Desiring Love, Accepting Desire
Why you shouldn’t sleep with a guy who willingly told you he listened to a George Washington biography that was 46 hours long.
Article by Anonymous, art by Tessa DeRose
Content Warning: Allusions to abuse, graphic sexual content
When I had sex for the first time, I was 17 and he was 24. Before we slept together, I asked him if he minded our age difference, and he said he didn’t at all, as long as I was 18. I never told him the truth about my age because it felt good that he was more into me than I was him. I think maybe I enjoyed the scandal, too. Eventually, he wanted to be more serious, so I ended things because I felt bad about how I misled him.
After I turned 18, I was bound for the first time by a 39-year-old. He was a good-looking professor at a university outside the city, and I was seduced by his honeyed words and experience in BDSM. When I got to his place, I felt comfortable in his presence after we had a thorough conversation about what my limits were. Later, blindfolded and with a limb tied to each bed post, I heard him take an object out of a heavy drawer. Paranoia told me it could only be a knife. Devoid of sight in my utterly vulnerable position, I hazily anticipated its cool edge reaching my throat. Not fearful, but rather amused by the cliché I had found myself in: “barely legal”, restrained by an older man I met for the first time, soon to be murdered. But of course the blade never came and I was startled instead by the sudden jab of a vibrator. When he asked to see me again, I never responded. There was something I didn’t like about his plastic-covered furniture.
At 19, I found myself (probably) in love with a 35-year-old. He was intelligent, a music fanatic, and really nice to sleep with. We talked about the anthropologists and historians I loved—ones he had taken classes with at Berkeley—and he would read over and edit my papers for class. He took me to spots all around the Bay (my new home for the year) he’d grown up going to. When he saw something that reminded him of me while thrifting, he would surprise me with it. I was taken by his thoughtfulness and genuine interest in me, more so than the sexual desire he exhibited. Over six months, we got pretty close. Close enough for him to tell me (after we were “close enough” to do anal) he was “still kind of in love” with his ex back in Ireland. Any notion I had about what our relationship could be once I was back at school was shattered (while I knew long-distance was ultimately not for me, I fantasized about him being so infatuated with me that he wanted to try). He never told his friends about me, except eventually his best friend, and only a few days after my birthday—so that he could tell him I was “in my twenties” and not nineteen.
Now, I’m 20, and he’s 43. The first divorcee. The first dad. The first one to make me feel shame. Not really because of anything he said or did. I don’t feel like he did anything wrong. He treated me with the impersonal and hungry manner I was all too familiar with and had come to expect. I would’ve appreciated it at any other time, witnessing a man so affected by lust at my expense. I should’ve been turned on by how much he was coveting me for my body alone. But instead, I feel shame surrounding my interactions with him for using them to cope with the state I was in. Earlier that week, I found out that my dad had cancer. I was also in an especially bad spell of depression, and feeling particularly unloveable after my recent parting with the 35-year-old. Writing now, I feel the experience all over again. My skin burns from thinking about his eyes on me, but I can’t help but desire his desire again from time to time.
He was messy. I learned he was the dad of a kid that CC students nannied for, a few of whom I knew well. Another good friend of mine had interviewed for the job and had his number, which is how we found out that it was the same man. Nonetheless, I pursued him openly. I found myself wallowing in the pornographic spectacle of it all—a young girl needing the comfort and love of an older man after finding out her dad was sick. A dad that would always tell her he loved her, but would turn a blind eye when her mother abused her. On the night of our meeting, I got ready for my performance starring as the dulcet, submissive girl asking to be fucked by her friend’s boss. I braided my hair back in preparation; I dressed in clothes I normally wouldn’t wear to seem like I was frail and his for the taking; I waxed because I thought he would like it.
I arrive and I feel his eyes take me in. He’s watching a dumb car restoration show. I pretend to be interested in it. As I look back over from the TV screen, he kisses me, still standing by the doorway. The kiss is lukewarm and something about it is tinged with medicine, or maybe more akin to the smell of discarded hairs singed by a warm razor. He tells me I look really good. It’s always the emphasis on really, as if men believe that the insistence in their voice will be the difference between getting laid or not.
He asks me if I want to go to the bedroom. I ask him if anyone lives with him. Your nanny.
“No,” he says. We walk further. “Wait, what?” he asks.
I repeat myself. “Oh. Yeah. I have a nanny that lives upstairs.” His casual response annoys me, and I press further and ask if that means he has kids.
“Yup. I’ve got an eight-year-old.” I know. “He’s the best. He’s not here right now, though.” Obviously.
The rifle cabinet should’ve been my first indication to leave. His own glass menagerie, backlit in dusty yellow, a symbol of his vitriolic compensating. But instead, I chalked it up to oddball Civil War buff tendencies (he told me he was really into American history). As we made our way to the bed, I was fascinated by his need to have me. Earlier, he told me I was his first younger girl and it’s funny how that probably turned me on more than it did him. I could sense the pleading in his eyes, silently begging me to down on him. Intoxicated by the power I held in that moment and tempted by the control I would have with him in my mouth, I obliged. His dick was so hard that I wondered if because of his age and the circumstances, he had taken Viagra.
