Sex & Violence

I like to play games. The Italian Stallion wanted me to love him. He fucked me and whispered, "I am going to make you love me."

I like this. I fight with him, look him in the eye and say, "No, no, no." Grapple against his weight, loving the struggle, turned on by it, by his big arms and big cock.

I like to say "No." I like to imagine I'm being taken against my will. Raped. I like games when they are as real as this is. I can have a little rape without having to think of my actual rape. I love that I can have this, where the perpetrator is the victim of his own self-confidence, where the offense is love.

The Long Distance Man was here from Australia for a week, speaking at a video games conference. Sayonara, Stallion. I borrowed a car to pick Mac up at the airport. Inside dirty, fluorescent JFK, I see him by the baggage claim. It always shocks me when I see him after time apart. I forget how he looks. Or rather, I am surprised by the three-dimensional reality of him. He is with me always in my longing and desire. Desire being fed by distance, of course, by the wanting across oceans and lands.

I am unhappy without him, but with him it's never quite real, always a treat, a dream, as if he is my mistress. Our other lovers disappear while we are together, but never completely. I am always aware that, with Mac in my life as my Long Distance Man, I will be disappointing other lovers. Who in turn desire me only for my emotional distance, their wants fed by my refusal to commit.

I will never love the Stallion. He knows that. He has lit red candles in his bedroom. "I am going to make you love me, Christen Clifford." He uses my full name and I like it. It makes me feel like a naughty schoolgirl. We are sideways on his bed, my head falling over the edge. He holds my wrists and my head thrashes back and forth while I protest. "No, no, I won't, I won't love you."

I welcome it, even if I'm acting out a scene from a porn flick. It makes me aroused, this fight, this dislike for him even. I take pleasure from it when I feel like a porn star. He fucks me slowly at first to mollify me?because I am upset, I don't want to love him?then violently, thrusting as if he wants to break my will. I'd like that. If he really could, if he could be that good. Does he think that with this particular fuck I will say, "Yes, yes, I love the way you fuck me so I will love you, I do love you, yes, yes"?

I won't say it. I don't love him, I love the sex.

And afterward, I want to get out, to go home right away, to talk on the phone to my Long Distance Man, to imagine myself curled up next to him. I'd rather be playing this game with him. But I don't; I turn on my side away from the big hairy Italian Stallion and fall asleep. I sleep pretty easily. He always holds me and watches until I fall asleep.

My shrink says that I shouldn't do what she calls "layering." Well, there's lots of things she says I shouldn't do, and layering is one of them. Fucking the Stallion is another. Layering is playing out games to layer good experiences on top of a bad one. She says people do this instead of really dealing with a traumatic experience.

Well, so what if I like and need to act out my neuroses, I say. Layering is pretty common. My friend Jaybo told me about his girlfriend wanting him to fuck her best friend while she watched from the closet. She asked him very seriously and sexily to do this for her. His eyes were wide when he told me about it. He was way into it. But then he found out that she was into it because her father used to force her into a closet to watch him having sex with women other than her mother. His enthusiasm dried up. Girls get turned on by their problems. Boys don't.

I've scared many a boyfriend over the years. Not every guy wants to help me play out my psychodramas. Apparently some guys don't like their sexual fantasies mixed with messy childhood traumas.

When I asked my first NYU "boyfriend" to rape me, he completely lost it. Tyler was a film student with terrible acne and a cooler-than-thou attitude. We were friends who fucked. When I told him I thought I might be falling in love with him, he said, "Maybe we should stop sleeping together."

This particular night we were drunk; it's pretty hard to tell someone you want them to treat you like shit for fun, so it usually comes out under the influence of alcohol. He got into the hard, rough fuck, but when I resisted and scrambled, he didn't like it anymore. "I feel like I'm really raping you." He started to cry. We were on a sofa bed at a friend's dad's apartment on the Upper East Side. There was a Chinese vase on the end table. He was still hard. It takes more than a fucked-up chick to kill an 18-year-old's erection.

I made my Pratt painter boyfriend hit me while we were fucking. His bed was narrow, and had one of those terrible dorm mattresses on it. His roommate's light was on across the room. His roommate's ferret was in its cage. I hated that ferret.

I was 17, a senior in high school. I had just told him that I didn't love him anymore. As if I knew. He smelled of turpentine, as usual. He was mad at me, so I told him, "Go on and hit me, you know you're pissed off." He said no.

But I said it again. He smashed his hands through the bathroom mirror afterward. He had sworn to himself that he would never hit a woman.

The summer I met him, at the Chautauqua Institute, he had hit me on the ass with a hairbrush and the brush broke in half. He freaked out about that, saying he didn't want to ever hurt me. I knew I was pushing a button. It didn't even occur to me to not push it. He hated himself for hurting me.

His instincts were right, not mine. I'm evil that way. I didn't mind being hit, I liked it. It was a rush. I felt like I deserved it. I had just come from Buffalo to New York for our weekend visit and he had stolen champagne from the liquor store he worked at. He stole champagne, and I didn't love him anymore. It didn't make sense to him. "But I stole champagne."

I don't understand either. I love the Long Distance Man and he's not here. It's like I stole champagne, too. I haven't asked him yet if he'll pretend to rape me. I'm scared he'll say yes, and scared he'll say no.