fills the room, i am only now learning to love the child cosplaying as an adult, there is so much kindness that is waiting to be ushered in and at twenty one, i haven’t opened the floodgates yet.
eighteen is all about chronic boredom, hedonistic ennui, a disparaging avoidance that is hubris manifest, and an all encompassing malaise that creeps up on your body. i was thoroughly fixated on my sleep paralysis demon as I turned eighteen, he was slender man and my lover all at once. the Atwoodian male gaze monologue rolled off my tongue as easily as desperation did, boredom remained the sluggish constant. the dissatisfaction of an eighteen year old is depressing and flat, it is almost a complete thought, and yet not so much. we often tend to confuse and intellectualize our dispassionate boredom for intelligence and that remains a fatal flaw of such a pernicious age. Here is a journal entry from then -
‘boredom is depressing, it is so exhausting sitting around twiddling my hair in my fingers for nobody to cross the door, to wait on the precipice of something big is so fucking trite, unleash the institutionalized manics into the public domain, purge the farce of civility, raze offices temples mosques churches monasteries to the ground, plunge the unsound mind into a vacuum of children thwart the fugitives out into the open. I am so exhausted of sitting by the window of a man’s shitty apartment waiting for someone to walk in, i would rather he walk right in, gut my insides and hang them out to dry on the umbrella hook. I lived adolescence on edge when my body was getting violated like a cook book recipe routine, i would rather lick my wounds than wait for them to appear as welts on my skin. the blood clots have gone awry and i am bored.’
it would benefit to remember that this was written as the first year of university introduced Namdeo Dhasal into the coursework and at a time when I was balls deep into American and French body horror. even if the reader does not judge my eighteen year old self harshly, i would but then again a dear friend has told me that self awareness as gratification is passe, so i must persist beyond it. the aforementioned entry was made in a moment of nothingness, and nothingness is a space you occupy, it isn’t the absence of something but the presence of a null invalid cavity. occupying such a cavity at the age of eighteen especially when my earlier years had been so full of violations felt vindictive, something bad happening to me was better than nothing happening at all.
so i would sit with a hazed look on the couches of poorly maintained apartments masquerading as ‘minimalist’, listen to their trashy music, and gape at their drug addled stories from university, i would often feel bitter when these short-term engagements would ultimately come to an end, always as a declaration, one or the other would cite my age as the limitation. old enough to fuck, this afterthought stayed with me as a little souvenir from these meandering arrangements. it wasn’t my age that pushed these men away, after all it is what drew them in in the first place, the perversion of immaturity is yearned for in the inner circle of men, they adore it when you listen to them talk about Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex and they love it even more when you abandon all thought to let them teach you the ways of their sexual exploits, they crave the newness of an unflinching pout except until it oversteps the line of playfulness. they love it when you challenge their myopic understanding of socialism, but only until you could cede ground to make room for more invigorating banter!
finding out that no man wants to really know an eighteen year old was devastating for me at that age, i read Proust and tolerated their shitty art, i felt cheated when i discovered that my interiority was of no interest to them. older men dating 18 year olds seldom do, they revere the image of the younger naive girl, a signifier of sensationalist abandon that they could mold and shape accordingly in order to suit their fantasy. this fantasy of a Girl Corrupted withers away when dawn breaks, because relationships need more than a wistful blowjob and a couple of sugarcoated lies.
men adore the fantasy of the barely legal girl, they love the iconography of girlhood even more when it becomes decently attainable to them, they devour the image of a girl too coy to suck cock but not coy enough to deny them, they crave the appetizing promise of a girl’s admission to her own adolescence only insofar that it does not interrupt their fantasy, the naivety must not by any means transcend the threshold of their desire, their desire was earned by the cajoling innocence at the precipice of a breakthrough but when this coyishness translated into real material needs, it took too little for coy to mutate and morph into needy, immature, crazy even.
i thought i was acting ahead of my age by memorizing the rules of such an unwinnable game, i behaved, i acted accordingly, i perfected my stride and reminded myself time and again of the mandate. suck well, but not too well so that he would feel threatened, speak, but not too much so as to take up space, communicate, but never to the point of assertion, be self assured, but always with an asterisk, keep your legs open, but never at the beginning and never too soon but not too late either, perform, but make it seamless, effortless, perfected to the penultimate moment.
so on and so forth, i was perfectly content by this arduous performance, it bore me no understanding, no love, no recognition that i was a person beyond the smallness of my time, but the patronizing touch satiated my entitlement to an accolade for the performance i was hyphenating and punctuating with every passing second. now when i look back at this moment of abject satisfaction, i recognize the betrayal of it all, i deluded myself back then into willing my ‘agency’ into existence, when i could not see that it was as clear as day that these men did not care if i was concealing my performance well enough or not. all that mattered to them was my wide eyed mystification coupled with a willing mouth - to speak, to use, to amuse.
