When I penned the final portions of Part 3 of this meandering chautauqua of mine, my mind recalled an innocuous passage that Stephen King wrote in his introduction to The Gunslinger in which he described the intimidating nature of authorship. He has a very vivid description about how the Dark Tower series grew far beyond the parameters of anything he could have initially imagined when he embarked upon the project, and how the enormity of the Dark Tower series only became apparent to him when he was already deep into the writing process.
My sentiment here is very similar to Mr. King, because I can already foresee the shrill cacophony arising from the congress of shrieking banshees who profess themselves to be the vanguard of so-called "women's issues." I would greatly prefer a world in which these figures did not command such a stranglehold upon our current zeitgeist, for it would spare me the labor of having to account for their intellectual pathology, but alas, that is not the moment in history that I occupy. Specifically, the excoriating censure from these so-called "feminists" will attempt to deride my position as inhumanely unsympathetic.
Case in point, just look at what Wendy Mesley said directly to Dr. Paglia's face in the interview that I quoted in my previous article:
"But everybody in that world will tell you it's almost impossible for women to have the strength to come forward to make the case and so on..."
What exactly is the logic behind this statement? Bluntly speaking, it is the idea that expecting women to fend for themselves is improper; and that would be the civil rendering of this position. If I was a betting woman, I would probably guess that the actual vitriol from the aforementioned banshees would more likely render as: "your expectations of women are cruel," or, "you have never actually endured real sexual danger or harm!"
I am not an analytic philosopher, but even if I was, drafting a syllogistic argument demonstrating the disconnect between individual experience and the independent veracity of an argument would not be appropriate here. I have witnessed many individuals—usually men—get sucked into that vortex, to which I say: Heaven bless their valiant efforts to save us all from the self-referentially incoherent. However, internally consistent syllogisms is not the issue at stake here, because the criticism that I reference is not founded upon—nor takes interest in—positions constructed from first principles. Rather, far more relevant to this context would be the demonstration that, in actuality, I do speak from very pertinent experience that—contrary to what some may find tempting to believe—my uncompromising position on female sexual responsibility arose in light of—not divorced from—fundamentally disturbing encounters involving sex.
The advent of Tinder and its ubiquitous proliferation across our contemporary cultural zeitgeist took place when I was already approaching university graduation. It was very shortly after this time, when Tinder was still in a sort of "golden age"—that sweet spot when it had a sufficiently widespread user base to reliably provide favorable matches while still being niche enough to be novel—that I found myself alone at home very late one springtime evening. I had already spent several hours on my living room couch, swiping through men on my phone as a random playlist of YouTube videos muttered incomprehensibly in the background.
For months, I had been slaving away at my first formal full-time job as a recent university graduate. The stakes were high. I had moved to a brand new city 300 miles away from home for this position—a "big, scary, dangerous place" for a small-town girl to be on her own without any immediate support from family or community. As a recent entrant into the labor force at the time, living a life in which the full weight of my basic living expenses fell squarely upon my shoulders and my shoulders alone was both unforgiving and unrelenting, and my employer was able to capitalize on the precariousness of that position. I was up at 6:15 every morning to ensure that I had enough time to eat, shower, and—worst of all—commute to work to arrive before 7:45. I was consistently required to work overtime hours by taking my desk work home with me. It seemed as if the only sensation I was capable of feeling was exhaustion. Every facet of existence, day in and day out, was bound together by the omnipresent fetters of fatigue; and I was in no position to establish boundaries with my employer, because I desperately needed the paycheck every fortnight. At the end of each workday after clocking out, I would walk out to the parking lot as if in a daze and collapse in my car in what I can only directly describe as a sort of "forced slumber." On Saturdays, I would remain largely catatonic in my apartment, with Sundays providing just barely enough physical reprieve to muster the strength to do it all over again on Monday morning. This created a situation in which I was largely isolated and alone by mere virtue of the fact that I had no energy to invest in any kind of recreational activity on the weekends. Actuated over a sufficiently extended period, this meant that I had also been celibate for a while, too.
In circumstances like these, I will frequently turn to increasingly harder and more aggressive forms of pornography—but this, of course, is the apotheosis of the proverbial "band-aid solution," which predictably becomes increasingly worthless over time. These were the circumstances in which I found myself when suddenly, a man with black hair and blue eyes—indeed a rare combination—appeared on my Tinder user interface.
