Alyson DeYoung - He-Slut
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What is marriage without true love? What is sex without respect? If an independent woman falls in the woods, will misogynists hear it at the farthest distance? After a childhood of fatherly abandonment and emotional abuse, a high school student finds the parents she always wanted, her boyfriends parents. The boy seems stable, his upbringing was loving, and he knows how to smile. The family is everything she wanted, and after he is unfaithful, she hangs on in hopes that he will change and she will never have to face uncertainty again. Nine years later, she has no choice but to evaluate her life and marriage after disaster strikes. Is feminism dead, or is the battle for civil rights waiting to be discovered by a new generation? The story of one is a story of many. He-Slut: A Memoir follows one womans decade of growing up, learning who she is, and becoming that person. This is a story of love that never was and discovering what its like to love oneself.
Alyson DeYoung: author's other books
Who wrote He-Slut? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Alyson DeYoung
Jeffrey Zuckerman
Amy Clipston
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Knox
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Cover Art: Mark Kirkwood
ISBN: 978-1-4835510-9-8
For Marye, who saved my life.
Contents
January 6, 2015
Oakland, California
I didnt find myself until I faced being alone in the world. I am in love with what I found. Five years after the separation from my ex-husband, I can see how I got where I am and how beautiful the path Ive walked has been.
I grew up in an emotionally abusive home with my mother. My father had left me with her as a newborn. Although he openly refers to her as crazy, he didnt stop to consider how that would impact me. Somewhere between hostility and neglect, perhaps you can see how I came to view Josh as a blessing. We started dating when I was sixteen, and his parents are beautiful. I love them still. But Josh didnt inherit any of his familys values. After nearly a decade of cheating, lying, manipulation, and mental abuse, I finally learned that all the caring in the world wont change someone who doesnt want to work on himself. No, if anything all he did was take out his feelings of self-loathing on the one person who knew what he was struggling with and tried to help.
I began writing this memoir in the week after my sexual assault. I can only speculate now why my husband, who was supposed to care for me most, wanted me to maintain a friendship with someone who was openly a rapist. I have some ideas, but I find no point in that kind of rumination on this page.
Also, to say that Eric was obviously a rapist, while true, was not something people wanted to acknowledge. American culture desperately wants to put stock in the idea that most sexually coercive encounters are gray areas that sadly happened and hurt the women involved because of their own poor choices. I mean, do you want to believe that one out of four American women get raped? For every woman I saw coming out of something with Eric who looked confused, depressed, and vaguely terrified, I saw a number of people who wouldnt guess at why.
As it happened, none of us got what we wanted. Joshs motives, whatever they may have been, assuredly went unsatisfied. He suffered. I never got the secure home I could always return to. Eric never got the validation of consensual sex with me. Some rapists are angry, spiteful little creatures, and some rapists only want to be loved and respected- loved by women and respected by men. Insecurity can turn anyone in to a monster. Whats worse is that for every woman he had to force sex on, he most likely became more insecure. When I think of him now, its with pity. I feel recognized and appreciated by most of the people I meet, and a good portion of that is the love I now feel freely for myself.
I wrote this book in part because I wanted to explore what it is to be a slut today. If everyone is equal, then why is this word only used for women? I also wanted to explore what it is to be a woman today. Women, past and present, have been so good at putting themselves last. Do men really consider us equals, or are many of them just saying that to get laid? Is rape socialized in our culture? I would say it is.
When I started writing this book, the process was therapeutic. In 2010, I finished the rough draft. Everything Ive written is true to the best of my recollection. I say this because while its easy to remember the essence of what someone said a decade ago in passing, its difficult to recall verbatim. As I revised and made multiple drafts, I healed a good deal, and every time I looked through it again, I found it more and more awful to look at. Could I really share this information?
The answer was yes, because the main reason I wrote this down is for all the other women who have gone through something similar. The answers are different for everyone, but knowing someone else out there has experienced a bad marriage or a sexual assault could potentially be a comfort. When I started group therapy, that was what I found.
I also consider this a treasure personally, for all the variations of myself I can see in these writings. I see the eighteen-year-old college freshman unsure of where to go next, the outspoken twenty-year-old with big ideas and no place to grow them in a house with an indifferent post-punk vibe, the twenty-two-year-old unexpectedly thrown in to suburban living, and the distraught twenty-four-year-old who knew a marriage cant survive that much betrayal without knowing what needed to be changed. I can also see myself after I ended the memoir- at twenty-six, writing arts and entertainment articles for a small scene, immersing myself in the art that had always called me, and trying to decide what my life meant if I was all by myself; at twenty-seven, moving to Las Vegas to give my father a chance and seeing a place I didnt belong, especially with him, and the bitterness that consumed me there; coming full circle and moving to the Bay area at the age of twenty-nine and basking in a neo-hippie lifestyle, filled with love toward strangers, a smile on my face I couldnt remove if I tried, and being referred to as old-fashioned and traditional by my peers. Id never been called old-fashioned before!
What will I be now? I dont know, but Im willing to find out. Pursuing my own life has brought me what Ive needed, and I have the feeling that turning thirty means getting not just what I need, but what I want.
I hope that after you read this, you will take away from it that no matter what happens in the end, taking a chance on love is never a mistake. Its my hope that every time you think of the one you love in anger that you can open your arms and forgive them, because the day could come when you will be unable to. I dont have the answers, but in writing this my hope is that you will find answers for yourself. In the words of Mary Oliver, Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
In a way, we were a family. By the time we moved in together, we had known each other for years, although none of us were really adults yet, really. I didnt fit- I was years younger than the rest, and not only the girl of the group, but the girlfriend. Josh and I had gotten engaged eleven months before.
I was still hoping then that some big music whoever would come across Jan and make him someone important. Perhaps not even music, as Jan is also a talented actor. Hes always been pretending something. Maybe everyone does. In any case, he was the quirky nerd of the house, although none of us were as average as apple pie on the Fourth of July. There still is nobody like him at all.
Eric changed very little over the years. He was twenty when I met him, and he always pretty much stayed the same. I think if he reached any maturity at all, it was only enough to fulfill what was expected of him. The things he loved didnt change over time- laying around and listening to music, pot, partying, and generally having fun. When we moved in to the house on Briggs Boulevard, he had been working the same dead-end job for a while, and would continue to.
Josh was as motivated as Eric wasnt. He graduated college in four years, and proposed to me shortly before the second semester of his senior year. He had big dreams, and I loved him. He sparkled like diamonds. Of course, things were getting tougher every minute. He had graduated in an obscure field, just after the World Trade Towers fell. But even though nobody needed a facilities manager, whatever that really is, this fact was not getting him down yet.
I was dissatisfied with the entire living arrangement. The house was falling apart, and I couldnt keep it clean. None of it was ever my mess, anyway. By agreeing to move in with Joshs best friend, I hadnt known I was signing up to be the not-so-proud mother of three grown men. More often than not, we had a fifth roommate and were joined by a gaggle of secondary roommates- people who didnt live there, but constantly spent their time on our couches. All of this was in addition to planning a wedding, going to school, working on our bi-weekly paper, and a part-time job.
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