GUYS IT IS MY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!!! IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!!!1!

HELLO HELLLOOOOOOO HI HI GUYS I AM TWENTY! AND GUESS WHAT??????? I BEAT TEEN PREGNANCY! I AM OFFICIALLY NO LONGER A TEENAGER!!!!

And as I write this, I am actually a little melancholy and scared. I'm not sure if scared is the right word but I am certainly at least a little nervous because I can't really believe it. Being someone who, at times still feels a child, I find it odd that I now could only be further from that if I continue living. My seven years is up. I don't remember turning 13, but at the very least I do remember turning 16 and now I'm just not, and where has the time gone? I am no longer a teenager and no longer nineteen. And here I thought it was an enormous deal when I turned 18. I hadn't even known the half of it.

Anyways, my birthday is not actually the subject of this blogpost. I might make another blogpost about how today went or I'll code a miniblog so that I'm not making duplicate blogposts and ruining my shroud of mystery that comes from posting only every couple of months (although admittedly, I would love to post more often than I have been.) I'm going out with my friends and doing some stuff today, and I'll write about all that later.

Today's blogpost is about what the title suggests. That in Sicily all men are the same, and all women are either Madonnas or Whores (anybody get my reference???? no? its okay)

Anyway, I don't mean this literally. But, the topic does come up because as I age and grapple with my ever-burgeoninng sexuality, I realize how complex it is and how uncomfortable it makes me to acknowledge it. But, before I continue, I do need to warn you that even though there are mentions of sexual topics. Maybe don't read if you don't want to read about sex and slut-shaming. So; how did this come up? Last night I was on facetime with my aunt, discussing my birthday, boys, and the like, when two of her male coworkers overhear the things she is saying to me and decide to adjoin our conversation. She's essentially telling me nothing crazy; that it's okay to entertain multiple people at one time without committing to them, and to never like a boy more than he likes you. I learn a lot from this narrative, being that she is a woman well-versed in the art of dating and understanding men and boys, and I am very much not.

Then, here come the contrarians. One of the males, who we'll call Apple, lamented that a boy, if he is your friend, is just waiting for the opportunity to get with you sexually, especially if he is my age. And then he remarked that when he was my age, if he had ten female friends he was sleeping with seven or eight of them. He was sleeping with 70% - 80% of his female friends!! This may come as no surprise to some of you reading, but to me, this was a revelation that was either an acute exaggeration or an incredible insight into the aggressive nature of male sexuality that is designed to be either feared or challenged with an aggression of similar proportion.

Thus comes the other male behind the curtain, and we shall call him Grass. Grass comes into the frame to dispute my aunt's point of view, talking about how entertaining multiple people would make me a whore. My aunt asks him why I would be a whore, and he says that its because I'm a woman and it's not the same as if I were a man. This male lamented later in the conversation that in his earlier years, he used to be a whore himself! And once it is revealed to him that I am a virgin, he calls me 'wholesome' which is certainly an adjective I'm not going to refuse, but it did make me think of where this all originated from.

We all love our lovely, lovely Sigmund Freud. Without praising him too brazenly, I want to say that to some extent he was undeniably, incontrovertibly correct about the male channels of desire and love, which can never truly be separated, and how that can trickle down to the women he interacts with throughout his life. Yes, we are talking about the phenomena he saw throughout his male clients: the Madonna-Whore complex. What intrigues me most is that not only have I seen this complex in an innumerable quantity of men, but also in myself.

Let's go back to my freshman year of high school. I am fourteeen going on fifteeen, with a clear vision in mind for what I'd like to do with my life. My goal was to get straight A's, get accepted into Rice University's astronomy program, become a brilliant physicist or engineer and never be distracted by boys, partying, or even friends (the latter of which I was content with because I have always been a loner.) My journey to becominng a scholar began very quietly in this manner. But, staying true to my promise ultimately the first year as a highschool student was dry socially. Enter sophomore year when I was sixteen years old. I've transferred high schools against my will, but was still an exceptional student. And here we have a cousin that is very similar in age to me; only a year. She tells me that she has lost her virginity to her boyfriend at the time. This immediately made me look down on her, because at the time I saw sex as something impure and shameful; I thought that because there was not much separating us in the eyes of the grandparents we shared, meaning not the difference in age, or the fact that she was lightskinned and I was darkskinned, or the fact that I was academically more focused and she cared more about the social aspects of school, that our differing sexualities should put me on a pedestal above her in their eyes.