"Lance..."
Clearly, there was no way this was his actual name, but the proverbial "douche-baggery" that it implied would only grow more pertinent—I would soon unfortunately discover—as the evening progressed. I clicked open his profile to examine his other pictures. I could see that he was a lanky young man with the body of a malnourished musician—the kind of figure you would expect from a guy who spent every waking hour indoors noodling on his guitar.
"Seems promising," I muttered to myself as I swiped right.
The match was instantaneous.
Within moments, an initially innocuous chat lot filled my Tinder inbox, just as it had so many times prior:
Lance: Hey there!
Sheena: Hey :-)
Lance: You're up kind of late, aren't you?
Sheena: Yeah, I'm having trouble sleeping.
Lance: Anything I can do to help with that? Lol
Sheena: It's very possible ~_^
Lance: Would it be ok if I came over to your place?
Sheena: When were you thinking?
Lance: How about now?
I froze.
Quickly, I snatched a glance at the time indicator hovering in the corner of my iPhone screen.
11:15pm
Shit. It was already late.
No more than thirty minutes prior, I had just been watching John Leslie's Don't Make Me Beg—a 2009 compilation porno by Evil Angel studios that captures one of my favorite performances by Sasha Grey, the one in which she wore black and yellow stockings while getting penetrated into submission.
Sasha Grey: "Take that fucking pussy...make it fucking yours!"
Already, I could feel myself getting wet at the prospect of that type of fornication. However, at this hour, there was no time to counter-offer with a suggestion to first meet at a public location, whereby I could establish a minimum threshold for judge of character. I could turn him down, perhaps request a different time; but my previous sexual encounter was already beginning to slip into long-term memory. I thought back to Sasha Grey's screams of euphoric agony, and my own licentious cacoëthes swallowed me whole, making my decision for me.
Sheena: Sure; here's my address...
The message exchange that followed from this was predictably straightforward. He, of course, was absolutely chuffed at the promise of freehanded fornication. We joked briefly back and forth about rough sex, and with my head filled with Sasha Grey's unrestrained example, I grew increasingly coquettish in my responses, becoming more explicit in my desire for animalistic sex. But just then, his final message caught my eye.
Lance: Just please be nice to me. I'm a little worried that you might not be nice to me, because other girls have hurt me in the past...
What an odd comment to make right before accepting an explicit offer for casual sex...
Well, no matter now; I had already given him my address by this point, and there was no turning back now. By the time he walked through my apartment door, the time was already well past midnight. His pictures were an accurate representation of his in-person good looks, and, much to my relief, his smile and affability were quick to reassure me when we formally made each other's acquaintance in my living room. From there, we lost no time—my own hand proactively reaching out for his—and moving straight to the edge of my bed where we sat and osculated one another while Lance simultaneously undressed us both. He was vigorous with his kisses. The way he shoved his tongue down my throat as he slowly, but decisively, pulled back the base of my hair bore intimations of a BDSM kink, but given how starved for sex I was at the time—with Sasha Grey still being fresh in my memory—the only reaction I remember having was a substantial rush of physical arousal, greatly assisted by the fact that his erection was also visibly impressive. In a matter of minutes, I was on my back, my legs spread apart, with his thrusts into me gradually becoming stronger and stronger...
This is what I thought I was in for.
But this is where the trouble began...
As a tangential aside, there seems to exist an enormous amount of confusion in our current zeitgeist surrounding the question of penis sizes—a subject about which, after having, by now, very intimately interacted with literally hundreds of different dicks, I could easily fill several dedicated articles; and in all probability, I most likely will. However, in the context of this chatauqua, I must be able to grant that "bigger" by no means automatically equates to increased pleasure, though my commentary on the frequently overlooked nuance behind the overly simplistic "bigger is better" aphorism will need to wait for a later time. It will suffice for now to grant that a large penis—particularly by the standards of "huge cocks" that we often see in Western pornography—is very frequently an instrument of pain as opposed to pleasure. This point here is fundamentally germane to this preposterously cautionary tale.
