Bad Dick
by Keti Shea
Image by Matvalina for Pexels
Trigger warnings: sexual violence, suicide, self-harm
When you meet him, Bad Dick will be several years older than you, a lifetime at your age. He will have steely eyes and dark brown hair flecked with gold and he’ll check his phone too much during dates. Over dinner, he’ll announce he likes to role play during sex, sometimes play a little rough. He’ll drop this casually on a third or fourth date, entirely to test you. He’ll suggest that you in fact like these things too, he’ll say all women have a rape fantasy, and he’ll act as if he has been put on this planet to satisfy your fantasies, starting with the ones you don’t have. You’ll be pretty positive you don’t have a rape fantasy, but this man will be incandescent with sex appeal, and he’ll insist that you do. You’ll be a sophomore in college, so what will you know? You will know exactly nothing. This man will be both smooth and sharp, and his dick will be authoritative with veins. He’ll know what you have and haven’t yet been taught, and he will capitalize on the chasm between those two things.
Once he disarms you with several innocuous dates at overpriced restaurants, he’ll buy you lacy underwear, which will feel good because it means he bought you a present, but then you’ll realize the underwear scratches and is too small to cover the stretch marks around your hips. He’ll know you are self-conscious about your body, so he’ll ask you to parade in front of him. He will enjoy degrading you, degradation will be sexy to him, like porn; and you’ll want him to approve of you, so you’ll abandon your instincts. You will dance like a slightly drunk stripper, which will be hot to him, which will make it seem hot to you. You’ll mistake his age for sophistication, so you’ll think you have to prove you are worldly before he cuts you loose for someone more pliable. Someone cooler and hotter. Someone seven pounds thinner than you.
He will produce handcuffs in the bedroom on date four or maybe five, which will make you visibly uncomfortable, and you will start to understand the underwear is not so much a present for you as it is for him. You will contort yourself on the bed so he can’t see your stretch marks. This will make your wrists ache from the handcuffs that are now very cold on your wrists, also too tight. They didn’t start out this tight, so he must have made them tighter, but you will miss that in your worry over the stretch marks. You’ll try to appear relaxed, while feeling increasing uncomfortable, because all the lights will be on. When you find yourself unable to ignore your discomfort any more, you will attempt to shimmy from your restraints, bucking wildly, which he’ll think is hot, so you’ll add vocal objections to the physical ones, because even dumb girls know that resistance is paramount, it is your duty, and he will find this new level of resistance very hot. You’ll give up and just do the dead cockroach thing every girl seems to know about and not make a big deal about, because that will make the moment pass quickly like a freak summer storm. Maybe the vocal objections were too lackluster, tepid as tap water, you will think after, when reordering the memories.
Bad Dick will later tell you to kneel and suck his dick while saying things that make you cringe and him come, and then he’ll buy you dinner, because it couldn’t have been all that bad if he bought you dinner. He’ll know this and that’s why he’ll do it, but you will be young and lonely and seeking approval, so you’ll override your instincts. You’ll let him convince you that you enjoyed the rough dick-sucking, even though in the moment there will be clear evidence you did not. Bad Dick will encourage you to subjugate yourself, because he will know you want to be loved and will do most anything for that love, even if those same things will make you hate yourself afterwards.
For example. You will later agree to gag on this man’s veiny dick because the last time you resisted a blowjob Bad Dick was so annoyed at your lack of compliance, your lack of coolness, that he pushed your head into his crotch until his fingers left welts. His hand on your neck felt powerful. Which was so hot, he will say afterwards, leaving no room for argument. You will say nothing because you’ll feel complicit, an escalating series of events will have led to this one. You’ll feel like there was an off-ramp somewhere that you failed to take. You will wash your mouth with anti-bacterial soap every day for a week until your tongue blisters. Someplace deep down that you won’t like to visit, you’ll feel good that you made Bad Dick erupt like Old Faithful. In fact, his pleasure will elevate just as yours diminishes; pleasure will be linked in precisely that synchrony. Bad Dick will immerse you so powerfully that you’ll be swept away by it, making it both terrifying and attractive, a rip tide.
