Game Runner

by Hannah Rome

To a constellation of men in flyover states, digital red pins that mark grain farms on the Great Plains, midwest towns radiating from adultery-laden convention centers, the last vanguards of American values, I am the one that got away. In the one pixelated Macbook selfie they ever saw of me was virility, companionship, a chance at love. They thought I was exotic looking; my dark hair and eyes originating from a homeland other than theirs. I thought better than to tell them they’d just never seen a Jew before. These men, the ones who loved me in states I avoided, were more recognizable to me through the weathered photos on their pockmarked walls, the flaking pleather of their couches, the grease and mildew I smelt through the screen. I didn’t know their faces; I wouldn't level my eyes to their flesh, to the hummingbird flutter of their arm, their lascivious gaze into the camera, the colicky demand of their swollen pink dick. 

If it were something Guinness kept track of, I may hold the world record for the most misguided attempts at empowerment. It isn’t my fault; when we teach young girls about sex, we use that word as if it’s something a thirteen year old should inherently understand, like eyeliner or cyberbullying. A friend’s single mom in lowrise jeans takes a swig out of a thermos and says something like, “Girls, you need to take control over your body. You need to be empowered.” We girls nod like bobbleheads, stabbing the roofs of our mouths with the jagged straw of a Capri Sun. The next several years of school sanctioned sex ed are somehow equally humiliating and vague. Panicked English teachers look over their shoulders for the PTA as they talk about our vaginas with such detachment you’d think they were something we pulled along on a leash. The negative outcomes of premarital sex are presented like side effects in a pharmaceutical commercial, each increasingly shameful and terminal. And then, after we’ve been sufficiently warned against sex, desire, and the likelihood that our vaginas will bite, a final, enigmatic reminder: Empowerment, girls. Empowerment. 

For years, I tried to figure out what that meant. When my puberty crested, sex was dangled like a carrot in front of my neon pink brace-face. I wasn’t entitled to it, but instead had to earn it through, I don’t know, defeating one of those blow up obstacle courses rich kids had at their birthday parties. I thought that sexual freedom might mean pushing the boundaries of what preteens were allowed to do. Me and two friends met a 14-year-old on the beach and took turns making out with him while the saltwater stung our freshly shaved pubes. At a Jewish youth group convention, I pulled a boy into the sanctuary and dry humped on the bima, under the Torah for God’s blessing. At sleepaway camp, I let my boyfriend finger me on the basketball court every night and spent the entire summer embattled with a UTI. 

At around 15, the adults in my life stopped trying to control my sexuality. After my fifth solid month with a UTI (my camp boyfriend and I were trying to go the distance), my mom took me to the gynecologist and got me on birth control. She felt she’d done her due diligence in protecting me from the unwanted side effects of sex (#3 on the list, I’m pretty sure), and left me to my own devices. I lost my virginity like they do in the movies: his dick went soft after three pumps and we spent the next two hours on WebMD. After two months, we built up the courage to try again. We lit a cinnamon apple candle and listened to Jason Mraz. We said “I love you,” for the first time to someone other than our parents; for the last time before heartbreak and history would alter the meaning. We were transcendent. I got my period on his bed.

I lost my virginity before anyone else in my friend group, and I thought that might equal empowerment. I was engaging in something definitively adult and they were all elbows trying to round second base. My go to retort when my friends teased me was to call them virgins. With one word, I placed myself at the top of a hierarchy. I was more mature, more worldly without having to leave my boyfriend’s Miami Heat themed bedroom. I was entering adulthood on my own terms, ahead of the curve. There is always something inherently unfulfilling about trying to define your sexuality through how others see you, though I didn’t know it yet. I did know that it wasn’t enough that my friends viewed me a certain way, or rather that I imagined they did. I was still searching for that elusive liberation, and based on my momentary ascendency, I thought I was on the right path. My boyfriend broke up with me on my sixteenth birthday; he said he loved me like a sister and drove away in his flame red sedan with flame red rims. I spent the night crying in my mom’s bathtub. She brought me oranges cut into smiles and shampooed my hair, lulling “I know, I know, I know.” 

I never saw sex as anything too precious. If I were more introspective and nosy, I may ascribe that to the fact that up until I actually did it, sex always seemed like something that happened to a person. Men had been commenting on my body, my sex appeal, since I could remember. I was five years old when my soccer coach yelled “Hey, bubble butt!” at me to bring my attention to the fact that I was dribbling toward our own goal. A few years later, an 80-year-old second cousin spent an entire dinner leering at me from across the table, commenting on how beautiful I was while my mom laughed uncomfortably and my dad stuffed breadsticks in his ears, I assume. I didn’t know what, but I knew men wanted something from me they were trying to bury. They hid behind remarks about my development, my maturity, actresses they thought I’d look like when I got older. They thought that didn’t count as desire. 

My self-possession was little more than performance and mimicry. In the early 2010s, the zeitgeist was only scratching the surface of what sexual agency looked like for young women. In characters like the effortless and effervescent Serena Van der Woodsen for Gossip Girl, a woman empowered was one of the guys. She prioritized impulse and thrill over thoughtful consideration. She was flippant about romantic attachments and breezily collected notches on her ornamental waist belt. Sex was as meaningless to her as it was to men, and that made them equals. To me, the message was clear: the road to autonomy was through not giving a shit. 

