One woman's story on using sex as a coping mechanism
BY JUNE 18, 2013
I vividly remember the patch of sidewalk that I was looking at when my dad said, “I’m afraid it’s bad news, honey.” I clutched my cell phone to my ear as he explained that a CT scan of my mom’s lungs had revealed a tumor wrapped around her esophagus and metastasis in her bones. I can still see the small dots in the cement—shades of gray in this decidedly black-and-white situation—as he explained that her prognosis was bleak: She had six months to a year. I also recall the green chain-link fence that I thought I might have to grab onto as a sense of vertigo took over, as though I might pass out from this too-sudden shift in reality.
Everything else in the moments and even months after that is a blur—everything except for the sex.
It started with "Sam," a 38-year-old waiter with leprechaunish looks. I wasn’t attracted to him, exactly, but he had an intriguingly dangerous, if corny, edge—what with his conspicuous flash of chest hair and wolf-tooth necklace. Already a few drinks deep, I met him in a local bar, and it took two more beers before I was straddling him in a shadowy pleather booth and he was shoving his hands down my pants.
At my place, he took the lead, gripping my face, wrists, or hair with his hands—I somehow just knew this was how he’d be. The harder he squeezed, pressed, or pulled, the louder I moaned. He got the message. Before long, Sam was flipping me over, repositioning my limbs, and dragging me across the carpet, as if I were a RealDoll. He seemed awed by my enthusiasm for being manhandled: “Are you kidding me? You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said breathlessly, as though he’d just won the kinky lottery.
I was in awe too: While I’d certainly seen far more extreme porn, and even had reported on BDSM as a journalist covering sex for an online magazine, I’d never so much as used fuzzy handcuffs before. My fantasies were sometimes off-color, but the most aggression I’d encountered in real life was a couple of de rigueur slaps on the rear. I vaguely knew my new desires were connected to my mom’s illness; I’d also chopped my long hair into an Aeon Flux—style bob—a superheroine, ready to fight evil—and started talking about getting a tattoo, an idea I’d always sneered at. It was as if I were casting off all the markers of myself, because who was I without my mother? Or rather, who was I to exist without her?
Sam left me with rug burns on my elbows and knees that scabbed over and months later became scars, but these were nothing compared to the grapefruit-size bruise on my butt. It was such a spectacular purple that I had to show it to one of my best friends: “Look at this,” I said, carefully pulling down my pants, trying to reveal only the mark. “Look at this.” It seemed a marvel of the human body, this firework of pigment right under my skin. She looked less impressed than concerned—and that was increasingly becoming the case with my friends. They just don’t get it, I thought: This isn’t self-annihilation, it’s affirmation.
I’d become fascinated with my body, in fact. After spending hours clicking through a digital copy of my mother’s CT scan, which revealed in startling detail all the precious organs that kept her alive, I’d stare at the veins in my own hands, imagining the blood passing through them, or I’d notice the thump of my heart and wonder that it hadn’t stopped yet.
My wounds were with me when I visited my mom in the hospital a few days after my session with Sam. She’d been rushed in for surgery because of a blood clot near her aorta, a complication of the cancer. She looked at me with wild, pleading eyes and in a stage whisper explained that doctors had secretly moved her from the original hospital to a locked psychiatric ward. I was terrified too—not because I believed her conspiracy theory, but because she sounded like she’d lost her mind. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if it was just the drugs she was on—what if the cancer had spread to her brain? What if my mom was already gone?
I turned to her and repeated the words she’d said to me so many times as I was growing up, after any embarrassment or disappointment: “It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Shortly thereafter, I met “Mike,” a smart and charismatic man with a drinking problem and a self-declared hero complex. I was drawn to him instantly. Grief is isolating, but with him I didn’t feel so alone. He seemed always to reek of whiskey—it was the smell of poison, or medicine, a sign that there was something in him that needed to be numbed. We’d met through a mutual friend and first hooked up while talking about my mom’s illness. “You must be having a hard time,” he said, stroking my hands, and then gestured for me to sit on his lap.
From the beginning he was forceful in bed, but in a way that seems to have become standard among guys of my millennial generation: jackhammer pounding with a little hair pulling. Just as with Sam, I urged him further. Soon he was taking me from behind while covering my mouth with his hand. He’d tug at my jaw or throat, using it for leverage, pulling my head up, up, up, like we were doing a pornographic yoga move. Although we never explicitly linked my mother’s condition to my appetite for pain, he must have known it played a role, yet he’d make confident proclamations like, “Girls love to be roughed up.”
