Today as I was cleaning out my childhood bedroom and packing for my upcoming move to San Francisco, I came across a “manuscript” of my writing that I compiled five years ago at age 17. It was just a packet of printed out paper, in Times New Roman, with a cover page that had a black and white picture of me drinking a beer on it. It was called “Resolutions and Revelations.” Most of the stuff in it was really just awful–I mean, some of the poetry actually rhymed. But one of the pieces I’d written was a chronology of essays about the boys I’d dated until age sixteen, and it was fascinating to revisit how I felt and thought about boys and sex at that age. It reminded me of a quote from An Education, which I watched for the first time last night and loved mostly because I completely related to it. “One of the boys I dated, and they were boys,” says Jenny after getting her heartbroken by an older man, “suggested that we go to Paris, and I said I’d always wanted to see Paris. As if I’d never been!” The twist is that she had already lost her virginity in Paris, she’d lost her youthful naivety in Paris, but in order to keep herself from hardening, she steels against that memory. Jenny retains some of that purity of youth by giving herself a “do-over” of sorts–this time she will have those experiences with boys, not men. Not all of us have that strength of will, but I admired that in her.
One of the things I noticed that was most striking in my essays about the boys I had been with was that in every single story I made some mention–sometimes subtle, sometimes overt–of the power that my sexuality held over them. I was 16 when I wrote this, and yet I was so conscious of the way my body moved, and of how it could move the men around me. Society never gives young women enough credit for this, for recognizing at an early age how much power small things like the delicate angle of our necks can grant us. In An Education, Jenny also says, “Silly school girls are always getting seduced by glamorous older men!” This is true to some extent. I’m not a school girl any longer, but when I turned 20 I met a 37-year-old doctor while living in Paris and never dated anyone younger than 25 after that.
I think that it was the power I found most exhilarating. Older men have an appreciation of your body that younger men take for granted. Younger men fuck like they have their whole lives to fuck. I’ve always felt that I wanted–that I deserved–more than that fleeting attention. It’s an indignation of sorts that appears when you’re conscious of possessing this thing that men desire. The real power comes with knowing how and when to use it.
This brings me to this really fantastic essay I read last night on ONTD. Apparently Kendra Wilkinson has a sextape. I had no idea, nor did I really care, but this essay was so refreshing in its indictment of the tape and so on-point with its feminist analysis that it actually encouraged me to care. The author talks about Kendra’s reluctance in the tape, elegantly writing:
It reminds me to some extent of the Paris Hilton sex tape, but even more so here. It’s that space where young women have discovered and perfected their sexuality and its value, but haven’t yet figured out how it’s empowering. They just know that it’s something people want from them; it’s something people expect from them. Something young men expect from them; something, perhaps, that young men haven’t learned how to ask for politely. It’s uncomfortable and new and everybody’s learning, and what happens, more often than not, is that the male partner’s desires come first and more forcefully, and the young woman is disrespected and disempowered and left with a sense that she’s less valuable and less capable of demanding respect and control than her male counterpart — a sense than lingers into her twenties and beyond, even though she might not recognize it as such.
This is it. This is exactly what I felt when I kissed those boys and wrote about it at 17. It’s what I still sometimes feel now when I kiss boys and write about it at 22! “It’s that space where young women have discovered and perfected their sexuality and its value, but haven’t yet figured out how it’s empowering.” I guess I have had an easier time dealing with this issue than Kendra has; I can’t imagine putting my body on display for the world the way she has. But I now recognize that what I was trying to get at in those stories was that feeling of possessing this really incredible, and in many ways beautiful, power, but being too young and too frightened to know what to do with it. At 17 I had the weapon but lacked the manual. At 22, I’m still not sure I have it figured out.
As Jenny says at the end of the film, I feel “old, but not wise.”
Jess,
I love reading what you have to say and I always have! This made me cry, I completely understand. I miss you, and btw I’m so excited to see you get the opportunities you deserve
I adore this film. Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard are absolutely brilliant, as is Alfred Molina, who was hilarious as Jenny’s father.
This reminds me of my favorite Zadie Smith quote, from White Teeth, describing a very beautiful teenager:
“She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.”