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Making Magic

There is something that I will never tell anyone about. It’s a memory of being young: four or five or six years old. I am sitting in the back of a car. My parents are both in front. Maybe I am in a car seat. Maybe my brother is not yet born. I am thinking, fantasizing. In my fantasy I have two boyfriends, one on either side of me. Grown men. They’re desperately horny. They paw at me. Caught in the middle of this, I am calm and happy and in control. “Wait, boys, wait,” I say cooly, in the most refined accent I can muster. If I had the language then, I would have said, “Wait until we get home and then I will fuck you.”

Or will you fuck me?

Power and domination, but I am the big horny guy, wanting to stick his fingers in places he can’t touch. I’m the monster who wants to ravage myself. The only difference now—the fantasy is the same—is that I make love to it.

I hate my fantasies, and I want them to change. It’s like the essay “Pearl Necklace: The Politics of Masturbation Fantasies,” by Merri Lisa Johnson, where she’s masturbating to the image of forcing her own sperm to coat her own unwilling throat. “A woman lies beneath me, sucking my dick,” she writes. “I imagine telling her I won’t come in her mouth. And then doing it anyway … It is the sharp edge of inappropriateness that makes me come.”

Break it apart. Little girl, one hand on each man’s thigh. Riding in the back of a car driven by someone else. When I fantasize about men reaching in the dark across little-girl flesh I’m the little girl and I am also the huge man, who is holding so much power in his hands.

I have always felt too sexual to be appropriate. No one can tell, because I’m not sexy in the way other girls are: I don’t show much cleavage to speak of and my lips aren’t bruised red, flower petal lips shiny from sucking cock. I’m bookish. But when my best friend Brooke played a kissing game with me at six years old, I wanted to go further. I knew there was nothing wrong with playing doctor, the stethoscope between my legs to feel a blood-rush pulse. I’d tell my parents I needed to be alone and close my bedroom door—seven years old—placing a chair in front for safety. I called it “making magic.” Pants down around my ankles, clit pressed hard against the corner of the bed, I played with Barbie and her butch partner (Ken’s head fell off, so they became lesbians by default), the two convex chests pushing plastic against plastic. Fingers glued, hands touching the tight place between legs. Push Barbie to the ground, turn her over, hold her hands above her head.

We used to get warnings in elementary school, warnings about the rapists in our neighbourhood. We all had the talk about being wary, not accepting rides home after school. My mother made up a password. She said if anyone offered me a ride I’d have to ask them for the secret word, and if they got it wrong I should run.

What would have happened if I’d said yes, opened the white van’s door myself, slipped in?

The problem with my sexuality is that it’s huge: it wants everything, and it’s not politically correct. I’m a feminist, but the way I want to get fucked isn’t. This is the central dichotomy. It’s at the core of everything. I want to go further.

I fantasize about the abuse of power, incest, authority. The coach, doctor, teacher, father. Power vs. helplessness. These men are caricatures; they never have moral qualms, they never want anything but sex.

I haven’t been abused. As if that would justify anything, but I feel the need to say it.

I look normal. You could pass me on the street.

My fantasies aren’t anything I’d want to act out, because how can you be everything? It’s not violence that arouses me; it’s the slight edge of inappropriateness when a hand slides under your skirt on the bus and you don’t move, even though you’ve been taught that you should.

I can get lost in these places, come up desperate and gasping for air.

I think about hands unbuttoning uniforms, girls bent over desks with their skirts hiked up at recess. My girlfriend makes me come with her lips and tongue while my mind somersaults, one lurid, disgusting image after another. Those are my fingers pushing her skirt up, spreading her legs. My cock taking its own, sweet time.

The selfishness of pleasure. A break from giving, accommodating.

If a six-year-old girl can’t be sexual, then she’ll create an imaginary alter-ego to shove and fuck and thrust for her. She’ll be reserved so he can be sick, perverse. He’ll hang around the edges saying, “Remember?”, saying, “You promised me we’d fuck when you got home.”

Six years old in the back of the car saying, “Patience, boy, patience. Control yourself.”

XXX

Shanti is a writer, reader and avid Earl Grey tea-drinker currently living in Montreal. She loves queering gender, good communication and being the little spoon. Areas of interest include queer and feminist theory, the history of Latin America and radical politics. When she isn’t in the library, you can find her checking out the waitresses at the vegan restaurant or reading Kathy Acker.

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