WHY ARE ALL THE GIRLS 17?
To be honest, I never thought about our relationship all that much. There was nothing to think about.
Two weeks before I graduated high school, I got a text from a man I had been seeing infrequently. These texts were always brief, often a single emoji of two silver chains hooked together, the underlying message simply being “link?” These texts often came at inopportune times, but the prospect of being wanted would lull me from the suburban-like safety of Battery Park City to the Upper East Side. It is perhaps more telling of my character than his, the eagerness I contained as I slipped through the sweaty graces of the 6 train into the painfully decorated embrace of his Park Avenue apartment.
I don’t know how I would categorize my relationship with him. To be honest, I never thought about our relationship all that much. There was nothing to think about. He went to college in the city and his parents paid for his apartment—I didn’t know much else about him. He didn’t know that much about me. The first time we slept together, he stopped halfway through to tell me that he wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. I said that was fine and we never broached the topic again. Part of me liked the simplicity of our relationship, I liked cosplaying as older than I was, and he liked that I didn’t make a fuss about going on dates or finishing. When we first met, I told him I was on a gap year exploring the East Coast—this was my noncommittal statement to signal that I was young, but not too young. He never seemed concerned about my age, though, none of the men I slept with ever did. There was a concern for the law, sure, but once the legalities were set aside these men—often in college, and occasionally grad school—didn’t ever seem to care about the difference between a 17 and an 18-year-old.
I started lying to these men about my age when I was 15. Back then I would say I was 17 because that seemed like the good, young, legal, sexy age. Later I learned that the best thing to do was to avoid the age question altogether and just let them fill in the gaps themselves. Between gap years, skipped grades, and not going to college, I learned earlier than most that men wanted deniability more than they wanted reassurance.
The age of consent in New York state is 17 with no Romeo and Juliet law exceptions. When I was still seeking out these kinds of relationships, I remember feeling that the age of consent (in concept) was stupid; no magical fairy came or would come to visit me when I was 17 to develop my prefrontal cortex and allow me to make reasonable choices about who to sleep with. Nothing bad ever happened, I often reassured myself. None of these men ever did anything I didn’t want them to do, none of them ever leveraged their age against me, none of them were even ever mean to me. I said yes, or rather, didn’t say no, in every instance. I enjoyed the thrill of masquerading as the concept of older. I told myself through all of this that these were things that I wanted. I told myself that this was good, that I enjoyed the sex, and, more than anything, I was in control.
I couldn’t tell you anything special about this particular night. We slept together and I told him that I was going to crash on his couch because I didn’t want to have to take the train this late. We exchanged a cursory nod and I planned on waking up the next morning and enjoying pretending to be an Upper East Side native. Instead, however, I woke up at 2:30 AM with a divine sense of urgency.
I left his apartment in a haste, said good morning to the doorman on the way out, and kicked myself for not saying good night. The city is a strange place at night. People like to talk about it in an illusory way: vast, dangerous, whimsical. But when I was walking down Park Ave, my haste melted into freedom. I couldn’t tell you what I wore that day, but I could tell you that I was wearing a pair of white Converse with a heart painted on the side from a failed art class. I remember because I sprinted in them 30 blocks from 93rd to 60th in the dead of night. I looped through Central Park at one point, passing the Great Pond and the not-so-great ponds. I went past the Museum Mile and the houses of people I went to preschool with. There’s no traffic at 2:30 AM, just you and chain smokers disguised as street lamps. I also remember these shoes because at 60th and Broadway, they broke; the sole from the left shoe came loose, so when I ran it made an unpleasant, flipper-like, thwapping noise that seemed to draw attention in a way I became self-conscious of.
I remember getting on the train and I remember no one else being on it. I remember looking around and thinking about how in one of the largest cities in the world, I was so alone in that moment. I remember being struck by some sense of awe in my solitude, and then I remember starting to cry.
When I first told this story to my therapist she asked about trauma. If something had gone wrong at his apartment, if someone did something to me while I was running, if the subway car wasn’t actually empty, if I was leaving out some detail to salvage my dignity. I answered no to each of her questions. I remained inexplicably steadfast in my resolve that this event, this sudden burst of adrenaline and escapism was not, in fact, due to underlying discontentment, but rather a dismissable one-off of inexplicable mania.
I rationed this to my therapist in a series of increasingly unserious feminist justifications. I told her I grew up in an era of #MeToo discourse and matured through the nuancing feminist discourse that followed. I told her that I read Chanel Miller’s memoir on the weekdays and watched Gone Girl on the weekends. I went to a progressive school with progressive sex education—I felt that I had a pretty good handle on sex and consent. I felt that I knew enough about FRIES and condoms and asking the last time they got tested. I told her that I had read and postulated enough to be ok. I Knowledge is Power’d my way to being ok.
My greatest defense was the lack of a cynical want of some sort of sexual assault Munchausen's. Around the time I started seeing these men, I read an essay called “the pain gap” and in it writer Rayne Fisher-Quann discusses the desire to have had her older boyfriends hurt her, “sometimes, in the small, secret part of myself where i tuck away my worst impulses, i wished they had gone just a little further, wronged me just a little bit more clearly, because maybe then i wouldn’t feel quite so crazy about hurting so much." In a meta dialogue at some points, I convinced myself that I felt slighted by the whole ordeal. That these men I sought out, those who I came to at beck and call, that these were men that were using me and wronging me. At the same time, I knew that wasn’t true—that I knew that, more than anything, I enjoyed being wanted. At the time, perversely, I looked down on women like Fisher-Quann, although with a more loving, appreciative, edge. I appreciated their sacrifice, but I knew better. I was smug in my reassurance that because I knew that what was happening was wrong and by having that knowledge I preserved some power.
Retrospectively, I don’t know how much power I held in giving men whatever, or rather, exactly what they wanted out of me.
Right after I sobbed my eyes out on the F (running on the R line until Utica) I resolved to stop seeing these men. I stopped responding to their texts, I stopped sneaking out at night, I stopped nodding at the stories they would tell me when they approached me. What I couldn’t admit then, shamefully, was that doing the same charade from the age of 15 to 18 took the edge off. It started to feel utilitarian. There was nothing to get away with, just doing, and nothing about just doing appealed to me. I was 18 when I went sprinting down Broadway and I could no longer deny the semiotics of it all—I was running away.
In the vacancy they used to fill, I would frequently wonder what would have happened if I ever were to say no. That if my compliance wasn’t already assumed, it would be forced upon me. When I first started thinking about the prospect of being assaulted—of being raped—I would assuage these worries by saying that I got lucky. More and more, I do not think that was the case, but rather the inverse. I think these men got lucky. They got lucky by encountering a girl naïve enough—young enough—one with just enough swirling meta-dialogue to preempt sexual assault by saying yes; a girl so resistant to victimhood, but so desperate to be “a cool girl” that they developed a hypersexuality to shirk their shame. Every piece of “control” I attempted to scourge from within teenage girlhood was expelled under the false premise that yes meant I want this and not I don’t want to know what it means to not want this.
I didn’t say any of this to my therapist. What I told my therapist when she asked about trauma was about my 18th birthday. I told her that I feel like I have been 18 for the past four years. I told her that I don’t think I’ll ever be any older.
AUTHOR: Emerson Rhodes
ARTIST: Amy Park