Sex Object (4 page)

Before I left Roosevelt Island to go to junior high school, I told Matt that I would be going to a different school next year—a newly opened technology-focused junior high in Manhattan. I filled out the application myself and thought I was very clever when in the box for “doodles” I drew pictures of palm trees and pyramids—a sign, I thought, they would take as an eye toward the global.
Not just any doodles!

We talked, alone, outside of the school building standing closer than we ever had before and he promised he would come see me in the after-school plays that I performed with a local theater group. That we were friends. That it wouldn't be the last time we saw each other. But it was.

COME ON,
HE SAYS.
SHOW US HOW GOOD YOU WOULD SUCK A
DICK
.

A guy who goes to my school takes the Blow Pop lollipop out of Jen's mouth before he puts it back in. Then he takes it out again. At first she looks confused but when he smiles she starts to exaggerate her lips around the red sphere and makes a coy face. He laughs and says,
That's nice
.

We are standing in front of our junior high school building on 33rd Street, out to lunch because we're allowed to leave school if we want to buy food at McDonald's or go to a diner to eat.

He comes over to me next, even after I say
no way
, and grabs the thin white lollipop stick coming out of my mouth. I clamp my teeth down and look at him, straight in the eyes, I hope now. He laughs again and says to his friend,
At least she wouldn't let go
. This is how I learned what blow jobs are.

At home, I spend a few afternoons in my room with one of my friends writing stories about sex in pen and red marker in
our white and black composition notebooks. We create dialogue and use descriptors like “hot dog” and “squirting milk.” I hide the notebooks behind my dresser wrapped in a nightshirt with a kitten on the front—something my mother brought home from her store for me.

When my parents find a joking note that my friend Jen has sent me about sucking dick—about blue-purple penises and tongues—they want me not to see her anymore, insisting that anyone who writes like that knows too much. Later Jen will tell all of us that she had an abortion in the sixth grade and point to a scar on her abdomen as proof. We'll all suspect she is lying but it won't be until another friend's older sister explains how abortions are actually done that we'll know for sure. But still, we won't say anything to her.

I met my junior high school friends on the first day of school in a basement cafeteria where the overhead lights flickered. There was a group of five of them, sitting at the same table, who all lived on Governors Island because their parents were in the Coast Guard. We made the long trek to the island after school and on weekends because it's the most adult-free place I have ever been. It feels special and secret because I'm not allowed to be there unless one of my friends “sponsors” me—putting me on a list of people allowed to come on the base.

I don't think I ever meet one of my friends' parents and we spend most of our time running around playing manhunt and hanging out at the island bowling alley, which has a Burger King attached to it. Sometimes Jen pretends to get drunk on one beer.
I peed my pants!
she squeals, though she hasn't. The rest of us play along though, pretending to lift her up and carry her back home.

One weekend we decide to take pictures with a disposable camera so we can enter ourselves into a
Seventeen
magazine modeling contest. We dress in what we think are our nice clothes. I wear jeans and a semisheer flowered top borrowed from a friend, and we take pictures of each other on swings, in the grass, and posed on top of rocks. When we get the pictures back, developed, we laugh at them together but secretly hope ours are maybe not so bad and maybe even the best ones and worthy of submission. One of my friends tells me if my nose
wasn't so fucking big
I would win for sure.

Another weekend we go to San Gennaro's feast downtown and buy wine coolers from a corner store that we keep in brown paper bags as we walk around. We are twelve.

We meet a group of boys who are seniors in high school and want our phone numbers even though we tell them we are in seventh grade. Instead they give us theirs, and I write the shortest one's beeper number on my arm in brown eyeliner from my purse. He tells me his uncle is John Gotti and we feign amazement. I never use his number but I also don't wash it off for a few days, hiding it from my parents under long sleeves and showing it off to my friends at school. A girl with us that night ends up getting pregnant by one of these men; I'll hear years later in high school that they maybe got married.

I don't tell my friends that one day a week after school I am
going to acting class, putting on year-end plays like I have every year since second grade. It seems too eager, too uncool.

I STARTED PERFORMING IN THE THIRD GRADE, A YEAR AFTER MY
parents got me into an elementary school on Roosevelt Island—the result of a months-long campaign to have my sister and me transferred out of our shitty zoned school in Queens. The first play we put on was
Oliver
, and I was cast as both an orphan and “Old Sally,” a character who gives someone a locket at some point. I don't remember why.

In the first of three performances, when I got out onstage for my Old Sally lines I realized that I had left the locket on the prop table, where it was outlined with a black marker. And so instead of saying my lines, I stayed mute and didn't move, didn't breathe, while the audience laughed. After the laughing died down and it was silent again, a fellow cast member ran offstage to get the locket and came back to bring it to me. Only when the necklace was in my hands, my fingers wrapped around the locket, was I able to speak again.

