F*cked: Being Sexually Explorative and Self-Confident in a World That's Screwed

by Krystyna Hutchinson

the one thing we can say for certain is that whatever flavor of sexual shame you may have, you are not alone.

Self-help is not selfish. In fact, we believe it’s the most selfless thing you can do. By taking time to better yourself, you will be a better partner.

Self-esteem isn’t everything. It’s just that there’s nothing without it. —Gloria Steinem

Apparently, when you have a squeaky clean track record, you get to lift your top now and again without repercussions. And that’s the best reason for staying in line anyone will ever give you.

I hadn’t been single for more than six months since I’d turned eighteen, but during that year I took a honeymoon with my adult self. It wasn’t just a romantic staycation for one. It was also a wake-up call about women, including myself.

We were allowing the men in our lives to determine our value and overshadow all the other things we had to offer audiences apart from our relationship status.

Sometimes loving yourself is precisely enough.

As a teenager, I would spend hours just admiring myself in the mirror—not my makeup or my clothing, my actual naked figure. I loved everything: my itty-bitty titties; my thick, milky thighs; my flat-enough tummy; my interesting nose with the ball on the end of it (shout-out to Sarah Michelle Gellar), and even my outie vagina,

It's sad to realise that the fact that she proclaims to love what she sees in a mirror makes me uncomfortable. It's like having a little itch on your neck. I have spent quite a bit of time coming to terms with the person that I am, but I'm comimg to the realisation that I have only worked to accept my intellectual and personality self. I still reject and allow other to direct influence my self-love for my body.

I’ve written love letters, letters to my future self, letters to the editor, and letters to the daughter I’ll probably never get around to having. For better or for worse, I’ve become my own therapist over the years through writing. I’ve written my way out of heartbreak, out of loss, out of disappointment. When I’m stuck or unsure, I often just write until I find an answer. I haven’t found all of them yet, so I’ll probably keep writing.

Peer and societal pressures can corrode a person’s self-esteem at any age. As a result, too many people spend their lives trying to become the person they think the world is telling them to be rather than the person they really are. Losing the need for approval from others is liberating. Best of all, it provides the freedom to take the very risks that bring life’s greatest rewards.

After all, she was born in the wake of Hurricane Gloria. As an English major, I should have recognized the foreshadowing.

inspired me to power through whatever life throws my way. I tend to have dramatic reactions to small problems more often than I’d like to admit,

Their love, support, and sense of humor gave me self-assurance and a bright outlook on life. So much so that I pursued a career in comedy.

He has taught me how to effectively communicate how I feel and ask for what I want emotionally and sexually, which has opened my eyes to what a romantic relationship can be.

That life-altering moment of discovery they describe sounds so thrilling! I never had that as a kid. I wasn’t hanging out in my room, going “What’s a girl gotta do to get a glimpse of some dicks around here?!” The stuffed animal horse did the job just fine, and—bonus—it didn’t look like a one-eyed snake monster.

Being sexualized because of how you look on the outside, when you still feel like a joyful, Barbie-loving, innocent little girl on the inside, blows. It made me realize that life can be cruel. As a person who is allergic to sadness, that traumatized me a bit.

This may come as a shock to some folks, but when I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t see a pathetic cum dumpster or a fat, fatherless slut. I see a fun bitch with a great rack and a heart of gold.

reader—be you male, female, transgender, or undecided—that you deal with shit, you brush your shoulder off like Jay-Z, and you move the fuck on. In a society where for some reason it has become chic to be the victim, we say this pity party ends now.

the best way to feel better isn’t for someone else to guide you through your feelings, it’s to be strong enough to have the ability to laugh yourself through the pain.

It won’t talk down to you or hold you while you’re crying. You’re not weak. You can get through this. We’re not going to explain to you why he’s just not that into you, because it doesn’t fucking matter.

We all from time to time have a tumultuous relationship with our sexuality—think of this book as a mental detox from the crap you’ve been fed regarding the choices you’ve made with your body. Sex isn’t evil, and talking about it is the first step in your personal erotic exorcism. So let’s talk about fuckin’!

that are often rooted in low self-worth and a deep sense of shame. Whether it’s an insecurity about your boyfriend’s porn habit, a fear about your lack of libido, or embarrassment about your pepperoni nipples, you can pretty much trace the roots of each dilemma back to an underlying belief that you are wrong for wanting what you want, gross for looking how you look, and in general, a certified weirdo.

The good news is, the more we realize that people are being shamed for the same thing, the less powerful the shame becomes. So what’s our advice? If you’re being shamed about something, don’t keep it to yourself. Secrecy feeds shame. When released into the open air, shame loses its power. Own your feelings, thoughts, opinions, viewpoints, and self-worth. To feel shame, you must relinquish ownership of those things. Which is easy if you never felt true ownership over them in the first place. But how do we lose ownership of the very things that make us who we are?

Shame is fueled by our deep concern with what others think of us and, perhaps more frighteningly, what we truly think about ourselves. So if self-shame fails to step in and stop us from saying or doing something we want to say or do, we can always count on society to let us know after the fact that we’re a real piece of garbage.

While both can be oppressive, guilt is many times warranted, and shame is pretty much always a steaming heap of bullshit. Bullshit we’ve been honing and perfecting for ages.

Female sexuality in particular has seemed to cause mass panic over the ages, and just as witches were physically hung, sluts are now socially hung.

Being accused of being a “slut” has become the modern-day equivalent of being accused of being a witch in Salem of the 1600s—a sexually explorative woman who is shunned and shamed by much of society because they don’t fully understand her and therefore she must be dangerous.

