People cheat, right?

            Except you’re not supposed to cheat. People cheat, yes. But not you. Not your friends. Not your family. Other people cheat. Strangers cheat. Bad people cheat. But you don’t cheat. You’re better than those people, the ones that cheat. Those people are selfish, they ruin lives, they are cowards. Cowards cheat.

            I didn’t think that I would ever be a coward. Not like that.

I was always the girl who took no shit from men. I never hated men, not like these modern day feminist anarchists.  I just knew how to work them. You could never change a man, but you could break them. It is easy to get a man to do what you want, to find the right man to fall victim to your plot, to your pretty face and your “nice smile”.

            Men get a bad reputation for screwing over women- watching too much porn, having too many side chicks, cheating. But women do the same thing, just more subtly. Women play men by stroking their constantly thirsting egos, all while running circles around them. I’ve talked to my girlfriends, overheard my mother’s conversations with hers. Women can be just as brutal as men, if not more. The vulgar overshare of the modern day woman amongst her friends could ruin a man's life.

            But men are born with the power. They’re born with a penis, a sword that pokes out of their body and gives them the right to pee standing up and finish every time during sex. A penis means respect. Sigmund Freud classified this as penis envy.

            Penis envy was a theory of the female psyche crafted by none other than a man. A world created by men that tells women who they are, how they’re supposed to feel, and how they’re supposed to behave.  Freud's penis envy theory dates back to 1908, where he wrote in a paper that during Psychosexual development, girls realize that they will never possess a penis, and live their whole lives in a jealous absence of a dick. This realization happens, according to Freud, at around ages three years to six years old. Young girls grow increasingly resentful of boys, which influences their gender identity and sexuality.
            Would this explain my tom-boy phase?  I am not a lesbian, I am a man lover, a dick lover. Does Freud’s frowned upon, widely discredited theory explain my childhood identity?

            At six years old, I wanted to be a boy. I cut my hair short. I wore blue shorts. I ran around with my shirt off. I threw oranges at my sister and her friends. I climbed into people’s yards and pulled their beautiful garden flowers to bring home to my mother. I wanted to be the best non-boy to ever exist. I wanted respect from my friends, all of which were boys until I hit the seventh grade. I did everything the boys did- skateboards, dirtbikes, greasy hair, sister bullying. It wasn’t enough.

            Seventh grade is when the difference of my sex became painstakingly obvious. I was no longer respected amongst the boys for being a boy-girl. I was just a girl. With boy interests. My body was different, my voice was different. I couldn’t talk about my wet dreams because they didn’t exist, not in the same world as the seventh grade boys did.

            And so I became a girl. I got my period. I made girl friends. I got a boyfriend. I sat out during P.E and complained when the boys were too noisy, tattled when a boy teased.  As the years went by I became as boy- crazy as my girlfriends, sneaking out to meet up with them in high school, even suffered a broken friendship over a boy that chose a friend over me. I lost my virginity in a musty, dark garage of my boyfriend's best friend's house, where he finished in three minutes and sat there panting next to me. Was this all that sex is? Those three minutes helped me to decide that sex was not great, that sex was not fun. Sex was only good for the man who goes inside of you and leaves gasping for air like his life depends on it.

            Fun was for boys, pleasure was for men, sex was for men. That’s the narrative I was led to believe, through non sexual and sexual experiences alike. This narrative doesn’t just come from the deeply exploitative porn industry but from classrooms where teachers ask the boys to help carry the heavy stuff, while girls are praised for their tidy desks and neat hand writing.

            Then, a man went down on me. Everything I thought that I understood about boys, about girls, about men and women and relationships and sex was forgotten. I was in the room of a stranger at a party where I knew two people, my best friend and this boy whose mouth was on my vagina. The boy who didn’t even expect pleasure in return but whom I suddenly wanted- a deep unfamiliar, longing desire for a stranger.

            I told this boy I loved him three weeks later and we were inseparable the whole summer. A toxic, teenage summer of love. He was perfect, and I was the asshole. But I loved him. Even though he talked too much about things I didn’t care about and chewed with his mouth open I loved him.  I loved how he saw me. In his eyes, I was a person. A powerful, sexual being with a clitoris and an opinion. I broke him, never on purpose. I told him I didn’t like an outfit or didn’t want to kiss him after he ate a hot dog, I told him I flirted at a party and didn’t say I had a boyfriend and I was met with unconditional love and forgiveness.

            Now, four years later, I feel far away from the eighteen year old girl that knew what she wanted out of life, the girl that knew how to meld her men. I am no longer invincible, trapped in an unfamiliar relationship dynamic that has drained my confidence, caused me to doubt my needs and forget that my clitoris can be led to an orgasm without a vibrator. Trapped in a relationship by my own choice, with a man who says that he loves me when I ask, hasn’t pleasured me in the months that we’ve been together and believes that higher education is a bunch of horse shit.

            But he does love me, in his own fucked up way. He asks about the bruises on my legs, he tells me I’m so beautiful that I could have anyone- why did I choose him? He kills the bugs for me and tells me to watch out for the cracks in the sidewalk.
            I have fallen in love with the angry man who chainsmokes and cannot express his emotions in a healthy way. It’s not his fault, I tell my friends- he had a rough childhood, I say.

            Then I go to bed alone, because he doesn’t like to spend the night on weeknights. I admit to myself what I cannot admit to my friends- that what he is giving me is not enough. The only about him sex, the lack of interest in my schooling, the dismissal of female pleasure. Then, I realize that this constant chase turns me on.

            The disgusting realization that I have been sucked into an undercover misogynistic orbit and have disappointed my mother who raised me to never need a man hits me. The realization that I have let down my little sister who I lectured about the importance of female pleasure in sex screams at me. And then I see him again, each time with the hope that it will get better. Even though, deep down, I know that you cannot change a man. I know that you can’t break a man that’s already broken.

            With my emotions dismissed and my clitoris alive, I go to the bar after one too many angry words with the man who I say I love and I cheat. I flirt with my ex who loved me openly, who spun me around and picked me up and came home early from his band's shows because I wanted him too. The man who gave me head because he knew that it made me feel good and fucked me liked he loved me. We have sex twice in a night and I lie to him- omitting that I have a boyfriend. I tell my best friend and roommate, who says that she thought she heard something the night I did it, the night I cheated, that it must’ve been the neighbors, and she believes me, saying that she knows that I would never do something like that.

 I lie to the man who has sucked me into his complicated world so that when he disappoints me or yells at me or fucks me so hard it hurts I know that I have something over him. My body is his but my mind is not, holding a cowardly secret so powerful that it would crush his fragile, masculine ego and excuse all of his angry words and hurtful actions.

I chose the coward's way out.  With irrational, validation seeking actions I betrayed myself. The guilt of it all should be eating me alive, lying to my friends, to my sister, to my boyfriend. But it isn’t. The guilt isn’t killing me- the betrayal is. I am not a cheater. I cheated, but I am not a cheater. My short lived, loving sex that I had with my ex boyfriend while my best friend slept in the room next to us and my boyfriend ignored my desperate texts told me that I was as powerful as the boys born with penises, as powerful as the man who broke my heart through his cruel words and breadcrumbed love.

I am starting to recognize myself again, feeling closer to the girl who I once was, the girl who existed before she met him. Who never questioned if her feelings were too much, who could tell a man how she felt, the girl who wouldn’t cheat. It wasn’t moral, it wasn’t right. But I am glad that I cheated.