At this point, you’ll be tempted to ask friends whether they too have been glossing over the bad dick of their pasts to ascertain the ultra-fine point at which bad dick becomes rape. This will be a delicate process, one you’ll decide is best left to silence or therapy. Therapy will prove useless because therapists will think everything is rape, because they’ll have forgotten what it is to want someone to want you. Silence will allow you to convince yourself everything is your fault, and so you’ll opt for silence.
You’ll eventually change your number and stop talking to Bad Dick, which won’t mean much because the memory of Bad Dick will linger on your skin like a taunt. You’ll come to understand there are critical factors, essential criteria, that make bad dick ipso facto rape, and these criteria will be characterized by an absence rather than a presence. Rape starts where linearity ends. It is rape when time stops, when the sky sucks its breath and holds it, so the entire scene is suspended before you, and you rise above to watch like a dirty third party. It is rape, you will come to understand, when your brain stacks memories in a flipbook out of order; it is watching a movie with the scenes in a jumble. Your body will bear bruises that you won’t remember receiving. And because you won’t fully remember the course of events in which you were involved, you will come to question the sanctity of your memory, your sense of self, your grasp on reality even.
You will eat less because concavity will feel good, it will feel like a much-needed punishment.
A sentence will then flicker through your brain, a neon sign in a charcoal night: If you wish to survive you must first try to die.
You won’t reach critical mass yet, you’ll still have a long way to fall, nine circles of hell and all that, so at this point you’ll seek to understand. How in the actual fuck did you end up here? You’ll see you must first unpack your conditioned responses to sex, to your body, to the qualities you believe make you desirable to men. You won’t yet question why it is you must be desirable to men; that will come later. First, you’ll dig through the trash heap of your past and catch a glimmer of an answer, well before your first junior tampon, when your vagina was hairless and hymened and your chest was unmounded.
The answer will rest that far back—when you first met the Hot Girl. The Hot Girl is the epitome of desirable. The Hot Girl is blithe, assured, down for whatever, not because she is a whore but because she has mastered the art of divesting emotion from sex. The Hot Girl is effortlessly undramatic. She is slightly tomboyish, so she can hang with the guys. She doesn’t flinch when asked to perform adventurous sex acts. She does not gag when bad dick ventures too far down her gullet. She is neither a slut nor squeamish about sex, a fine line to walk. The Hot Girl is smart and funny, never bitter. The Hot Girl has the perfect amount of hair on her vagina—enough to show her self-esteem but not so much that men don’t want to fuck her. The Hot Girl goes to many parties because she is well-liked, and she dresses in a way that flatters her body without being showy, because The Hot Girl knows that if someone roofies her at a party, her clothing will be the first thing under scrutiny. The Hot Girl takes an Uber home from bars, she doesn’t walk home at night, because walking home at night is an invitation to rape.
The Hot Girl is your beacon, your guiding light, a figment of your imagination, and you’ll now realize she is the ideal against which you have been comparing and grooming yourself since the moment you understood you were an object for male consumption. If the Hot Girl would smoke pot or do ecstasy for attention, you will do those things too.
Once you have popped the pimples of your past, you’ll return to the hideous rash of the present. You will have abandoned yourself for a man again and again, and you will hate yourself for being a doormat. A thought will blossom: You don’t like bad dick, you’re not even sure you like dick at all, but you want it to choose you. And because you were not chosen by it, you will find fault with yourself. The hate will be a wildfire, slow at first then rapidly building as it jumps and consumes everything within its path. This hate will be a wrecking ball that spares nothing. You’ll begin to hate yourself more because hatred conveniently self-pollinates. You will eat even less because you’ll conclude that it was probably the softness of your thighs that got you into this mess. You’ll remember a comment someone once made about women with perfect bodies having power, and you will decide your body is imperfect. You’ll think that if your body were perfect, Bad Dick would have bowed down and respected you. So that’s it, you’ll decide, you will excise your flaws to become worthy of attention. Only the flaws will seem malignant—self-perpetuating and squamous—and no matter how much of the rot you cut out yet more will appear in its place. You will feel terminal with flaws. Eventually all of this will remind you of that comment your best friend made about your nipples in front of everyone when you were thirteen and still had headgear and no one wanted to go to the homecoming dance with you, and you will skitter across the floor to land headfirst in a roiling snake pit of shame. You’ll come to consider your vagina a hideous ogre, a geyser of need and want, it is the reason you are here, and so you’ll condemn your vagina to an involuntary hold in a psych ward for the rest of its days. You’ll try never to look at it.