I started to get better parts and more lines, which I traced over with yellow highlighter to help me memorize them. By sixth grade I landed a lead: Rosie in
Bye Bye Birdie
. I was the youngest girl to get the role, and I was supposed to feign sexiness and experience. My big solo required me to rip off a jacket to reveal a fringed and red-sequined short skirt underneath. I
got to wear bright pink lipstick. The choreographer—one of my friends' mom—whispered in my ear before I went onstage that I should
bring it hard
.

Later, I played Nancy in
Little Mary Sunshine
—a character who has a boyfriend but loves attention from any and all men. One of my songs is “Naughty Nancy,” and in another I sang about wanting to be like a spy who seduces men for information.
Oh what a wicked girl was she, that's the kind of girl I want to be.

My friend Dave, who was in the theater group with me, said I probably got the part because I had the “figure” for it. Even at eleven years old Dave talked like he was a grown man. A few years later he would ask me if I knew my boyfriend “in the biblical sense.”
You mean like fucking?

I continued to perform throughout high school, and we did fewer musicals in favor of “real” plays. The better parts started to go to kids whose parents gave the most money to the theater, we heard, and my parents gave nothing. On the last day of our last performance the woman who had taught and directed me from third grade on, who had the same name as my mother, gave me a card saying she was proud of me, listing off some of the roles I'd had over the years. Later, after the show, I compared mine with that of another friend who was also a senior. Except for the list of roles, the inscription in her card said the same thing that mine did word for word. A few other people, those who played more main characters, got messages that were longer, more personalized.

MY DAUGHTER IS NERVOUS. SHE'S FIVE YEARS OLD, BUT SHE
knows that once she turns six, she'll have to dance on a real stage in front of a real audience for her ballet performance. Right now, at the end of the year, parents take off their shoes and file into a small ballet studio and sit in folding chairs up against the mirrored wall and watch their children perform in the same room that they learn in weekly. We watch these tiny humans dance and jump around with complete abandon and joy. They wave to us, trip and fall, their headbands falling down around their eyes, and they don't care because their parents and grandparents are right there smiling and taking pictures.

But when they turn six, the performance moves to a stage—a fact that both thrills and terrifies Layla. She wants to be a “real ballerina” but is afraid of all the people watching her. I tell her not to worry because the people in the audience are on her side. They will be thrilled just to see her dance happily.

She wants to know if her teacher can come up with her, if she can wait in the wings or just dance like she normally does—for her parents, in a room with her friends. The night before her last performance as a five-year-old child I have a dream about being in a play that I never bothered to learn the lines for. A dream about yellow highlighters and scripts bound in three-ring binders that I desperately thumb through in the moments before I'm supposed to step onstage.

I want to tell her that she can quit, that she doesn't need to perform if she doesn't want to. But I know it's bad advice,
setting a bad example. I also know that she might like being onstage. Sometimes the best moments are right before a performance when you're backstage putting on makeup that you would normally never wear and fixing your hair in a certain way and looking at the lineup of costumes you'll have on. And then when it's done, when you get onstage, the hot lights make you sweat but the way people look at you, look to you, for how they should feel and what to do is a power of sorts. I have always liked it, despite the fear.

I WAS WALKING FROM THE CITY HALL SUBWAY STATION TO MY
high school on Chambers Street when I noticed my nipples sticking out. The white shirt with the small bow on the neckline had seemed sweet when I put it on that morning, but outside of the darkened train tunnels I could see the outline of my areolas when I looked down.

I had neglected to wear a “T-shirt bra”—the slightly padded lie that female breasts are Barbie-smooth. I crossed my arms in front of my chest but soon realized that would be an impossible pose to keep throughout the day in class and in the hallways. So I pulled the straps of my JanSport backpack a few inches off my shoulders and in, so that their shadow would cover the points. It started to rain.

I have normally had very good luck with my breasts. They grew at a reasonable pace, at a normal age, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen years old I wore a respectable B cup. The real fortune, though, was that before then—when I needed my first bra—I didn't have to go far to get it. My
parents' lingerie and clothing store, though hopelessly uncool, was an easy place to get a training (AAA-cup) bra without the embarrassment of department store shopping. For some girls this was a rite of passage with their mothers; for me it was just another day at my mom's store—with my aunt, who was the manager—watching on.

A salesgirl (she was in her sixties, but this is what they were called) named Mickey helped to measure me, taking me into the small dark dressing room with an accordion-style door and pressing limp white tape up against my skin. Looking back, I realize this must have been just for show because I had no real breasts to speak of yet, but I appreciated the formality with which she measured me. I got three bras: one in white, one in beige, and one in black. They were ribbed cotton and had a bow in the middle where my cleavage should have been.