one man bragged to me about how roughhousing his ex led to him giving her chemical burns, another man broke down into tears after slapping me in bed because he felt so guilty, an older man administered molly to me for the first time and then confessed how my newly lost innocence excited him, i broke the mold of the breezy childish new girl the moment i texted a man for weeks until he told me he was no more interested in going out with me only after spending weeks telling me how he couldn’t wait to date me.
having been violated in the past before the perilous age of eighteen, i found these experiences passable. the threshold of distress when lowered to the ground makes for the acceptability of anything and everything not-cartoonishly-evil. with better foresight now, i am still not insinuating that these men are predatory and abusive, far from it in fact. i am simply placing my year of unmitigated pain under the microscope and undoing the guilt the comes from it. having navigated the cast of victimhood imposed onto me by men who did not know better in my formative teenage years, the role played and staged at eighteen were a little different, here there was no culpability, no accountability to the law, no colossal moral misgiving that would push these men over to the side of wrongdoing. i struggled to make sense of a world then, wherein i was wronged and yet somehow, there was no perpetrator, in its loud technicality.
even at twenty one, i find it hard to chalk it up to the grey zone of interpersonal relationships, because for such a grey zone to stand in attendance, there needs to be the absence of a glaring power dynamic, an obvious upper hand, a stark and fundamental different in age - all conditions met at the big age of eight and ten.
the truth of the matter is that there is no confessional for such crimes, it is not that i was groomed, it isn’t that i was preyed on, i willfully entered these arrangements; so to examine this burden of guilt that i have carried, as have many women like me, is a challenging task. can we really chalk it up to demanding that teenagers know better while fully grown men are excused and given the luxury of a willful amnesia? i know that the man who slapped me in bed because he asked and i said yes, does not lose a night of sleep, it becomes rather convenient to ask a teenage girl why she agreed to something instead of asking a man why he wanted it in the first place.
the sexual revolution and its failings have been monumental in throwing girls turned women overnight into the throes of scrutiny, turning the question of agency on its head and declaring that on the eve of her 18th birthday, yesterday’s jailbait becomes today’s independent woman capable of making her own decisions and being responsible for them. the tragedy of gendered sexual politics reveals its insidiousness as it stakes that claim that teenagers are to be held responsible for not knowing better. the one sidedness of pain for teenage girls in inflated relationships with older men only exposes the wound of a legitimate anguish, chalked up to a Girl Scorned. the cultural anxiety that underlies our milieu is more concerned in assessing the jurisdiction and lawfulness of a girl’s pain than investigating the desires of men. to a patriarchal economy of entitlement and acquittal, there is nothing more threatening than the prospect of asking a man to critically examine his desires, to place them under a microscope as women do their shame, and dissect it. it is much easier to dwell in the ambit of negation wherein desire exists in a vacuum, it is much easier to point your finger at a woman and ask her why she let something transpire, than to deconstruct the fallibility of masculinity.
sexual politics of the body demand too little of men while demanding all too much from teenage girls, men are acquitted by default in the trial of public opinion, their position is distilled to that of a spectator, a non participant in the omission of a complete relationship. the man is bequeathed the honorary benefit of doubt in his intentions while the teenage girl is married off to the burden of proof. in the absence of a law broken, a woman’s pain is a misdemeanor at best.
i scoured the internet for a select favorite tweet of mine today, it reads ‘my favorite conspiracy theory is that he regrets what he did to me’. there is an abundant amount of literature on the cornerstone of unrequited love, there is very little about the misgivings of an unrequited pain. one of the greatest comforts of a relationship ending is knowing that the both of you have been marred and changed forever by the nature of the time shared, this is seldom witnessed in age-gap relationships. the closing scene of Call Me by Your Name closes with Elio sobbing over the phone, while Oliver gets to move onto a relationship with a woman his age. the lapse in the way which the climax affects the two stages an obvious discrepancy in pain, some of my most fulfilling relationships have been consummated in closure by the knowledge of mutual hurt. however, i know far too well that the countless men who have either violated me or have found their way around the rulebook by deriving their charming cheat codes do not bat an eyelid towards the thought of me. the authenticity that I felt at eighteen begins to wither away as it is replaced by the decay and rot of the glaring incongruity in pain.
there is an indiscernible distance in mapping this pain, in pinning it down and saying - see! it is real and tested to be true! - there is no semantical category that could cover the far reaching expanse of such an agony, no dictionary to clock it in, no jury that would render it legitimate. in the absence of a glossary that can plot and chart this pain, teenage girls are left to become women learning to placate and quell a suffering that rests in the horizon of gilded discovery.
i hope the next time i think about my eighteen year old self, she is on the receiving end of much more empathy and understanding than she allowed herself then.