That wasn’t how it started, with an off-hand joke and a wink from Luthor.

Years before, when I was eleven, I would lay, belly down, on the tile floor in the most remote corner of the living room. Mitchell Lee, my best friend, would be in a similar position at her home. I’d shuffle my papers and read into the phone receiver, low and urgent. The details: descriptions of clothes and unclothed skin; movement-by-movement narrations as the man approached the woman, touched her, caressed her, undressed her; and the woman responded. I’d stab a sentence into Mitchell Lee’s ear and pause. Another sentence, another pause.

Before the papers, before the phone, before Mitchell Lee...

I refer to myself as a woman without ambition. This is not true. My ambition has been to revel in sex. Not positions, not toys, not promiscuity, not fidelity, although all of these have their place. Sex.

I have always believed sex is the most important...

I was raised on an island where sexuality was taken for granted, a tropical given. I came to know sex as I came to know the typhoon season. Debilitating and vitalizing.

It was a given. I am alive, therefore I am sexual.

It happened whenever I was aroused, whenever I thought or felt or moved deeply. Whenever I was ready for release.

I loved myself long before I knew the word “sex”, so I experienced self love as though it was hunger, or curiosity. I thought masturbation was the activity that connected intellectual, emotional and physical activity; a chiropractic technique for the soul. Death, I decided, must be what happens when this power fades, when power is no longer necessary.

I understood this when I was eight, overcoming my fear of being lost, plunging into the labyrinthine tropical thicket behind our house and emerging with a renewed sense of where I was. I’d run home, lock my bedroom door and touch myself in an exultant victory dance.

I understood this when I was ten, straddling the vertical iron pipe that connected my seat with my school desk, tight and high between my thighs, flexing my pubic muscles to create tension and friction.

I understood this when I was twelve, figuring out the equation for relativity. That night, I jettisoned myself into the universe with that equation and the subtle craft of my fingers.

I understood this when I was fourteen, fantasizing brutish encounters with intense men. I’d imagine myself braced against a sturdy tree or a massive, brick wall, shivering in ambiguous, excruciating something-like-pain, but not painful, which could only be relieved by repeated, blunt, frontal poundings of my partner’s body against mine.

I knew this before I knew about penises. Or pulsating crevices. Or connections.

I didn’t lose my virginity. I gained my ease with the world. I opened up.

There is a key to existence in scrutinizing life from the sexual perspective. I continue to be surprised that everyone’s life is not anchored around this pursuit, that the business of living in the United States seems untainted with the reality of sex, yet squalid with prurience.

I consider my perspective a gift.

Maybe it is a gift we have all been granted. Maybe, if I talk about the gift, talk about how it manifests, how it feels, maybe others will recognize, and open, the it.

Text & Graphics © 1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

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