Eventually, you will put the shattered pieces of your limbs back together, zip up your skin suit, and set out to prove that you are still Hot, that you are rape material, which is to say believable, not because you will want to be believed (that would require speaking out loud) but because you will need to believe it yourself so you can hide in plain sight. You’ll play the part of the perfect victim so you can pass as loveable. You’ll study the requirements of the task ahead of you like a candidate for a job interview. You must be smart but not too smart. Just-right smart girls are prudent and wise; they never make poor decisions, even when they drink at parties. You must also be the perfect weight, one which appears effortless to maintain. You cannot be either a slut or a prude. You must be calm and collected, which means not too victim-y, because victim-y girls are attention-seekers. But most important of all is your vagina. It must be beyond reproach. It must be pure and tight. It must be not a day younger or older than twenty-two. Your vagina must be so saintly it could be canonized.
You will drop even lower into the bowels of hell, which means of, course, you will become suicidal. You didn’t choose to be born, so why do you have to keep living? You’ll be amazed at how far you can sink, how much hatred you can direct at yourself. You will not eat and you will not sleep, and all this deprivation will border on mania. Your flirtation with death, with nonexistence, will now reach fever pitch, and this will open new avenues of self-discovery. You’ll realize that above all else you must remain funny. This will seem imperative: People will be sad if you die, but only if you are funny. You’ll discover that funny and suicidal is a state akin to nirvana because it frees you to be yourself. It will be stronger than any alcohol or drugs combined. You will do and say whatever you want, all the while knowing you could kill yourself. If you drink too much and make a fool of yourself by falling down a flight of steps, it doesn’t matter because you can kill yourself later. Other people won’t know this about you, and that will make you feel powerful.
But wait.
You’ll realize there are a few more circles of hell and you’ll drop into those. You will sleep with men who are disgusting; it’ll be a real chore, but it’ll make it easier to hate yourself. You’ll drink until you black out. You will frequently drive drunk, and in the mornings, you’ll discover your car parked sideways in a parking spot outside your apartment. You’ll both impress and terrify yourself with the depths of your depravity. You’ll drive with eyelids drooping, not on one occasion but many times, swerving as if in a video game, until you’ll no longer trust yourself with yourself. When you drive down the road, you will fantasize about driving off the side of the highway, through the guardrail and over the overpass. Like a hot air balloon ride, you will think it the experience of a lifetime, especially because it could make you dead. You’ll think about this so much that you’ll jerk the wheel sometimes when you drive—this will scare you and exhilarate you. You can end this at any moment, you’ll think, and somehow that thought will give you strength not to die.
You will often wake to a pillow wet with your own vomit, which will be disgusting but not surprising, because you’ll find everything about yourself disgusting, starting with your vagina. You’ll treat your vagina like a schizophrenic who talks to herself and never takes her meds, the thing everyone turns away from in pity and horror. You’ll remember that in order to live you first have to die, so you’ll relinquish your hold on life even further. It will be a surrender, a thing so ugly it does a full circle to become beautiful again. This is the last circle of hell, where you will fall with a splat as if to the bottom of a deep and dank well. Your mom will be there, decrying your many shortcomings that all have to do with your body, and you won’t tell her to shut up because your crippling inability to speak up for yourself is another of your shortcomings. You will reach the end of your days at the bottom of this well, so you can start fresh now, you’ll think. But this will prove tricky because you will still want to die.
Somehow you won’t die, and you will have no explanation for this other than you are not very good at killing yourself.
One day, out of the blue, you will meet a man who will act as if he truly and undeniably loves you. You will find this terrifying, so you’ll seek out his flaws, pick fights, find excuses to leave him. Eventually you will stay, partly out of curiosity, mostly because he feeds you like a stray dog, and you are licking your chops looking for more. You will believe he likes you only because he doesn’t know you. He’ll do things you won’t comprehend, such as not care how much hair you let grow in your armpits. Such as wanting to hang out even when you have your period, and which will spark a withering conversation about tampons, which he’ll buy for you at the store unprompted. He will cook the food you once liked and begin stocking his pantry with snacks for you. You will be disoriented by this turn of events; this is no rip tide, though it’ll be unchartered waters.