Within two years, I was wearing a full C cup. So at fourteen years old, I had the body that I would always have. Outside of the leers from strange men on the subway, though, I didn't give a lot of thought to my breasts. I was glad to have them, glad that I was “normal.” Glad that I had something, finally, that made me forget about my face. And so when I left junior high with what I thought seemed like a reasonably womanish body and improving makeup skills, I was optimistic that I could leave behind my reputation as the nerdy one of my friends.

Stuyvesant High School was supposed to be the best public high school in the city. Or at least the hardest to get into. We were a school of consummate test-takers, students who were
praised simply for our presence at a freshman orientation in a packed Tribeca auditorium where we were told by the principal that “cream rises to the top.” To get into the school students had to take an SAT-like test that would qualify them for admission, hopefully, to one of three specialized schools in New York. Those with the highest grades went to Stuy.

My parents started talking to me about this test when I was still in elementary school.
You're going to Stuyvesant, right, Jessica?
my dad would ask in front of my aunts, uncles, and sometimes strangers in bookstores or parks. My father—so smart as a boy that he skipped seventh grade—had wanted to go to the school. But at thirteen years old he got caught stealing a car and a guidance counselor told him he was no longer eligible to take the entry test. This was a lie that shaped the rest of his young adulthood, a missed opportunity that I was expected to make up for.

I was to take the test for the same reason my parents spent months working the education system to move us to the elementary school on Roosevelt Island, sent me to a ballet class that I hated and was too clumsy for, and later would make me visit colleges that I had no chance of getting into. It was a move that a friend from the Bronx would later call the “outer-borough shuffle”—the hustle of middle-class parents who had the time and knowledge to fuck with the system. A lot of times it worked, a lot of times it didn't. But either way it left me with the feeling that I should always try for more than I had been given, even if I felt unsure what to do once I got it.

And so my father and my mother put money aside and sent me to a Kaplan course every week for months before the test was scheduled. I rode the subway to a midtown classroom where I would take practice tests and learn how to strategically skip questions, narrow down answers, and otherwise up my chances of getting in. My parents tell me that I didn't sleep for weeks before the test, instead walking around the house in the middle of the night. The evening after I finally completed the test, though—sitting in a room in the old Stuyvesant building in the East Village surrounded by strangers and a few friends from junior high—I slept for thirteen hours straight. My parents tell me this is how they knew that I got in.

In a school of math and science aficionados, the girl with well-developed boobs is queen. I went from being the dowdy friend of cute girls to the dowdy friend with big tits. I was being asked on dates, a lot of dates. Proper dates to pool halls and movie theaters, lunches at a diner on the weekend or a walk to Central Park. I had boyfriends—more than one! Later, in between high school relationships, my male friends would jokingly/not jokingly ask to “talk business” with me—code for
let's negotiate how it's in your best interest to suck my dick
. I turned them down but was secretly pleased nonetheless. It hadn't yet occurred to me that the boys my age would want to hook up for any other reason than
they liked me
.

I was not the smartest kid in the class anymore. To my friends and the high-achieving types around me, I was barely literate. That I could cut class and still come out with a good
grade irked them. That I didn't mind when I got a shitty grade baffled them. Instead I was the girl who lost her virginity freshman year, who wore tight tops and bright lipstick. The girl who embarrassed her best friends by talking too much and too loudly about sex and joked about penis sizes. The girl who, when given an assignment to come up with the first line of dialogue in a play written in iambic pentameter, handed in a page of paper that read, “So how / long did / it take / for him / to come.”

I got 95s in the classes I loved and 65s in the classes I hated, making me what the guidance counselors there would consider low achieving, an embarrassment to a school full of Westinghouse science award winners and National Merit Scholars. Students with just-okay grades were roundly ignored in favor of the real students, the ones who could up the school's rate of kids who got into Ivies. My counselor/gym teacher had one meeting with me, recommended I go to a city community college, and never spoke to me again.

I tried not to think about it and ended my senior year with a trip to the Bahamas—a weeklong vacation not sanctioned by the school but put together by student “leaders” who made it sound official enough that our parents thought it safe to ship off their teens to the beach during spring break. We were seventeen and eighteen years old but still were able to get free amaretto sours in the hotel casino and then, later, take buses to a club where we had to wear bracelets marking us as underage. They served us anyway.

The first night that my friends and I tried the green “hand
grenade” cocktails served in plastic cups with huge straws, we decided to enter a wet T-shirt contest. We lined up near the stage, giggling, believing someone would throw a bucket of water on us as we wore white shirts emblazoned with the club's logo. When we got onstage, though, the three of us watched as other girls—college girls and adult women—started to take their clothes off. All of their clothes. The music was too loud to hear if they said anything as they did this, and the men's screams from the audience almost drowned out the music anyway. The more the women danced, the closer the audience inched to the stage, some hands grabbing at their ankles as they walked by. There was no water.

