Sex Object by Jessica Valenti Read Free Book Online

I got it.
    And so my father and my mother put money aside and sent me to a Kaplan course every week for months before the test was scheduled. I rode the subway to a midtown classroom where I would take practice tests and learn how to strategically skip questions, narrow down answers, and otherwise up my chances of getting in. My parents tell me that I didn’t sleep for weeks before the test, instead walking around the house in the middle of the night. The evening after I finally completed the test, though—sitting in a room in the old Stuyvesant building in the East Village surrounded by strangers and a few friends from junior high—I slept for thirteen hours straight. My parents tell me this is how they knew that I got in.
    In a school of math and science aficionados, the girl with well-developed boobs is queen. I went from being the dowdy friend of cute girls to the dowdy friend with big tits. I was being asked on dates, a lot of dates. Proper dates to pool halls and movie theaters, lunches at a diner on the weekend or a walk to Central Park. I had boyfriends—more than one! Later, in between high school relationships, my male friends would jokingly/not jokingly ask to “talk business” with me—code for let’s negotiate how it’s in your best interest to suck my dick . I turned them down but was secretly pleased nonetheless. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that the boys my age would want to hook up for any other reason than they liked me .
    I was not the smartest kid in the class anymore. To my friends and the high-achieving types around me, I was barely literate. That I could cut class and still come out with a goodgrade irked them. That I didn’t mind when I got a shitty grade baffled them. Instead I was the girl who lost her virginity freshman year, who wore tight tops and bright lipstick. The girl who embarrassed her best friends by talking too much and too loudly about sex and joked about penis sizes. The girl who, when given an assignment to come up with the first line of dialogue in a play written in iambic pentameter, handed in a page of paper that read, “So how / long did / it take / for him / to come.”
    I got 95s in the classes I loved and 65s in the classes I hated, making me what the guidance counselors there would consider low achieving, an embarrassment to a school full of Westinghouse science award winners and National Merit Scholars. Students with just-okay grades were roundly ignored in favor of the real students, the ones who could up the school’s rate of kids who got into Ivies. My counselor/gym teacher had one meeting with me, recommended I go to a city community college, and never spoke to me again.
    I tried not to think about it and ended my senior year with a trip to the Bahamas—a weeklong vacation not sanctioned by the school but put together by student “leaders” who made it sound official enough that our parents thought it safe to ship off their teens to the beach during spring break. We were seventeen and eighteen years old but still were able to get free amaretto sours in the hotel casino and then, later, take buses to a club where we had to wear bracelets marking us as underage. They served us anyway.
    The first night that my friends and I tried the green “handgrenade” cocktails served in plastic cups with huge straws, we decided to enter a wet T-shirt contest. We lined up near the stage, giggling, believing someone would throw a bucket of water on us as we wore white shirts emblazoned with the club’s logo. When we got onstage, though, the three of us watched as other girls—college girls and adult women—started to take their clothes off. All of their clothes. The music was too loud to hear if they said anything as they did this, and the men’s screams from the audience almost drowned out the music anyway. The more the women danced, the closer the audience inched to the stage, some hands grabbing