Obviously this is not a great way to think, but at least I'm being honest with you, and I was sixteen. It took me a lot to unlearn this complex and to not see sex as something that defiles a woman or makes her impure and thus incompatible with the role of wife or mother. I thought that by engaging in sex, which is carnal, rendered you uninterested in academics because the two were just so different in my eyes. Simply put, I saw myself as smart, and I did not believe smart people had sex. How this made sense in my mind, I'm still not sure so please don't go about asking me any questions along those lines. Because for the sake of Jesus Christ, Lenin had sex. Atleast, I think so. He never had any kids so I'm not entirely sure but I know that if Nadezha Krupskaya was my wife I certainly wouldn't be abstinent (she had a very attractive mind!!!)

I was very disappointed in my cousin and did try to explain my feelings to a couple of the adults in my life, though I can't recall an experience during my lifetime in which that was ever of any help. But! Now that I'm older, I know the perspective I adopted to be reminiscent of the Madonna-Whore complex. How could it be that one man 'taints' a woman and robs her of her complexity, narrowing her down to a debased harlot when she is actually a being of incredible polyvalency? No clue how that worked in my mind but it did. Meanwhile, as this identity enveloped her, I was using it to elevate an identity of my own: the untouched, saintly virgin who was moved only by the pursuit of knowledge rather than the desires of the flesh. Though, I must state that I don't believe any fleshly desires had materialized within me yet at all, which is why I was so prudish?

Long story short, this was very effective in keeping me away from boys. Hilariously so, when girls who liked me were propositioning me for sex (I have to write a WHOLE other blogpost about how I thought myself to be invisible to boys my first few years of high school because only women and girls were hitting on me/asking me out. That is SO brave. I have never had the guts to show romantic interest in a girl because I assume most of them are straight), I was still refusing it, though I saw it as less violating and something I'd be more open to. I actually greatly desired it while still viewing it as an act incompatible with the scholarly good girl, because it was still sexual behavior, even though it was with a girl.

Back to this MWC. How does it affect you and me? For me, it has long plagued me with the perspective of non-virgin women as being 'different' somehow. My thoughts always went to the fact that we all used to be children, and engaging in sexual behavior marks the loss of childlike innocence because under no circumstances should children be engaging in sexual behavior. I realize now that puberty makes all the difference. A change happens in which you are suddenly sexually mature. So; now that you can use these organs, I assume the thought process for many people is: why not? Once your baby teeth come in, you begin to consume solids, after all. Only in my mind I cannot yet separate the two: sex carries this weight for me that I have never been able to separate from the act, and eating is something you do from the day you're born. Perhaps that was a not so great comparison.

Why did Grass view me as 'wholesome' once he'd discovered that I was technically 'untouched' by a man? How did I become elevated to this position after the preconcieved threat of me being a whore if I were to hypothetically juggle five people at a time? Interesting inquiry. If we were to go by the good 'ol Jew's theories, it is because a man cannot associate a sexually experienced woman with being nourishing or lovable, because the character-defining currents of her 'aggressive' sexuality are not parallel to the motherly or saintly image of femininity. And, the woman who is both nourishing and lovable is who does embody this is not sexually desirable. Exerpt from Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar:

"Eric's whore hadn't even taken off her dress. She was a fat, middle-aged woman with dyed red hair and suspiciously thick lips and rat-coloured skin and she wouldn't turn off the light, so he had had her under a fly-spotted twenty-five watt bulb, and it was nothing like it was cracked up to be. It was boring as going to the toilet."

"I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldn't seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. He'd go to a whore if he had to and keep the woman he loved free of all that dirty business."

Well done, Sylvia! Female sexuality is cauterized and frankenstein-ed in such a way that the human woman with carnal desires and the mother full of love and grace cannot exist in the same flesh in the eyes of a man who has suffered narcissistic injury at the hands of his mother. But women are just women (atleast I think so) and they do exist in the same vein! I'd love to see what Sigmund Freud thought about this generation and our parent's sexual behavior because of the devastating impact of porn, as well as the manner in which we view one another. For me, as someone who unfortuanetly was exposed to porn at an incredibly early age, I think this contributed to, at the very least, my split views of women. If sex is dirty, and these people are doing it all the time (for 'work'), how could they ever be good parents? I still have conflicting views on sex workers raising children but that's a conversation for another day because I don't even feel like going into that at the moment. But, now that I'm older, the world of human sexuality is confusing and very disgusting to me and I can only log my observations and changing opinions.

So, here's to a decade of new discovery, and of no longer being a teen, whatever that means. Let's see what changes.

Nu out!! No shame!