Although Lance was not the size of, for example, Lex the Impaler, he was large enough to require a certain degree of conscientious courtesy in the boudoir. The problem: he wasn't. The strength of his thrusts became deep enough to stab my cervix, which would cause me to wince in pain. The discomfort quickly became sufficiently severe that I had to verbally say "ouch." At first, he would apologize, and temporarily reduce his vigor, but soon after, the same problem would recur once again. That was when it became clear to me that a proverbial "switch" of sorts had been flipped somewhere in his psyche, much akin to a type of animus possession. I could see it in his eyes and facial expression that he was deriving increasing amounts of pleasure from my outward demonstrations of discomfort. His sexual arousal was tied to inflicting pain on me; and that's the moment when the full weight of what was happening finally hit me...
He was a sadist.
At this point, all of the physical pleasure drained from my body, and my mind began to frantically race, haphazardly improvising a series of highly inefficient decisions—a natural result of trying to simultaneously subdue my panic given the circumstances. I was naked and alone in my own home with a man who had morphed into a demon right before my eyes, so I adopted a submissive strategy to avoid agitating him any further. I feared that if I attempted to openly struggle, his sexual excitement would burgeon into a diabolical frenzy. By this point in my life, I was already developing a fairly mature familiarity with Japanese pornography, and so I drew upon the "damsel in sexual distress" archetype that characterized the performances of Sora Aoi and Maria Ozawa for much of their careers in an attempt to get Lance to cum as quickly as possible. At one point in this circus from Hell, he had thrown me from the bed and onto the floor. The way he grabbed and penetrated my body was inordinately violent, and even at one point, he looked at me dead in the eyes and said, "I'm going to punch you in the face!"
The experience was extremely torturous, but thankfully, it eventually ceased when he blew his load (fortuitously, he had agreed to wear a condom at the start) and fell asleep in my bed. Needless to say, I did not get much sleep that night. The next morning, when Lance got up to leave, he behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary happened the previous night. Even the way he spoke seemed to suggest that our memories of what transpired were incongruous. The affable Dr. Jekyll I met on Tinder and invited into my home had returned—wholly disconnected from the Mr. Hyde who had just sexually brutalized me on the floor of my own bedroom.
I recount this story in order to highlight, and perhaps also further elaborate upon the points that I was using Dr. Paglia's commentary to elucidate upon in my previous article. Like she says, there of course exist true victims of rape—women and, most sickeningly, young children who, by no fault of their own, are beset upon by predators who overpower them regardless of how much they fight back, leaving little choice but to succumb and disassociate until the brutality is over in an attempt to at least escape with one's life and hopefully without debilitating injury. The key metric here is, and must be, personal choice. Measured thusly, my previous article sought to demonstrate the logic of how inappropriate it would be for me to claim the status of "rape victim" in light of the fact that my confrontation with sexual terror was the result of my own idiotically rash decision-making.
In Western society, everybody seems to unquestioningly accept the proposition that stolen valor is abhorrent on the grounds that it is inexorably demeaning to those uniformed soldiers who actually endured the horrors of war. Yet, for the past decade or more, post-modernist deluded "feminists" and other so-called "women's rights activists" have pugnaciously raised the unholy banner of "anti-victim blaming" over our society's sexual landscape, enabling myopic girls who toy with sexual forces they do not truly understand to retroactively decide that they are discontent with the consequences of their own self-inflicted sexual misadventures, adopting the self-proclaimed lamentations of "rape victim"—which has launched a veritable witch hunt against men who are guilty of nothing more than miscommunication at most—and all while completely overlooking the fact that they are promulgating an abominable "boy who cried wolf" situation, which in turn exponentially increases the difficulty of sexual violence cases receiving necessary attention from either the police or community members.
Now, I can predict that there might be those who may attempt to suggest that, given Lance's very clear sadistic tendencies, I should have used a rape accusation to raise social awareness around his vicious proclivities, lest he move on to victimize somebody else. My nausea induced by the Machiavellian arrogance that this type of thinking requires notwithstanding, committing to such a position engenders a labyrinth of moral issues surrounding Minority Report style "precognition" and the assigning of guilt for a crime that has yet to occur. It is easy to envision how citizens of East Asian societies might applaud such practices in the name of preserving "social stability," but that pathology, unfortunately, is a subject to which I must return in a separate article.
