SEXIS WRONG

I am. In the decade of my life in which I was most unhappy, I
cut myself with changing degrees of frequency, intensity, and
depth. From fifteen to twenty-five, I could always depend on
the blade of a knife to calm me.
I still have scars on the backs of my hands and wrists that I
scratched into myself during eleventh-grade biology class. I,
too squeamish to pin a worm to the tray and slit lengthwise,
had no compunction about using that same pin or blade to
slice into myself. I still have vague, wide scars on my breasts,
cut vertically down toward the nipple. And the thin line across
my cheek that I cut with a piece of glass I’d hidden in my
pocket one January between semesters. This was in college
when my girlfriend and I were fighting all the time, and the
My scars aren’t just mute white
lines; they’re a roadmap.
only way I could think to make it stop was to slap her across
the face, slicing my cheek open in the next moment. The
two actions parallel in my mind: the smooth, clean arc of my
palm slicing through the air to connect with her heated, redspotted
cheek and the twin motion of my hand moving from
pocket to ear, dragging the glass forward and bringing the
blood and heat to the surface. It stopped the fight and began
the unraveling of our life together.
I would repeat this act one more time with another woman,
pushing her out of my way and into the hallway wall on my
way into the bathroom, where I locked the door and opened
a razor, freeing the blade. Severing her responsibility for the
relationship going bad. Giving her the reasons to begin to retreat.
I’ve only brought others into my cutting against their will, irrevocably
showing them my anger and violence. But you, you
invite yourself into the anger and violence, S/M the midwife
that sees you through the pain and lets you share in the passion.
You like my scars; I think they’re proof to you that I’m a
serious person. You trust that, like you, I know what it means
to be unhappy.
My lack of interest in drugs and alcohol could have worked
against me, making me seem too straightlaced and boring
for you. But eight years of being queer and over a decade of
self-loathing under my belt seem to guarantee that there is a
genuine fuck-up under the flesh. You get to peel that open.
My scars speak more to you about the person that I was than
my pictures and portfolio or my scrapbooks and stories ever
could. Because you know that whatever was going on around
me, I still kept my secrets intact, kept the depraved, sick girl
alive with every slice. This you like; this you can relate to.
But there is so much that you don’t know. I can never just
tell the story of my past, never make the words translate the
experience. My scars aren’t just mute white lines; they’re a
roadmap. Only the story has a different ending now: not suicidal
expectations but the possibility of traveling with someone
else. Experiencing such exuberance in cutting you is new
to me. Though I’d cut one person before, I never experienced
the vicarious high, all the beauty and satisfaction of cutting
with none of the bad aftereffects—disconnectedness and
limp, hopeless depression. It’s safe to cut you. I hope it’s
safe to let you cut me. I know it’s still not safe for me to cut
myself.
I hand you the blade and a fistful of alcohol packets. I breathe
the odor in slowly as it seeps out and fills the room, preparing
for you.
“Any words of wisdom?” you ask. Of course, I
smile. I am the expert. I instruct you: Cut hard.
It will be much harder to cut deeply than you think it will. It’s
no scalpel, for godsakes, but a utility blade. That means it’s
serrated, and you will have to drag it hard down my arm. Trust
me; it will hurt much more to recut over a small scratch. Do
it once, using firm pressure. Remember, you can’t cut too
deeply, not here on my arm, not with this blade. Don’t be
afraid. I look into you, see that you are nervous and shaky.
“You know why I want you to do this, don’t you?” I ask. Not
sure if the motion of your head is a response of yes or if you
are just trembling. I want to belong to you, too.
I don’t think that anyone else has cut me before, though one
would think that I’d remember that, even fifteen years later.
I’ve forgotten more traumatic incidents, though, and suffered
through recovering them, so I know how powerfully the brain
and body can work together to reweave the past, leaving
small creases in which the truth lies.
My first high-school boyfriend introduced me to S/M all those
years ago, and I’d forgotten that until this year when you and
I started playing. Back in high school I didn’t have the vocabulary
of S/M. Without an intellectual context, the experiences
he led me to couldn’t take hold inside me or gain meaning.
They just sat, abstracted and forgotten until I needed access
to them.
He may have cut me. I know he cut himself. And I cut him
at least once, making thin ribbons of blood pop up on his
chest with the blade I held between my teeth. I did this at
his instruction with no thought or feeling about it. I was his
sexual tabula rasa, always saying yes. He must have culled
these images from somewhere, tried to dress me up and
bring them to life. The scenes seemed overwrought, too selfconsciously
devised to be genuinely sexy. I don’t know if they
24 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG