I’m a 27-year-old woman, a virgin, and a slut. A woman because that’s the gender I was assigned at birth, a virgin because I was cursed with vaginismus, and a slut because I am my father’s daughter.

The universe has an impeccable sense of humour — I used to think that the story of Virgin Mary being impregnated by the holy spirit was a metaphor, until it happened to me. Only this time the holy spirit wasn’t involved. It was, unfortunately, just a boy and his mortal semen. If I’m being honest, he was using my womb as a testing ground for his own fertility, which is neither here nor there, I’m just glad I could be of help. I guess.

Growing up, the subject of sex wasn’t always referenced by the birds and the bees. It was barely spoken of. That was the societal understanding decided upon by everyone’s grandparents and implemented as tradition for years to come. That being, “we don’t speak of sex.” The way I understood it was that sex was a sin. And we have the church to thank for that.

Sex inferred connotations of impurity and exclusivity to marriage. Unironically, it was also representative of shame and guilt. Subsequently, that brought in the question of how to stay away from the filthy gallows of it.

Enter abstinence and virginity — the two pillars on which piety and reverence hung. However, they were only emphasised to one gender.

During the day on which we observed the holy Sabbath, there was an afternoon service where the entire congregation was split into different classes according to age. I was a teenager and my class was filled with raging hormonal kids that were taught to stay away from sex. In that same vein, our leader would also go on to teach us how to stretch our vaginal lips (with Vaseline as lube) because it heightened sexual pleasure (which was only to be engaged in after marriage, of course, this just happened to be training).

The well-meaning adults told us that our genitals were flowers and should remain unplucked until a certain stage in life. There was an overwhelming amount of advice that emphasised abstinence coupled with little to no advice on what it was and what we were supposed to abstain from.

Anyway, I took the aforementioned advice to heart and truly believed that there was a substantial amount of worth ascribed to my hymen. The only rule I had to follow was to maintain a ‘well-kept’ hymen, and by that I mean it should stay ‘intact’ (unbroken by coitus), not forgetting that not everyone has a hymen to begin with.

Regardless of the questionable rules, I listened. I kept myself pure and my virginity preserved. It never occurred to me to question why something so sacred was referred to as a thing to be broken or lost. How did it become lost? What logistics were involved here? Did one lose a vaginal lip if they indulged in premarital sex or did they lose two whole lips… or would the entire thing swallow things up or get swallowed up? The whole ordeal seemed sketchy and quite terrifying.

Even though I listened, I failed to anticipate the sudden emergence of adolescent hormones. Oh! Nobody prepared me for it. I became a consistent expression of desire and rage. Desire, because at one point or another, everyone is colonised by an urgent sense of longing, and rage because I was ill-equipped to deal with my own urges.

Sex was assigned a completely new meaning when I got enrolled into college. Everyone spoke of it, indulged in it, dressed and undressed for it, expressed it with a fluent body language (meanwhile I could barely translate a syllable).

Everywhere I looked, there sex was.

It demanded that I give in to its desires — that I betray my Sabbath School teachings and forego the advice from my well-meaning elders.

Sex called me by my first name, seduced me, brought me tulips and demonstrated that chivalry was in fact still alive. Sex knew I was shy, so she’d tempt me with innocent flirtation and boy, did I give in. Except, not in the ways one would expect, conventionally, that is.

I stuck to my guns about keeping my “flower unplucked” by exclusively indulging in sexual acts that were devoid of penetration. I managed to strike a balance between my own desires and those that the Sabbath School asked of me. Surely, who wouldn’t be proud of my sacred homeostasis. I’d struck a pot of gold.

Or had I?

I forgot to factor into account that sexual beasts demand huge meals and are never fully satisfied. Somehow, they manage to stay salivating for more, always in a state of voracious longing. When those beasts pick you as their favourite food, it will be made clear to you how much of that is far from a compliment.

However, living in a perpetual state of flight from prey heightens one’s senses. Nothing escapes your attention, not even a whisper. You run the risk of becoming prone to being a motion detector for danger. The wild becomes your home and because of that overfamiliarity with beasts, you’re likely to disarm your senses eventually or transform into a beast yourself.

This is a point of no return. A defining moment. A juncture where Friedrich Nietzsche asks, “Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”

Attempting to navigate romantic relationships of any sort, without the conventional performance of sex, proved not only to be challenging but close to futile. What happened to “It’s exclusive to married folks,” I wondered to myself, foolishly. God! I was livid. The betrayal I felt, pure vengeful wrath.

To avenge all the years I’d lost to my sexual deprivation, I made a vow to myself that I’d become a slut. It was the perfect story, ‘a nun turning into a stripper’ kind of holy plot twist. I was furious and ready to commit all sorts of sexual ‘sins’ the Sabbath School had dissuaded me from.

So, there I was, on my journey to debauchery.

All I needed for my debauchery road trip was an intimate acquaintance with alcohol overconsumption, a nicotine + pot addiction, a personality disorder, and creative intelligence. It was a premier league package, of course I’d win against all odds, relatively so, that is — if one is willing to bypass the microscopic definition of the word, win.

The question remains, “Did I out-monster the monster or was I quietly devoured?”
You, my beloved reader, will get to answer that question.

During my journey of debauchery, sluthood was a staple precedent above all else. A staple that required authenticity and gumption — qualities that came to me naturally. Except I did not factor into account that being a slut and cosplaying one would be two different things. My participation in slutdom was limited to cosplay, so in the end I did not, in fact, have the gumption after all.

I possess a certain worldly quality that allowed me to shift into a personality well suited for debauchery. That personhood survived indescribable things — embarrassing, shameful, silly, intense, and heartbreaking things. Things that were simultaneously necessary and unnecessary. Regardless, the conclusion was that I didn’t quite fulfil the role of resident slut in the way one should.

Realising my grand mistake, I chose instead to be in toxic romantic relationships that exhausted my spirit and provided a muse for my writing. Isn’t that brilliant? To willingly put your heart in a grinder, for art.

Upon further meditation on this blunder, I quickly brainstormed a mitigation strategy. I interrogated myself on how to intertwine being a woman, a virgin, and a slut in one personhood, and the answer was right in my face — “necessity is the mother of invention.”

Invention. What a eureka moment. Thanks to all those years in Sabbath School, coupled with sexual trauma from other avenues, my brain and body agreed upon inventing a personality disorder and a sexual health condition — borderline personality disorder and vaginismus, respectively. What a fucking genius!

For context, vaginismus is a condition that involves an involuntary tensing of the vagina. It usually occurs when one attempts to have penetrative sex, insert a tampon, or get a pelvic exam. Meanwhile, a borderline personality disorder, usually referred to as BPD, is a mental health condition that is characterised by patterns of unstable emotional regulation that tend to result in intense mood swings, anger, and self-harm. It’s also sometimes referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder.

On a personal reflective note, I experienced vaginismus in a nuisance kind of way because I wanted to have penetrative sex but it would just be too painful an experience to be worth it. The BPD, on the other hand, was very quiet; almost as if it wasn’t there, until a former therapist brought it to light and burned me with it.

In retrospect, there was some cruel and divine hilarity to the situation. A virgin attempting to be sinful only for the devil to refuse to take part in any cooperation.

Navigating romance while trying to be a slut while trying to be a virgin was quite the holy grail. All I ended up doing was amassing a collection of dead people cosplaying at life. I collected men and women like pennies. Some of whom I might have genuinely loved and others with whom I preferred to be an object upon which obsession could flourish.

When I took my journey into sluthood, I unconsciously took a wrong turn, maybe not wrong per se, just unexpected — there were stop signs and danger ahead signals that I completely disregarded. Something inside of me seemed to thrive in a constant state of rot.