We whispered to each other on the staircase leading to the stage, asking what we were supposed to do when our turn came around. The bouncer behind us had our real shirts in a pile in his arms. We finally settled on a quick flash and laughed as we did it, and hurried offstage.

Later, on the dance floor, a short man in his fifties walked up to me, smiling, and leaned in close.
I thought you should have won
, he said. I said thank you.

During that trip I found out that a boy named Joe liked me, and because he had gotten good-looking over the course of the year I hooked up with him on the dance floor of a club and then later, in his hotel room. The hand job I was giving him was taking too long, though, so I blew him instead to get it over with. I didn't think much of him the rest of the trip until at the airport
waiting to go home he yelled at me in front of a crowd that you can't just suck someone's dick and then leave. I was hungover and apologized a few weeks later. For what, I wasn't sure. I just felt confused as to why he cared so much.

Before we graduated my male friends—a group of guys whom I loved and revered as hilarious and down-to-earth—let it slip that they had a nickname for me:
Valentitty.
I laughed when they told me this because that is what you do when you want to be the cool-girl friend who doesn't give a shit. The girl who isn't uptight like the others.

JESSICA VALENTI BREAST.

If you Googled my name in 2006, this was one of the first “related searches” that came up as a suggestion.

If you're searching for Jessica Valenti, maybe you're also looking for her tits!

This algorithmic embarrassment was the result of a twenty-second-long interaction in which I took a group photo with President Bill Clinton along with other then-bloggers. Soon after, a law professor/blogger posted the picture online and suggested I was posing provocatively, that I had worn inappropriate clothing, and that I “should have worn a beret.”

“Blue dress would have been good too,” she wrote.

This woman, known in part for her rants on YouTube, encouraged her followers when they published suggestive com
ments. One wrote a limerick about my fellating the former president. Another suggested I was too plain to inspire the Monica comparisons. I got phone calls with men breathing and laughing.

Soon, hundreds of blogs were dissecting what I thought was a perfectly innocuous picture, debating whether my posture suggested I was trying to stick my tits out, whether I had worn a tight sweater on purpose—one podcast even theorized that as I wasn't nearly important enough to be invited to such a meeting I must have been placed there to entice Clinton into an affair.

The mainstream media picked it up. The political video show
Bloggingheads
—which would later be run at the
New York Times
—devoted an episode to it, with the founder of the series, Bob Wright, calling me the “famous breast woman.” A young reporter at Politico also covered the story, inviting the before-mentioned law professor to expound on the months-long harassment campaign, which he called a “dust-up.”

Jessica Valenti, who runs and blogs on feministing.com, is standing at an angle with a slight arch in her back, making the focal point of the photo, whether intentional or not, her breasts. Valenti isn't shy about her body; she just published a book called
Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters
.

Publishing a book with a catchy title meant I
wasn't shy about my body
. When I called him on the carpet (Feministing post title: “Two Words for POLITICO: Fuck. You.”), the reporter and Politico doubled down, publishing a live chat on the topic. One reader asked why he didn't talk to me before publishing the story.

My research consisted of reading Althouse and Valenti's version of what happened, and speaking with Althouse. I e-mailed Valenti to speak with her about it but she says that she didn't get it. I can't find it in my sent mail so something must have malfunctioned.

“Malfunctioned.”

We can also wade into the dispute between Althouse and Valenti: Does Valenti use sexuality for self-promotion? If she does, who cares? And if she does and nobody cares, why not just say so?

I am just grateful memes weren't too big a thing yet. Here is the truth: I look good in that photo. My breasts are fine. But I cannot help their presence in a picture that I also inhabit. I cannot help what or that you think about them.

As I read through comment after comment, blog post after blog post, I cried in the living room of my parents' house. My mother, who has always lived in Queens and rarely has left, said she was considering looking this blogger up, taking a plane to Wisconsin, and kicking her ass. My mother does not make idle threats: my father later told me she had researched flights.

Weeks earlier, when I told my parents I had been invited to meet President Clinton, they had both started weeping. They told family, friends, and random people who came into their store. Before the group picture became a joke about blow jobs and interns, they had it tacked up behind their cash register.

I was proud, too, but said nothing at the actual meeting—too afraid of sounding stupid. I was the youngest person in the room and knew I didn't deserve to be there. The “dustup” around the photo just confirmed it.

Right before I started blogging, I went to my five-year high school reunion. I was excited to drive home this point to friends I hadn't seen since graduation, friends to whom I was “a character” and the “fun” one.

While on line to get into the party, I ran into someone who was a friend on the periphery of our group—a tall nice guy who none of us knew was insanely wealthy until his mom threw him a surprise graduation party at their Brooklyn Heights duplex. We tried to catch up as we moved forward, closer to the party. He told me about Harvard and when I mentioned to him I was in graduate school he laughed.
That's the last thing I expected to hear about you
, he said. I got drunk and took him home.