fuck turning the other cheek

I was very young when I learned that I was not only a woman, but a piece of gum. It was when I was given my first sexual purity talk, at 11 or 12 years old. I remember my youth leader, in faded jeans and a tie-dyed t-shirt, chewing a huge wad of Juicy Fruit. He pulled it out to show us that the gum was irrevocably changed. “Show of hands— how many of you want this chewed up, used piece of gum now?” It was the first time I really remember feeling a hard pit of anger in my stomach. I sat on my hands until they went numb.

Purity culture loves a metaphor. They love to compare a woman’s body to an inanimate object, a thing to be had, a possession to be given, or taken, something that can be broken or damaged.

The metaphors didn’t stop that night. I’ve been compared to a basket of eggs, a crumpled up dollar bill, a chocolate bar. But I am and always have been a woman. And nothing, certainly not a penis, can chew me up or take my chocolate or break my eggs.

But at 11 I didn’t know that. So I bought it. I read my pink Bible and sang in the youth band and hid my body under Bermuda shorts and baggy t-shirts. I learned quickly that my anger wasn’t godly and didn’t have a place in a “clean heart.”

And I got really good at it. Every time I felt myself start to get angry, I would shove it down and turn the other cheek. I did it at 13 when a boy asked me how big my nipples were in front of the entire youth group. At 15 I did it when a senior tricked me into going on a date with him and put his sweaty hand on my thigh for the entire movie. At 16 I turned the other cheek when a performer at a renaissance festival smacked my butt with a frying pan. At 25 I turned the other cheek when a man cornered me inside a Pizza Hut and told me he could smell my pussy. (Over the garlic bread? Not likely.)

I shoved my anger so far down I am still pulling its roots out of my heart, 16 years after the gum incident.

I am a woman who has been angry all my life. A woman who now, at age 28, has so much sexual shame that the only way she can get off is alone with the lights off and her eyes closed. After, I lie on my bed and the sweat cools and my orgasm fades, and I cry.

I cry because I want to slap that man’s smug face and scream, “I DO. I WANT THAT PIECE OF GUM.”

And I cry for that little girl who was taught her body was a weapon instead of a gift. And I cry because she believed it.

And I cry because I’m angry.

By Morgan