I recently wrote up a draft of me and Mr. Honey’s love story, and it jumped out at me instantaneously: my promiscuity was a huge part of us getting together. Thanks to his jealousy and competitive spirit, fucking other people allowed me to keep his interest and attraction despite his best efforts to jump ship. He couldn’t help but love naughty me.
When we became exclusive, it was harder for both of us to feel that same sexual intensity as before. No longer did I have the constant confidence boost of being able to pick up and bed any man I wanted. No longer did he have the constant threat of me doing just that. In this way, so many of us give up something core to who we are to be with the person we love. Thank goodness swinging allows us to welcome our full selves back into the picture.
Another thing I noticed, upon reading our love story, was how similar it was to what I know of my parents’ love story. Here’s what my mother conveyed to me: It’s high school, and she is the biggest slut. She goes to Planned Parenthood to get birth control, but they advise her to keep her legs closed. She knows she isn’t going to do that. She ends up pregnant and her parents kick her out of her childhood home. She gives the baby up for adoption and shows up at college a semester late with her boyfriend. But she is a tease, a slut, and the relationship ends. Right after that relationship ends, my dad, her ex-boyfriend’s roommate, grabs her, pulls her onto his lap and says, “Now when are you going to let me take you out?”
It’s my understanding that sex was BIG for them. I only know a few stories from their early relationship, but I know that my mother demanded regular sex and that once, my dad tried to leave a sex session for a family “emergency,” and my mom threw a fucking fit. But where are they now? They taught me abstinence only. They shamed me when I lost my virginity and asked for birth control. They were strict and regularly made me change before leaving the house. They policed my friends until eventually I stopped going places. If they still have sex at all, I can’t imagine it’s good. They’ve lost the fire. They’ve lost themselves. And their hatred of themselves landed on me. If only they could’ve embraced their original nature.
“Do you think you’re a whore, Mrs. Sutherland?”
Emily, Taboo: American Style 1
“Yes… no… maybe so. I didn’t want my daughter to have these feelings! I disciplined her, I controlled her so that she would not be like me.”
In the movie, Taboo: American Style 1 (1985), the mother, Emily, is strict. The movie begins with Emily forbidding her son to date a girl because she has a reputation of putting out. As for the daughter, Nina, Emily polices and shames Nina’s desire to be seen as a sexual being, wholly forbidding her from the pleasure she seeks.
Later, the mother is caught cheating with the repair man and becomes the shame of the family. She tells her therapist: “I was afraid to ask [my husband] Harding to do the things that Jack would do to me. Harding would think I was some sort of whore or something…I didn’t want my daughter to have these feelings. These desires. I controlled her, I disciplined her so she would not become like me.”
So here we have a mother who resents her own sexual nature. A mother who thinks she is a whore. Who is ashamed of her sexual tastes and desires. Sounds like my mother. And what does she do? She so badly fears her daughter will inherit those same desires that she oppresses her. Instead of Nina getting to explore and learn who she is, she is caged. She never had a chance.
The daughter, Nina, laments her mother’s strictness in a monologue that could be my own: “My mother and my father, they have no idea what they are doing. All they do is watch television…. On television, they show these families but it’s all pretending, it’s not real… So that’s what my parents want for me. They want me to just pretend. To them, there is no real Nina. It’s just like I am a puppet on a string. Not me, I’m real. I’m not pretending.”
As the daughter goes on to fuck as she pleases, it’s clear the mother’s fears have been realized. And isn’t that always the case? Whatever we fear, we attract. Despite expressing remorse, it’s clear Emily still hates this part of her and her daughter when she says: “I can’t control her anymore….I fear for our family. Nina has changed into something unusual, perverse!” Sure, to be fair, this is from Taboo, so the daughter fucks the dad, but there is such hatred in the mother’s tone it’s sad. What was hatred of herself has found new life externalized and embodied by her daughter. And that’s the danger of hating ourselves: it justifies hating what we hate about ourselves in other people, innocent people.
“I’m not going to live my life pretending. When I’m through my family is going to know there is a real Nina. I mean look at me. I’m beautiful. My body is a piece of living art. I am Venus De Milo. And no one is going to cover me up. Get everything I want, when I want it. And when I’m through, I’ll leave.”
I’m with Nina.
😘😘Honey