When we were apart, it was as if he were still with me. I’d send him text-message updates, things like, “still purple” and “ribs are bruised.” Mike would apologize, but I wasn’t complaining, and he knew it. My sorrow was uncontainable, but bruises and scabs have clear edges and a short timetable for healing. I started to recognize that rough sex, which I was pursuing with other men during the same period, was a means of physically manifesting my interior pain, releasing it in a way that my tears couldn’t. It was a sexual version of cutting. So much of my grief was abstract—horror at an inevitable but still only imagined world without my mom—but there was nothing theoretical about the marks on my body. I looked as beat-up as I felt. It relieved my feelings and validated them, all at once.
At one point, I visited my parents’ house with a large scarf wrapped around a hand-shape bruise, and while part of me wanted my mom to catch a glimpse of the evidence of my pain, I mostly felt ashamed. Her arms were covered with sores from weekly poking and prodding at the cancer clinic, her belly a collection of bruises from daily injections in her stomach, and my body was scored because of what? Because of my inability to bear emotional pain, because of a frivolous overidentification with my mother’s suffering, because I was furious at how little control we have over life and death and was turning my rage inward.
Manhattan sex therapist and author Ian Kerner tells me that just as with eating, drinking, or shopping, “sex can quickly escalate into a way of self-medicating to deal with emotional unrest, whether it’s to avoid those emotions or, conversely, to confront them in a deeper, fuller way.” Defining what is healthy when it comes to such coping is complicated and often depends on “the duration of the behavior and to what extent it was situational or in danger of becoming chronic,” he says, and, crucially, whether it’s causing “personal or relationship distress.”
Undoubtedly unhealthy was the binge drinking I’d been doing, which typically accompanied the sex. I hit points that should’ve been rock bottom—such as when I woke up next to my own vomit, with only the fuzziest recollection of having drunkenly thrown up in my bed—but I managed to keep sinking lower.
Looking back at the time with my mom immediately after her diagnosis is almost like trying to see the sun: I can only catch a partial glimpse of what it was like. Even then, it felt like a surreal, out-of-body experience.
Not long after she was discharged from the hospital, I can remember curling up next to her in bed. She was asleep, moaning and mumbling. I wanted to wake her from what seemed to be a nightmare, but was reality any better? Awake, in her morphine haze, she formed sentences that were coherent but made no sense. “Harold is coming over for dinner,” she told me nonchalantly, referring to a family friend who’d died months before.
Later, when she got up to sort through the medicine bottles on her bedside table, I saw just how decimated she was. The flesh of her thighs appeared to hang from the bone, as though there were no muscle left. Without thinking about it, I sat up in bed and readied my arms in case she started to teeter, much like she must have done for me during the first years of my life. I’d never before felt the need to protect my mom.
I’m an only child, and my parents and I used to have a game when I was little: At the end of a dinner out, I’d whisper a code word to my dad that was the cue for us to leave the restaurant ahead of my mother. Then I’d hide nearby, and when she came out, he’d pretend he’d lost me. “What do you mean you lost her?” my mom would plead. “Oh no! Where’s my bunny?” At that, I’d emerge from the shadows with a leap, and she’d wrap me in a big hug: “There you are!” I adored this routine; though I didn’t grasp it then, of course, it was a game about the dangers of the world that served as reassurance that my mom would always look out for me.
She took care of other children, too. Our place was home base for my friends, some with absent or abusive parents, and my mom was always stocking the kitchen with snacks and inviting everyone to stay for dinner. She went so far as to take in a boyfriend of mine who’d dropped out of high school and was sleeping in his car amid serious family unrest; she helped him get his GED and enroll in college. My mother was never the cuddly type (her own strict upbringing had discouraged that), but her capacity for nurturing was huge.
It wasn’t just that the world felt safer with her in it—it also made more sense. We talked endlessly, especially when I was in college, about philosophy, literature, religion. This had always been the nature of our odd little trio. My parents and I were known at local restaurants as “the reading family,” because we’d each bring our own book to read, although we often as not began talking to one another instead. As I grew up, so did our conversations: In my teens and early twenties, it seemed no topic was off-limits. Berkeley liberals through and through, my parents not only talked openly about sex but rhapsodized about its spiritual, transcendent possibilities. As progressive as they were, how-ever,
they seemed to make value judgments about “good” and “bad” sex. Although I firmly believed that people could happily and healthily engage in BDSM, I was sure that my parents would consider it harmful, even if consensual.
It was after Thanksgiving dinner, spent in my parents’ living room with a rented hospital bed acting as the proverbial elephant in the room, that I began to crave more violence. When I got home, I arranged to go to Mike’s and then sent a timid text: “Be rough with me?” He responded within seconds: “Done.”
I was asking him to take it to the next level, without knowing what exactly that meant. I didn’t have anything in particular in mind: I was more curious about how far he’d go. I already felt at the whim of an indifferent universe, with no choice about my mom’s illness. But giving Mike “permission” to do what he would with me was different. There was something comforting about surrendering to controlled chaos. As BDSM practitioners like to say, submission is about control: The “bottom” sets limits and calls the shots. I wasn’t following the rules of careful negotiation and boundary setting, but the principle held, to an extent.