By the time I had my first one night stand, most of my friends had still not lost their virginities. It was with a senior named Dario on my winter break trip to Punta Cana, like something out of a romcom. He was blonde, tanned, and headed to play D2 football after graduation. We danced at the resort nightclub and walked hand in hand to the beach, all twirling limbs and opaline teeth in the indigo wash of night. We found an isolated daybed, a wink from the hotel to horny teenagers sharing rooms with their parents. Dario went down on me for approximately two minutes, after which his mouth filled with sand and also he got over it. “Foreplay, boreplay,” I said, because in all of the conversations I’d had about sex, it hadn’t been brought up once. 

I returned home with a new feather in my maturity cap. I gained a bit of a reputation, which I wore as a badge of honor. Rumors swirled about what I’d do for a gram of weed. I laughed it off, feeling that anyone who judged me only did so because I was an adult and they weren’t. I was a modern woman and they were just jealous kids, waiting for permission to get what they wanted. As graduation neared, more of my classmates oh-so ceremoniously dislodged the stick up their asses, losing their virginities and hooking up casually. Without immaturity to scapegoat, the gossip felt more incisive. When a guy I hooked up with’s Senior Superlative was “When In Rome,” a lewd play on my last name, I reposted it to my Snapchat story with clammy, palpitating hands. My attitude towards sex no longer made me more evolved than my peers. I was that friend’s mom with the lowrise jeans and wine in my thermos, preaching about empowerment while barely grasping it myself. 

When I got to college, virginity went from something precious to protect to a social demerit overnight. Sex wasn’t something you built up to, it was standard and immediate. All I had to do to not go home alone was to lock eyes with someone in the bar, take the gum out of their mouth and put it into my own. I was relieved that sex lost its stigma, so I tried it all again. More men, more anonymous. If a man did show any interest in me outside of sex, I would turn them away before they had the chance to do the same. I can’t speak to the motivation of my girlfriends, but we all treated sex as a sport. In my college apartment, we had the composite picture of the fraternity we hung around taped to the refrigerator, big black X’s marking the members we’d conquered, like a game of Fuck Bingo. Sex was so meaningless you didn’t even have to remember it. Sometimes, the only evidence we had of our escapades was soreness the morning after, like we’d spent the night riding a jackhammering hobby horse. 

Sex was more a matter between girlfriends than it was with the man you had it with. Dishing about it, laughing about it, the bond between spit sisters. The man was incidental, and the sex was always bad. We were human fleshlights, our bodies parodies of parodies of themselves. Still, despite the joy I felt commiserating over unsatisfying lays with my girlfriends, and despite my efforts to convince myself of my apathy, when the men I slept with consistently ignored me, I felt used, discarded, and worthless. I felt detached from my body, like I wore someone else’s ill-fitting skin. I obsessed over what could have gone wrong; did he hate my body? Did he hear me queef during doggy? Who did he like more and why? I tried to salve these wounds with more sex, hoping each time the man would see me as more than a body. When he inevitably did not, I began to wonder about the salinity of my personality, and whether I was worth knowing at all. I thought if I made sex even more impersonal, it wouldn't have the power to hurt me. I signed up for an app called Phrendly, an “online companionship” service that was a thinly veiled phone sex apparatus. The mechanics were simple; for every message I sent, minute I spent on the phone or video chat, money would be directly deposited into my bank account. I thought if I could prove my worth with a dollar amount, I may believe it myself. 

For once, I wasn’t an afterthought. My online roster anxiously awaited the ping of my sign on, showering me with virtual “gifts” of chocolates, flowers, and teddy bears, fronts for significant cash deposits. I sent them photos I claimed to be me, in actuality just cropped photos from the porn side of Reddit. Girls I wished I looked like. I cajoled them with the cheesiest and most obscene dirty talk I could muster, rolling my eyes and silently snickering at their moans and grunts. When we video chatted, I would cover my camera so they couldn’t see me, citing technical difficulties. For a while that felt like power, the chicanery of it all. I felt vindicated in manipulating desperate men, wondering devilishly what percentage of their incomes went into my pocket. They were surrogates for the men I felt had wronged me, who laughed at my jokes and never called again. Who fucked me like a girlfriend and treated me like a whore. All it really was was another way for me to feel validated in someone else’s gaze; to define my sexuality by the determination of others. 

I thought I was the game runner, but to my online companions, I was the game. They signed on to Phrendly like an online multiplayer game. If it wasn’t me online, they’d find someone else to play with. I was a disembodied voice, instantly replaceable. I felt power being snatched from me at all angles, pulling me limb from limb. I signed off from Phrendly for good, I wish I could say after some grand epiphany about what empowerment truly meant. The truth is, I was headed home for winter break and realized that the least horrifying explanation for the noises coming out of my room would be that I was watching porn for hours a day. I took a break from casual sex, and started dating a man who never left my side. I found him a bit annoying. 

Several years after my stint as a phone sex operator, my search for empowerment hasn’t ended, but it’s taken a backseat. When you’re just coming into yourself, into your body, definition feels so critical. Are you a slut or a prude? A girl’s girl or one of the guys? Team Edward or Jacob? But, identity is a constantly moving goalpost. To embody yourself fully is to allow yourself to be fluid, in motion with your whimsy and your insight. To allow empowerment to mean different things on different days, at different points in your life. Part of me wishes I’d learned that sooner. The other part knows that’s just not how it works.