Sex Object by Jessica Valenti Read Free Book Online Page B

Valenti’s version of what happened, and speaking with Althouse. I e-mailed Valenti to speak with her about it but she says that she didn’t get it. I can’t find it in my sent mail so something must have malfunctioned.
    â€œMalfunctioned.”
    We can also wade into the dispute between Althouse and Valenti: Does Valenti use sexuality for self-promotion? If she does, who cares? And if she does and nobody cares, why not just say so?
    I am just grateful memes weren’t too big a thing yet. Here is the truth: I look good in that photo. My breasts are fine. But I cannot help their presence in a picture that I also inhabit. I cannot help what or that you think about them.
    As I read through comment after comment, blog post after blog post, I cried in the living room of my parents’ house. My mother, who has always lived in Queens and rarely has left, said she was considering looking this blogger up, taking a plane to Wisconsin, and kicking her ass. My mother does not make idle threats: my father later told me she had researched flights.
    Weeks earlier, when I told my parents I had been invited to meet President Clinton, they had both started weeping. They told family, friends, and random people who came into their store. Before the group picture became a joke about blow jobs and interns, they had it tacked up behind their cash register.
    I was proud, too, but said nothing at the actual meeting—too afraid of sounding stupid. I was the youngest person in the room and knew I didn’t deserve to be there. The “dustup” around the photo just confirmed it.
    Right before I started blogging, I went to my five-year high school reunion. I was excited to drive home this point to friends I hadn’t seen since graduation, friends to whom I was “a character” and the “fun” one.
    While on line to get into the party, I ran into someone who was a friend on the periphery of our group—a tall nice guy who none of us knew was insanely wealthy until his mom threw him a surprise graduation party at their Brooklyn Heights duplex. We tried to catch up as we moved forward, closer to the party. He told me about Harvard and when I mentioned to him I was in graduate school he laughed. That’s the last thing I expected to hear about you , he said. I got drunk and took him home.

SUBWAYS
    THE TWO WORST TIMES FOR DICKS ON SUBWAYS: WHEN THE train car is empty or when it’s crowded. As a teenager, if I found myself in an empty car, I would immediately leave—even if it meant changing cars as the train moved, which terrified me. Because if I didn’t, I just knew the guy sitting across from me would inevitably lift his newspaper to reveal a semihard cock, and even if he wasn’t planning on it I sure wasn’t going to sit there and worry about it for the whole ride.
    On crowded train cars I didn’t see dicks; I felt them. Pressing into my hip, men pretending that the rocking up against me was just because of the jostling of the train—but you know differently because the rhythm is all wrong.
    On the worst day, in eighth grade, I didn’t notice at all. The train was crowded but my mind was elsewhere. I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest on my Walkman and thinking about how warm it was and when I stepped out of the subway onto the 39th Avenue platform the sun hit my face and I was happy to be almost home. But when I started to put my hand in myback pocket, I felt something wet: I had made it the whole ride back without noticing that a man, whose face I would never see, had come on me. I wiped my hand on the lower leg of my jeans and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. I walked the three blocks home with my backpack slung as low as possible so that no one walking behind me could see what had happened or would think I peed on myself.
    I peeled the jeans off when I got home and even though most of the semen had landed on the pocket of the pants—giving me