New Essay Series: My Favorite F***ing Movie

I’m very excited to announce a new essay series I’ll be releasing monthly all year long: My Favorite F***ing Movie is a personal exploration of sex through film, and Go (1999) is the subject of my first piece. I hope you’ll give it a read and consider subscribing! And without further ado, here is an excerpt from my first essay (follow the link to finish it and subscribe).

When I was thirteen, my concept of coolness revolved largely around the things my older brother deemed cool.

I assumed my brother’s tastes were a cheat sheet to the preferences of all cooler, older people, and a window into the secret language and desires of older boys, in particular. The four years between my brother and me felt like a chasm by then; just wide enough to ensure that we were never in the same school, never shared classes or even a cafeteria. I had abstract crushes on all of his friends, but I was too shy to even speak to most of them.

Instead, I noted and catalogued their favorite pieces of pop culture, as if by collecting and eventually consuming them myself, I might be transformed into someone else. Someone knowing, and therefore worth knowing. (This was the childhood fantasy of most online millennials, I’ve since gathered.) I yearned—goddamn, did I yearn, so much that my wrists got sore… but for what, exactly, I couldn’t quite pin down.

My fixation was less about broaching any actual act of sex with someone else—I wouldn’t even have my first kiss for another two years—and more about being the kind of person who could hang. I felt a nagging desire not to be a boy, and not to be a girl amongst boys, but simply to be one of the boys.

I was deeply inexperienced, and also deeply curious in a way that implicitly felt wrong… for a girl. None of my friends seemed to hold the same appetite I had, this hunger for something intangible, something that made them ache. Or rather, if they did, they weren’t sharing it with me. Like anything that might mark me as different growing up in the early aughts, I assumed that meant it was bad and I should hide it.

I knew by then that it was okay for boys to want sex, to be interested in it, to talk about it. It was natural, almost a requirement. But for girls? It was more complicated.

(Though Allison Reynolds summed it up rather succinctly in The Breakfast Club: “If you haven’t, you’re a prude. If you have, you’re a slut. It’s a trap. You want to, but you can’t, and when you do you wish you didn’t, right?” I realized quickly that what she was saying applied across the board to girls committing any act of sexual pleasure, even masturbation.)

I couldn’t help it, though… I wanted to know what the boys knew.

My friend and I snuck down to the basement one night, where my brother’s borrowed copy of Go was still sitting inside the DVD player. My mom was fairly permissive, but her whims could be unpredictable. Better to seek forgiveness later, I reasoned, than to ask permission and risk a straightforward no.

And then the film unfolded in all its vulgar, wanton glory. My friend cringed away from the screen in embarrassment, just as I leaned in.

Read the rest and subscribe to My Favorite F***ing Movie here.