As soon as I stepped into his bedroom, he pulled me down by my hair and slammed me against the side of the mattress. “Who’s in charge here? You think you’re in charge?”
I looked him in the eyes and coquettishly nodded, “Uh-huh.”
He lightly grazed my face with the tips of his fingers and I laughed, telling him to do it harder—and he did. It was the first time I’d ever been slapped in the face. It was a stunning trespass against my body—more than any other part of me, my face was me. The broad smack reminded me of the most sickening, inexcusable cases of domestic violence—and sexism, more generally—but I’d asked for it. From my feminist perspective, this was pretty transgressive—and it was thrilling, if not pleasurable.
Before we finished, he did it again, slapped my face three times in quick succession. It felt like Buddhist meditation with a twist of S&M: Smack-smack-smack. Be here now. There was just my skin and his hand, nothing more.
Afterward, while I was lying in the nook of his arm, he offered, “So, I’m guessing Thanksgiving was hard.” “Yeah,” I said with a wry laugh. “It was a reminder of how little time is left.” My throat closed up on the last few words, and as he traced the ridges of my ear with his finger, I hoped he didn’t feel the tears falling onto his chest.
Mike tried to rescue me by satisfying my need for more—but all the time he worried that it was too much. Once, he grabbed my face, looked me straight on, and said with concern: “Wait. Is this okay?”
“Yes, it’s okay,” I replied, exasperated. I didn’t want to think—about what it meant, about whether it truly was okay—I just wanted to feel. “It’s exactly what I want.”
Nonetheless, after seeing him I often left feeling used, abused, and alone. He was a notorious cad, but I harbored the pathetic hope that I’d be the one to change him. I’d shown him the depths of my pain, but it made no difference. That, it seemed, reinforced the cruelty of the world, the irrelevance of my grief. The feeling was amplified by my concurrent exploits with other men: I sought out guys who seemed like they’d be into getting rough (and I was rarely wrong), but, paradoxically, their willingness to go there felt like an insult.
Even as my mom rebounded from her initial decline, I found it difficult to celebrate her improvement rather than mourn what was gone. Radiation shrank some of her tumors and eased her pain so that she didn’t require as much morphine, which meant that she was more like her usual, coherent self—only she still lacked much of an attention span. My exceedingly literate mother, who wrote her master’s thesis on the romantics and read Wordsworth at her wedding, had enough concentration only for TV—specifically, The Real Housewives andCupcake Wars. We spent hours watching catty socialites hurl insults and overturn tables, and bakers build improbable, motorized layer cakes.
One afternoon, as she threw up from the chemo, she apologized, “Honey, I’m sorry.”
I was incredulous: “Mom, how many times have you watched me throw up? I’ve thrown up on you.”
She tilted her head and smiled: “Yes, but not in a very long time, sweetie.”
I realized it needed to stop after I typed out a matter-of-fact text message to send to Mike: “Will you punch me in the face?”
My dad was driving me home from a visit with my mom when he started to cry. “I just love her so much,” he said, tears bouncing off his round cheeks and landing in his graying mountain-man beard. “I can’t imagine my life without her.” It was an unusual moment of open despair—usually he teared up telling me how lucky he felt just to have had such a love, even though he was losing her. The thought that came to my mind was, My dad’s losing his life, too. His world was being taken from him. I greeted this apocalyptic idea by asking to be punched in the face.
I stared at the words and the blinking cursor that followed, which seemed synced with my heartbeat. Then my thumb went directly to the backspace button: Delete, delete, delete. I held down the button long after the message was gone.
With one sentence, I’d managed to finally reveal the depth of my anguish to myself. I might as well have asked him to take a razor blade to my wrist. No one would ever be able to hurt me enough, I realized. No amount of physical pain could trump my emotional agony; no number of healed bruises or scabs could erase my sorrow. In contrast to my father’s great, big aching love for my mother, my nihilistic impulse seemed especially ugly—and foolish.
The rough sex didn’t stop immediately; life rarely moves in such a straight line. But as I began to see these trysts for what they were, they increasingly lost their allure. At the same time, I started to appreciate what a blessing it was that my mom was responding to treatment and that I could be with her in these final months. I actually believed my roommate when she told me how lucky I was: “My mom could live to be 100,” she said, “but I’ll still never have the relationship you’ve had with yours.”
My mom has outlasted her doctors’ prognosis by three years, but she still has cancer, she is still dying, and I’m still preemptively grieving. The difference now is that instead of treating myself harshly, trying to destroy, I want to follow the advice she gives me at the end of nearly every one of our visits: “Take care of yourself, honey.”
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