Sexy

There used to be times when I would see certain women and feel an intense, irrational hatred toward them. I wasn't sure where the feeling came from, but I knew it had something to do with sex. Some were women I knew personally, like coworkers or acquaintances or even retail clerks. Some were women I'd never met at all, like celebrities or unseen Internet friends of my husband's or strangers I'd pass on the street.

I'd feel a wave of aggressive sexuality coming from these women that would make my chest tight with rage. Everything about them screamed sex and seemed to say, "I want every man to desire me, and when a man desires me, nothing will prevent me from trying to get him to act on that, if he is what I want."

In the days immediately following my husband's revelation that he was a sex addict, I pressed him for details with sleepless fury. I wanted to know everything: to break the bond of secrecy he had with these other women, to reclaim my reality, and to try to make sense of what had happened and what was happening. I would make lists of tens questions as they popped into my mind during the day, so that I wouldn't forget a thing, and I would keep him up far into the night answering them, not letting either of us rest until I knew every word, every thought, every name, every touch.

I know this wasn't a unique desire; the first impulse of many wounded and betrayed partners is to want to know everything. And I know that many of them regret it; that knowledge stays with them and the images haunt them. But while it's true that those details did (and sometimes still do) bring a deep, piercing pain, they also did bring me some of that insight I craved and some of my first real moments of empathy: for my husband and the women he was with.

In one of those very early days, my husband was telling me about a sexual encounter. The woman he described was very sexual, very eager and willing to become intimate quickly. And yet, although they had sex, she refused to touch him. As she took shape through his words, I saw her arranging a casual sexual encounter with a married man whose body she wanted and shuddered at, to whom she revealed herself and from whom she wanted to hide. And the realization of her pain went through me like an electric shock. I shook with rage, locked for that one moment in a furious solidarity with the woman whose actions tortured me, as I hissed at my husband, "My God! That woman was sexually abused! How could you not see that? How could you use her like that?"

I started to see, slowly, that she wasn't the only one. The women my husband acted out with were, each in their own way, deeply hurt and damaged. In trying to understand the other side of my husband's story, I read books (because I'm a nerd like that) on female sex addiction. I read the personal stories of women like former porn star Shelley Luben. I got to know courageous, inspiring women bloggers who struggle with their own compulsive sexual behavior.

I learned how abuse, particularly sexual abuse, can lead women to seek out love in the only way it has ever been shown to them, through sex. I saw how sex could be used to medicate feelings created by the abuse: that they were unworthy, undesirable and unlovable. I saw how that aggressive sexuality that threatened me was a woman's way of seeking power over her abuser. And I started to recognize that when a woman made me feel uncomfortable and threatened with her sexuality, it was a sign, not of her desirability or confidence, but of some deep, past hurt to her body, mind and spirit.

A few days ago, I was chatting with some friends in recovery about celebrities when the topic of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie came up. And I said, "Oh, I hate Angelina Jolie!" It wasn't one of those dramatic uses of the word hate either. I thought about her and felt a sickness like a punch in the stomach. I've never met the woman, I know nothing about her other than her on-screen persona and the headlines I've seen on tabloids in line for the supermarket checkout. But I have truly always felt a tight, burning rage and disgust at the sight of her.

"Ugh! So do I," said one of my friends, who is also the partner of a sex addict.

"That's because you're both with sex addicts," said another. "She's sexy and you're threatened by her."

Duh. I hadn't thought about it lately, my hatred for Angelina Jolie was so long standing and unspoken that I'd virtually forgotten about it. But why had I always had such passionate negative feelings about her? What had she ever done to inspire irrational loathing in me? She was sexy. Sexy in the same distinctive, fierce way that always made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

And the proverbial light bulb clicked on, right over my head, and flooded every cobwebby room in my mind with light. Maybe Angelina Jolie was sexually abused. I could feel something like that in the aggressive sexual energy that was beating against me. And I experienced one of those moments where faces and images and sound fired at me in a rapid barrage, like a movie time traveler. The women my husband was with were abused. Prostitutes and porn stars overwhelmingly come from abusive backgrounds. Marilyn Monroe, the queen of sexy herself, the woman on whom so many women from whom that same threatening sexuality radiates have modeled their own image: Marilyn Monroe, was sexually abused as a child.*

And I sat there like some slapstick cartoon character, with stars dancing around my head, knocked to the ground by that falling anvil. What we call sexy, what we hold up as the standard of female sexuality as a culture, the sexiness we aspire to and celebrate, is the sexuality of abuse. In looking for feminine power in movie stars and models, in porn stars and pole dancers, we're aspiring to be victimized girls grown up, fiercely pretending to revel in our shame. We are modeling our behavior on a sexuality born of violence against women, of abuse, of molestation, of rape.

And I thought, my God. My God. What are we doing?

---

*Biographies of Marilyn Monroe document her sexual abuse, and while she exudes sexy, I've always adored her. I think it's the codie in me reacting to that vulnerability that needs taking care of.