However, at this juncture, I want to reemphasize the point about personal responsibility that I mentioned in my previous article—namely: what did I honestly expect was going to happen? I extemporaneously invited a complete stranger into my home after making explicit references to hardcore pornography, and about how I wanted to be on the receiving end of unyielding sexual aggression; and lo and behold, my failure to lucidly articulate to myself the precise parameters of what I was and was not willing to accept lead me to a situation in which I was, as the aphorism goes, "in over my head." The aforementioned "feminists" always transform into feral banshees whenever they hear the phrase "she was asking for it;" however, a conscientiously forthright review of the facts unequivocally demonstrates that such a phrase is a perfectly appropriate description of my behavior that night. I was willfully engaging in behavior that was monumentally increasing the probability of getting raped (and raped in a way that could've ended far more tragically than what actually happened); ergo, getting sexually brutalized that night was absolutely the result of my own voluntary invitation; and in that respect, the responsibility of that evening's outcome falls squarely on my shoulders.
There do exist more stories in my personal history that are sufficiently similar in both nature and scope, and it is very possible that I will even share those stories in future writings. However, this wandering examination of my experiences and the reflections born out of them should be enough to demystify at least a small subset of the reasons why I formally entered the retail business of spreading my legs. Officially whoring myself is the most honest method, both to myself and others, by which I can, at least partially, satiate my thirst for consistent sexual variety and adventure, which is a point upon which I deeply resonate and sympathize with men.
In this respect, I cannot help but think—given my own history—that non-professionally promiscuous women, beyond a certain threshold, are living with a certain degree of self-deception and—by virtue of that—irresponsibility as well (for it is one thing to enjoy an occasional one night stand a couple of times per annum, and quite another to cycle through multiple sex partners every week). In the advent of the mass proliferation of OnlyFans content, there are indeed many women who have donned the outward trappings of a licentious tramp, but for compensatory reasons that are either only tangentially related to desire, or are, at best, inauthentic to their own characters.
Regardless, just as Dr. Paglia says: the sexual revolution has been won.
My generation...arrived in college in 1964, and we were kept in all-girl dorms, [and] locked [in] at eleven o'clock at night. We had to sign in. My generation [is] the one that broke through that in America and said, "No more rules!" We said to the colleges, "Get out of our sex lives! Let us have the freedom to risk danger, to risk rape (emphasis added). Get out, okay?" Now today, feminism is so stupid, it wants authority figures back into sex!
Vamps & Tramps: New Essays
Vintage Books Edition
Page 242
However, this creates a choice that many, if not most, women would rather pretend does not confront them—a choice between sexual freedom and immunity to social "slut shaming." Contemporary women delude themselves into thinking that they can reap the hedonistic benefits of sexual adventure while still invoking zero effect on their status as a proverbial "good girl." The slogan they tell themselves often broadly states: "it's not like I'm a whore or something." Coming from someone who is a whore, the only thing I have to say to that is: "if you don't want to be considered a whore, then perhaps you should stop acting like one." (For the sake of brevity, I'm purposefully avoiding a critical distinction—the one that distinguishes highly competent sex workers from women who shortsightedly sell their flesh in nonstrategic ways that render their lives, to quote Thomas Hobbes, "nasty, brutish, and short." My commentary on this subject absolutely must wait for its own separate article).
The hypocrisy that post-modernist feminism affords to contemporary women is appalling; but even with that aside, the refusal to accept that all things come at a cost, particularly with regards to sex, leads women to perpetuate a pattern of consistently sub-optimal choices, and the consequences that arise from that level of irresponsibility—itself the product of willful blindness—are often the most detrimental and unforgiving among that which we as individuals can incur during our lifetimes. Dr. Jordan Peterson teaches us that, as a fundamental requirement to the process of becoming a responsible adult, we must choose our limitations.
Make no mistake, there are very tangible limitations that I will carry for the rest of my life as a result of opening my body to whomever abides by the rules of negotiated trade—options that will forevermore be sealed off to me because of this history. However, I do so voluntarily and, most importantly, conscientiously, too.
This is my attempt to adhere to Dr. Peterson's third rule in Beyond Order (i.e. "Do not hide unwanted things in the fog"), and establish the articulated framework of what I'm willing to accept and pursue for all in the world to behold.
This is my attempt to incarnate the ancient power of Aphrodite and the other archetypal gods of old to perhaps, one day, create an existence rooted in truth that is better than the status quo that preceded it.
I am Sheena Rheed, and this is my adventure into the unknown future.
Finis
Blown away by your prose. An excellent read.