How Not to be a Nice
Girl
Let your fingers
do the walking
they said
on that television
commercial
my mother said,
"nice girls
don't
touch themselves
down
there."
last night,
as I went to touch myself
down there,
I wondered if I was
a
nice girl.
I smell nice,
talk nice, play nice
with others
- does that make me
a
nice girl?
I stopped myself,
steadied my hand,
stopped
the rhythm to the beat of my own
questioning.
Embarrassed,
afraid, wondering if
my walls
had eyes, my sheets had ears, if mom
was
listening, somehow.
My friend, he
doesn't know what I'm talking about.
He was
raised by hippies, he says.
No
problem with that.
You were raised
with a penis, too, I said.
It's always
easier to play with something
you
can see.
People like
it better that way, they're
always
afraid of what they can't see
down
there.
We have dark
places between our legs,
ruby lips
and mystery and the whole world
down
there.
And sometimes,
an old girlfriend used to say,
you push
the right buttons and the whole world
stops.
My mind is dirtier
than I like to let on,
because
I'm a nice girl, normal girl,
safe girl.
I lie in bed
awake, arms firmly shoved down
to my
sides, staring at the ceiling, trying not
to
think.
And I feel like
a child, my hand pushed away,
instructed
on proper sexual etiquette - seen, and
not
heard.
And so as a
two-year-old, I learned shame,
I learned
to look over my shoulder at twenty-six,
wondering,
watching.
After my sexual
liberation, after learning how to
please
myself, another woman, another man
at
the same time
After learning
how to dance in leather, how to
use sweat
as a seasoning, how to taste
like
a critic
After learning
what it is to be a feminist,
an activist,
a bitch, a slut, a liberated
woman
I still find
myself looking, watching, listening
for my
mother's snores from the next room,
holding
my breath in
one hand, my home-made EZ-bake
do-it-yourself
betty crocker dildo
in
the other
watching, waiting,
for what? to get the goddamned
voice
out of my head? To give myself
permission?
Who gave you
permission to tell me what to
Think,
speak, eat, drink, fuck, spit, swallow
anyhow?
If you press
the right buttons, she said,
everything
suddenly seems right again, the world just…
stops.
nice girls don't
touch themselves down there,
my mother
said. I say, I’d rather learn how not to be
a
nice girl.
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