Spencer - Secret sex lives: a year on the fringes of American sexuality

A Year on the Fringes of
American Sexuality

Suzy Spencer

BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

BERKLEY BOOKS

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Copyright 2012 by Suzy Spencer.

Cover design by Diana Kolsky.

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PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spencer, Suzy.

Secret sex lives : a year on the fringes of American sexuality / Suzy Spencer.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-61174-6

1. SexUnited StatesCase studies. 2. Sexual fantasiesUnited StatesCase studies. 3. Sexual excitementUnited StatesCase studies. I. Title.

HQ18.U5S64 2012

306.70973dc23

2012005724

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however the story, the experiences and the words are the authors alone.

This book describes the real experiences of real people. The author has disguised the identities of some, but none of these changes has affected the truthfulness and accuracy of her story.

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

To the lonely
You are not alone.

Ive always hated touch.

I spent much of my childhood and youth screaming, Dont touch me! Dont touch me! as my uncleby marriage, I feel I need to addchased me around the dining table determined to touch me. My family watched and laughed, thinking this game of chase was cute and fun.

It wasnt to me.

Touch from women was equally horrible. My mother knew better than to hug me. But she was a typical mom who yearned for the feel of her child. So every once in a while shed try to sneak a graze of a fingertip across my skin, and in less than a millisecond my body would jerk and Id jump, never realizing what I was doingor had doneuntil Id find myself standing on the other side of the room.

Im not saying that I dont like touch because Ive been raped or abused; I dont know that I have or havent been. I have no memories of such, even though I do know that I frequently behave like someone who has been abused. I had a gynecologist who suggested that might be due to the fact that Id been around so many people who had been abused that Id absorbed their feelings and actions. I once counted up how many of my friends had been raped or molested. I want to say the number was nine out of ten. But even with their histories of rape and abuse, none of them seemed to have this terror of touch that I did.

I asked my mother when this refusal to let people touch me started, thinking that if I knew when it began, I could determine the cause, and then I could deal with it. She just said, Youve always been like this.

So maybe I was born this way. I dont know.

But whatever the cause, and despite years of therapy with more than a half dozen shrinks, thats where I was in December of 2004, when I sat in my town house in Austin, Texas, and first clicked on Craigslist.org, the San Franciscobased website that connects people with jobs, apartments, platonic friends, long-term lovers, and seekers of one-night stands all over the world. I scrolled down its list of locations and lingered, then stopped, on Ohio, a state I hoped represented America in its deepest, truest red, white and blue. I clicked and stared at its personals sectionsstrictly platonic, women seeking women, women seeking men.

I dont think I needed an entire hand to count the number of dates Id had since Id returned to my home state of Texas fifteen years before. I do know that Id never considered meeting people over the Internet. After all, rapists and murderers stalk the net for victims. But I figured if I met someone over the Internet, and just talked to that person over the Internet, surely Id be safe. No one would have to know who I truly was or where I lived. And there would definitely be no touching.

I scrolled down furthermen seeking women, men seeking men.

Then, there it was, the personals section I wantedcasual encounters. It was for those seekers of one-night stands, if not half-hour stands. Before entering casual encounters, I read the Craigslist warnings that anonymous sex with multiple partners could increase ones chance of getting a sexually transmitted disease, including HIV, and that the casual encounters section included adult content. I swore that I was over eighteen years of age, moved my cursor to enter, and paused.

Just a few months before Id sat with most of my family at a big round table in my favorite Chinese restaurant. I need a family meeting, I announced.

They turned and looked at me. Wed never had a family meeting in our lives. I took a deep breath. Im thinking about writing a book about sex. It was hard to even say the word sex. It was a word that wasnt mentioned in our family, unless it was uttered in a tone of disgust.

They sat in silence. Each one of them was widowed or divorced and had been for years, if not decades. And Ive never been married. I thought that was irrelevant, though. Id be writing about other peoples sex lives, not exposing my ownor the lack thereof.

My aunt, who was a church secretary, and my eldest cousin, who was a jail chaplain, emphatically stated that they were against the idea.

I looked to my mother. Her opinion was the one that really mattered. Shed been an independent businesswoman, and from the way she held her head, I knew she was running her internal calculator. Shes always told me Im the only one in the family who knows what shes thinking. When I read in her blue eyes that shed hit total, I knew her answer. She was for the book.

My youngest cousin, whom wed always considered the least practical and thoughtful of any of us, sat quietly. Finally, he spoke. You could use the book to teach kids. He was a teacher in a private Christian school. Besides, he said, and he got very thoughtful again, youre too old to be tempted by any of this.