I was housing death in a sacral part of my body, the cause of which seemed linked to a forbidden place of original sin. And because a dead thing is heavy, I dragged every fucking person that came into contact with my existence so much so that they’d forego any sexual aspects of themselves because my darkness made such unreasonable requests.

Death always demands purification and so, in true fashion, I killed every life that came into close proximity with mine and remoulded it into my own image. I am blasphemous like that — I turn into a deity during certain phases of the moon and feast on a few chosen souls for my own consumption because greed is a language I fluently understand.

So, you can imagine how I lost myself when the Virgin Mary threatened to reincarnate through me. I politely turned the holy mother down. I could not become a saint after all that work I’d put into being who I am, whatever it is I am, anyway.

For a little context — there was a boy. Oh, there’s always a fucking boy. I liked him anyhow, still do… might even love him. He sort of showed me, in an indescribable way, that I was real. I’m not sure how else to explain that except to say that, before him, I’d never felt like an actual person, always floating by like a fever dream. I operated as though I was an idea slash concept slash illusion and he somehow wiped that illusory mirror.

In another life, he’d have been my soulmate. In this one, he was a wound mate. Our traumas were impeccably compatible and so spiritually aligned. I know. I know. Very boring. Anyway, like I said before, I have a quiet BPD so the longevity of our relationship was sponsored by my somewhat multiple personalities and his penchant for disturbed individuality.

Sexually, he taught me how to please him and I got excellent at it. The vaginismus frustrated my efforts at times, naturally so, because we would always struggle to indulge in the penetrative aspect of it. So, getting pregnant in this format was quite rude of the situation and absolutely hilarious. I can hear you asking, how the fuck it happened and I’m tempted to withhold the details for reasons beyond me.

Discovery channel 101 — turns out that as long as the semen lingers around the vaginal walls, pregnancy is a possible outcome. So, there I was, semen on my genitals from slight penetration and the Virgin Mary had reincarnated.

I hold no appropriate bearings from which to speak accurately about this. Some elements are exaggerated while others are oversimplified. What can I say? It’s the most extraordinary experience to ever be expressed through my being, both somewhat holy and insidious.

It reinforced the ideology of my existence as a creator. Quite ironic for someone who’d vowed to never have children while simultaneously committing to sluthood.

When I think of that whole experience, especially right now, I am filled with a multitude of emotions. Happiness mostly… because for a brief moment in time, I housed life in my womb. I held life within my body and yet subjected it to abuse. It seemed my subconscious had already made a decision about my womb’s state of affairs without consulting me.

I fed her nicotine and fermented grapes. Her — because every time I meditate on this particular experience, the name Miriam comes to mind. Regardless of the fact that I’d never name a child, mine or another’s, Miriam. On second thought, it might have been fitting, considering the whole ordeal with Miriam, Moses, and the River Nile. Or it could be so far from befitting.

Ignore that, I get carried away at times. Or do I run away from the point on purpose? I’m doing it again, aren’t I?

Anyway, I crucified baby Jesus. Instead of a cross, it was an abortion pill, and in place of birth, it was a blood clot-stained pad that was carefully wrapped and discarded into a trash can.

I think about that trash can a lot. I should have burnt the pad instead, no? Cause that whole trash can ordeal seems cruel and reckless in retrospect. Don’t you agree? Let’s just hope it wasn’t a recycle bin.

Baby Jesus got cast into a trash can by Mary, because, well, she turned away from God, divorced his Sabbath School teachings and chose a different path — not of debauchery or sluthood but something much worse — the deep gallows of emptiness.

I can’t bring myself to apologise. To whom am I offering my head for redemption? God? Miriam? Myself? Miriam’s father? My mother? Whose altar should I bring sacrifices to seek forgiveness?

So, here I am dear reader, asking you: “Did I out-monster the monster or did the monster quietly devour me?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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