Sally Curtin, a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, notes that suicide had been on the decline since 1986 and then suddenly things did a 180. What’s happened since 1986, you ask? The Internet. Smartphones. Modern-day scarlet-lettering in the form of a Comments section. Social media isn’t just making us feel worse about our bikini bodies and our ability to plate food as well as a Top Chef; it’s literally driving us to take our own lives. The shit that was once said about us politely behind our backs is now being said directly to us. And survey says: we can’t fucking take it.

While stigma, shame, and judgment have always been a part of human life, we’ve simply swapped out old forms for newer, subtler forms, and the volume of shame and judgment given and received has escalated grotesquely in the age of social media. Scarlet letters are no longer just handed out by the people we know and love. They’re given out by the people we don’t know and don’t love but whose opinions we somehow care about—a lot.

binging isn’t healthy either. Clinical social worker Gerri Luce explains in Psychology Today, “Binging on something, be it food or sex or drugs or the Internet, also denies [a person] pleasure because he or she is so intent on acquiring as much as possible as quickly as possible. Any joy is destroyed.”* This cycle starts early. Children are often raised in an environment of punishments and rewards,

We stifle ourselves with jobs that are smart and secure rather than what we love, partners who make us feel not alone rather than alive, and sex lives that feel more comfortable than creative. With so many wild possibilities available to us, we keep choosing the same mediocre options time and time again.

It’s the age-old question “How many pussy licks does it take to get to the slut hidden in all of us?” Oh, wait. That’s not a saying. That’s just some bullshit society made up one day because, you know, women were getting out of hand.

In other words, enjoying your life is important because the act of enjoyment is the acknowledgment that you lead a life in which you have the privilege to do so.

The “logical”—and we’re using that term loosely here—reasons for denying oneself sex or pleasure of any kind seem to be because we don’t think we deserve it . . . and possibly because we don’t think we can handle it.

P-in-v sex improves vaginal- and pelvic-muscle function, strengthens cardiovascular health, decreases hot flashes in menopausal women, decreases the likelihood of developing breast cancer, lowers susceptibility to stress, and allows a faster recovery from stress.* Some sources even say that semen is a mood booster.

it is not within the genitals that sexual pleasure is being created but rather through the cooperation and interaction between two people. A study conducted in the early 2000s by researchers Cindy Meston and David Buss revealed that many of the four hundred students they interviewed about having sex were not having it because it physically stimulated them but because of some psychological reason

To recap: we are animals whose core purpose is to connect with one another and, yes, mate. It’s in our nature! So why, specifically, do we wrap our sexuality and sexual choices in so much shame? Perhaps we are uncomfortable with urges that connect us to other creatures we see as primitive or dirty (“doggy style” isn’t necessarily looked at as reverence for man’s best friend). And if we’re squeamish about simple, straightforward sex, we’re even more uncomfortable with the complexities of our deeper sexual selves. Even straight people who enjoy vanilla sex—the “norm”—struggle to come to terms with their sexuality.

While a healthy parenting style can reinforce the natural state of just being okay with who we are and who we want to fuck, parents often project their own insecurities, worries, and fears onto their children.

Finding out that your parents aren’t perfect is a tough realization to process, but I encourage you to lovingly find the missing puzzle pieces if you can. It may take ten years, but the aha! moment of finally understanding their intentions might help ease a traumatic memory or two.

The world seems to be filled with these two very conflicting messages: “Be who you are” vs. “Don’t be a dumb, fat whore.” But . . . what if you are a dumb, fat whore? What if that’s your truth? It appears that the real message we’re being told is “Accept yourself, but only if you’re acceptable.”

As women, we often feel sexually suffocated by society because a sexual woman is a free woman and that’s no good for order. But also it seems females cannot all feel free and sexual harmoniously. Even when we’re able to get the men feeling comfortable with our sexuality, many of us still shun the sexual choices of our sisters because we think their freedoms might showcase our shortcomings.

“Are there any feminists in the room?” The silence I am greeted with is undoubtedly a direct result of fear. Fear that by a woman admitting she is just as powerful as the man sitting next to her, the dick of aforementioned man might be a little less hard in the bedroom later that night. In our quest to find mates, we are continually and repeatedly losing ourselves.

“You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores.”

We shouldn’t feel ashamed if we were raped or had an abortion or even ate an entire box of Oreos in one sitting, but we should feel ashamed of how many times we’ve thrown a fellow female under the bus for the amount of cleavage she exposed at the office holiday party, for blowing that guy without having gone to dinner with him first, or for openly admitting she doesn’t agree with the possibly antiquated practice of monogamy.

We nitpick the women around us because it’s a relief from being nitpicked by society. We nitpick because we somehow have the idea that by doing so we are making ourselves look better, when really we’re just making ourselves look worse. Every stab of the knife into another woman becomes a step up for a man on the ladder of the patriarchy.

Thou shalt be cognizant of the amount of time we spend talking about boy problems. We have so much to achieve and so much time to make up for.

Once you’ve stopped attacking the people who should be your biggest allies, grab a sponge because it’s time to scrub off all the shame that’s been undoubtedly slathered on you over the years—for what you look like, how you speak, what you know, what you do, what you think, and most definitely who, how, why, where, and how much you fuck. Fuck.

Everyone likes to shit on “cockiness,” and it’s no wonder why—everyone is so fucking insecure. People are constantly turned off by my “cockiness,” and those people are—you guessed it—insecure.

Once the act of being unapologetically ourselves is seen as less of a hike, we’ll all be able to relax a little. There are still too many women on the planet who value being with a man more than they value being their own person.

it’s a danger to all women in a society where women already hold less value than men. Whether you identify as a woman, a man, or nonbinary, the first step in not getting mind-fucked is recognizing your value and demanding that other people who want to be a part of your life recognize it as well.