The Geometry of Want
by Marissa Korbel
The idea that girls don’t want sex without marriage was antiquated by 1980. But even in schools where we teach sex ed, we don’t teach pleasure. Teaching pleasure means teaching agency means saying that sometimes, the adolescent body desires. That they have skin and nerves that thrum; the whole electric molten world of pleasure and yes comes together. What we say is: under a certain age, your yes doesn’t matter. What we say is: yes or no is the same. But it’s not the same.
What fascinates me is how all of these social and legislative concerns manifest in my own experience. I have felt condescended to, protected from. I was given far too much leeway and not enough sway. I have angled for more power, and I protracted for less. Statutory rape in its current state pulls childhood over the mouth of teenagers, strangling consent with condescension. Every conflicted social and legal narrative lives in the boundaries of my politicized body: a child-hearted, teenager in mom-drag. Here I am. When I close my eyes, I remember my bodies, all of them, stacked, sedimentary. All of their stories are my stories, and all of their voices square mine like a body electric. A whole history of laws press between my thighs: what I can do, when and how, with whom, and under what circumstances. The weight of the law outperforms than my want.
Statutory rape is only a crime for unmarried people. Those first wave concerns about hearth and home are alive. In some states, a child can get married with parental consent at any age. There are children whose parents tell them to marry their rapist to avoid a “messy criminal investigation.” While former-child-brides have been trying to change the laws, our lawmakers have dismissed their stories and infantilized their concerns. They would rather marry them off than listen to them.
Do you know the story of Salome? I was sixteen when I saw the opera. I watched her dance for her father, the King, to get her wish for the head of a prophet. History is strewn with young bodies using sex as leverage. It is the only lever many of us are given. It is a lever we will press over and over again, wrecking ourselves to get the ever-diminishing pay. We are left with a broken handle, and no map.
Here is the only map I know how to draw: It’s not about the hims of the world. It’s not about whatever makes him stiffen. That’s not magic, and it doesn’t give you power. That’s just an autonomic response and it doesn’t mean shit about you. It’s not about you. It’s not about you. It’s not about you.
What is sex about if it isn’t about power?
Marissa's featured column Backbone is a 6-month series on Corporeal Clamor. More of her work can be found in The Rumpus, The Manifest Station, Nailed Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, and The Establishment, among others. Her essay, "No, Lolita," was named one of Entropy Magazine's Best Online Articles & Essays of 2016. Her poetry has been anthologized in Only Light Can Do That (PEN/ The Rattling Wall 2016) and Things I Have to Tell You (Candlewick, 1998). Marissa is currently writing a collection of lyric essays and revising an experimental memoir. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and their toddler.