This new man will get lost while going down on you, and you’ll stare at the ceiling and wonder what the catch is. You’ll believe that your mask cannot slip because then you won’t pass anymore; he will know you’re a monster and he will stop loving you immediately. He’ll smile at you during sex, and you’ll try not to notice. He will come on your face, but only when you want him to, which will surprisingly not be never. The boundaries of role play will be as clean and clear as his detergent. When the day comes that you freeze like a dead cockroach on your back during sex, he’ll pivot seamlessly into cuddling and watching TV. He will wait for an appropriate time to discuss the dead cockroach thing, the cause of which he will have already intuited. He will pry words from your mouth faster than a creative writing prompt. You will not spontaneously combust, he’ll still want to cuddle, which will make you worry you might actually be losing your mind.
You’ll do the dead cockroach thing less and less, and that will delight and also confuse you, as will many things related to your body that don’t involve self-harm. You’ll decide to inhabit your body again so you may reclaim it. You’ll go for slow runs in the park. You’ll cut your toenails before they burst through your socks. You’ll brush your hair. Somewhere along the way you will drink less alcohol. You’ll consume drugs not to numb or obliterate, but to laugh. And because drugs will make you eat food. One day you will not be high on anything, and you will watch cottonwood dander drift like summertime snow, and it’ll make you cry at how much you have missed. You’ll remember once loving a tree as a child, and that memory will feel like a former life, an ache.
You’ll come to understand this new man is medicinal, that he is Organic and Cruelty-Free. He will encourage you to cry at trees, even though you’ll think yourself a very ugly crier. You’ll realize this new man is a therapy session and a health-food store; he is pastured-raised and grass-fed. He will laugh when you laugh, and you’ll think he’s laughing at you until he explains he’s experiencing joy. You’ll tell him you don’t know what joy is, and you’ll mean it as a joke but later you’ll realize it’s true, and he’ll smile like he already knows you don’t know what joy is. He’ll buy you small presents that you’ll refuse to use because you’ll be unaccustomed to presents with no strings attached, and you’ll think using these presents will ruin them. When you complain about having to shave your vagina, he will shave it for you, not because he thinks it needs doing but because you want it done, and this man will want to please you. He will come only after you come, and you will find this truly disorienting.
For a long while, you’ll struggle to trust this Organic Cruelty-Free Dick until the first time he lets you eat cereal straight from his bowl. Then the truth of it will wallop you: A man has chosen to love you, not despite you but because of you. You’ll wrestle with this because you’ll think you don’t need saving by a man. You’ll believe yourself a feminist in that you share memes about patriarchy on social media, and so you’ll resist the idea of a savior. But then you’ll realize you’ve never once been saved, so you’ll save yourself for a change by letting another person treat you kindly. At some point you’ll realize it’s actually easier not to hate yourself, it takes much less energy, although that will confuse you too, because what exactly are you supposed to do all day unless you are hating yourself? You’ll begin to do things you think you might enjoy, if personal enjoyment were ever a factor you took into consideration. You’ll look around the empty room as if seeking approval, and you’ll understand no one is watching you, it’s just you in the room, so you’ll give yourself permission to relax. This will feel like playing hooky.
One morning it will dawn on you like a sunrise. You’ll look in the mirror and you’ll be surprised at your reflection. Bowled over by it. Seeing yourself, you will smile: You are a wild and beautiful thing, aren’t you? That will be a great day for you, it will be an opening. You’ll let Organic Cruelty-Free Dick comfort you—because you’ll be so very tired from chasing bad dick and thinking you can make it good. What a strange new world this will be for you: You’ll feel like a pioneer, like some gunslinging cowgirl. You’ll let Organic Cruelty-Free Dick hold your hand when you walk together. You’ll let him smile at you for no reason, and you will smile back. He’ll kiss you on the top of the head, and the smell of him will remind you of your sleeping bag as a kid, the one you used to read in by flashlight. At night he’ll laugh at your jokes, even the ones that aren’t that funny, and then you’ll eat cereal straight from his bowl and fall asleep with his hand on your butt.
This will feel like an ending, and it will be the beginning.
Keti Shea (she/her) is a neurodiverse lawyer and writer who lives in a former nunnery in Northern Colorado with her family. She is currently working on a novel, Small Birds In The Woods, about contemporary love. To see more of her writing you can find her on Instagram @ketishea.