As we moved onto the bed, it was awkward. He was rough, but not with the control and display of experience that I was used to. He kept asking me to repeat things I said, and I don’t know if that spoke more to his age or to the objectivity with which he saw me. He continued to direct me into one position after another, but save for those commands, he was silent. No grunts, no moans. I hated that, because I fed off of the affirmation that I was behaving exactly how he needed me to. It wasn’t bad sex, but he felt cold inside me and I just wanted him to finish. I asked him if he was close to coming, but he said that he “still had a lot in him.” He took pride in his endurance and as the long minutes passed, I felt more like a doll, limp-bodied and obedient to his desire for playtime. He handled me with little fragility and care, or appreciation, as if our interaction was perfunctory as operating the artillery in his armoire.
Afterwards, he asks me about school. I tell him my major.
“Huh. That’s sort of unusual, being an Asian girl studying Russian.”
Ugh.
“So, wait. Does that mean you go to CC?”
I say yes. Like it said on my profile. He swears he didn’t see that. His age becomes apparent by the minute, yet I grow annoyed at his increasingly childish retorts. He’s fidgety. I ask him if he would have still met me had he known I went to CC. He nods his head yes, immediately supplemented by, “But I think it’s best we be discreet about this. You’re not gonna go run and tell all your friends about this are you?”
I assure him I’m not (haha).
“Let’s just say I used to be very affiliated with someone at your school.”
I never asked. And I already know.
“My wife teaches there. Ex-wife.”
“Mm.”
I knew the professor because I had interviewed with her before. I thought she was sweet and pretty. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t imagined a threesome with them after I found out who she was.
We move on to talk about where we grew up and he asks me about my family. I’m unresponsive because I’m sensitive to the topic, and I especially don’t want to think about my dad. Eventually I relent, and I tell him my dad used to be a cop. He immediately proceeds to call the mayor of the city where I grew up, “a nut,” because she wants to defund the police.
The guns in the room are suddenly the only thing I can see. All the lights in the room are off, except the dim glow of the bathroom where I just rinsed myself of his touch, and then the palpable spotlight from the vitrine, trying and failing to assume inconspicuousness in the corner. The light is the only warmth on my wet body as I lie bare above the covers. That’s when I decide it’s really time to go. As I’m getting dressed, he continues his monologue. I hear “children’s safety,” “protection,” “shitty neighborhoods,” but I’m tuning him out, hyperfocused on not leaving anything behind. I tell him I should be getting home, he shrugs alright. A beat.
Then, “I was surprised when you asked to meet me,” he says.
“Why?”
“Well, you wouldn’t even give me your number but you were willing to come over.”
“Haha, I guess I’m just not comfortable with giving it out. In case they want to keep contacting me.”
“Oh, I don’t need your number or anything. I just think it’s brave you didn’t want to give it to me but you still came over to my house.”
I couldn’t find any reason for why I met him for the first time at night, alone, in his house. I think part of me fantasizes about tragedy happening to me, surrounding sex and promiscuity. Or maybe I’m proving something to myself, agentic or otherwise, in taking charge of my experiences with older men. I am gratified to see the power that my body holds over white men; the short thrill of their climax is seductive enough that I overlook common sense and safety to get it. At the same time, I often wonder why these men seem so concerned for my well-being. As if they’re really worried about me, when only moments ago they were hitting, spitting on, and fucking a girl half their age.
As I headed towards the door, I asked him to check if his nanny was home, or coming in.
“Wow, you’re really serious about this.”
I was. I knew them personally, and they probably wouldn’t be happy to find out their boss had sex with a 20-year-old (or that I had sex with their boss).
He checks outside. When there’s no sign of the nanny, I quickly make my way across the living room to the door. As I’m stepping onto the porch, he asks me if he’ll see me again.
“I don’t really do repeats actually.” A lie.
“Really? Well, okay.”
I couldn’t tell if he was incredulous at the idea of the girl being less attached, or shaming me for my behavior. Or maybe it was a well-knowing really, certain that I’d renege on my words and ask to see him again. Either way, I matched his emphatic “really” and rushed down the stairs to my car.
When I get home, there’s already a message from him that says I left my necklace there.
Shit.
I try to be as curt as possible in my response, “I can grab it sometime later.” Naturally, to him, there’s an invisible, “So you can fuck me again,” addendum to my sentence. I knew he thought this, because he responds with, “Anytime, I may want to fuck you again though [insert an emoji unbecoming for his age].”
A week later when I went to collect the necklace, there was part of me that wanted him to ask me to come inside, so I could feel his desire for me again. But as I approached the porch, I saw his kid eating breakfast through the window and all at once, I felt nauseous, slapped by the realness of his age, family, circumstance. I fumbled for my necklace inside the mailbox and left as quickly and quietly as I could. We haven’t spoken to or seen each other since.
Talking to my therapist, she seems to think I seek these men out because their “love” is reliable. Older white men will always desire young Asian girls, and as someone who finds herself unlovable, there is solace in that clause of unconditionality. She also calls my sex with them a punishment I dole out to myself, an infliction of self harm. I don’t think she’s right, but I still grapple with finding pleasure in something that other people, and even I see as wrong. Not because of the age difference, but because of how I use these interactions with older men as a means of coping motivated by a fear of never being loved authentically. The act of sex with them is easy validation and an illusion of emotional intimacy, two things absent from my childhood. I found comfort in the fact that these men found me so beautiful and young—someone they wanted to dominate. But someone can easily turn into something. I find myself guilty in facilitating that transition.