Sex Object by Jessica Valenti Read Free Book Online Page A

at their ankles as they walked by. There was no water.
    We whispered to each other on the staircase leading to the stage, asking what we were supposed to do when our turn came around. The bouncer behind us had our real shirts in a pile in his arms. We finally settled on a quick flash and laughed as we did it, and hurried offstage.
    Later, on the dance floor, a short man in his fifties walked up to me, smiling, and leaned in close. I thought you should have won , he said. I said thank you.
    During that trip I found out that a boy named Joe liked me, and because he had gotten good-looking over the course of the year I hooked up with him on the dance floor of a club and then later, in his hotel room. The hand job I was giving him was taking too long, though, so I blew him instead to get it over with. I didn’t think much of him the rest of the trip until at the airportwaiting to go home he yelled at me in front of a crowd that you can’t just suck someone’s dick and then leave. I was hungover and apologized a few weeks later. For what, I wasn’t sure. I just felt confused as to why he cared so much.
    Before we graduated my male friends—a group of guys whom I loved and revered as hilarious and down-to-earth—let it slip that they had a nickname for me: Valentitty. I laughed when they told me this because that is what you do when you want to be the cool-girl friend who doesn’t give a shit. The girl who isn’t uptight like the others.
    JESSICA VALENTI BREAST.
    If you Googled my name in 2006, this was one of the first “related searches” that came up as a suggestion.
    If you’re searching for Jessica Valenti, maybe you’re also looking for her tits!
    This algorithmic embarrassment was the result of a twenty-second-long interaction in which I took a group photo with President Bill Clinton along with other then-bloggers. Soon after, a law professor/blogger posted the picture online and suggested I was posing provocatively, that I had worn inappropriate clothing, and that I “should have worn a beret.”
    â€œBlue dress would have been good too,” she wrote.
    This woman, known in part for her rants on YouTube, encouraged her followers when they published suggestive comments. One wrote a limerick about my fellating the former president. Another suggested I was too plain to inspire the Monica comparisons. I got phone calls with men breathing and laughing.
    Soon, hundreds of blogs were dissecting what I thought was a perfectly innocuous picture, debating whether my posture suggested I was trying to stick my tits out, whether I had worn a tight sweater on purpose—one podcast even theorized that as I wasn’t nearly important enough to be invited to such a meeting I must have been placed there to entice Clinton into an affair.
    The mainstream media picked it up. The political video show Bloggingheads —which would later be run at the New York Times —devoted an episode to it, with the founder of the series, Bob Wright, calling me the “famous breast woman.” A young reporter at Politico also covered the story, inviting the before-mentioned law professor to expound on the months-long harassment campaign, which he called a “dust-up.”
    Jessica Valenti, who runs and blogs on feministing.com, is standing at an angle with a slight arch in her back, making the focal point of the photo, whether intentional or not, her breasts. Valenti isn’t shy about her body; she just published a book called Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters .
    Publishing a book with a catchy title meant I wasn’t shy about my body . When I called him on the carpet (Feministing post title: “Two Words for POLITICO: Fuck. You.”), the reporter and Politico doubled down, publishing a live chat on the topic. One reader asked why he didn’t talk to me before publishing the story.
    My research consisted of reading Althouse and