Want Me

Description

One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year

A New York Times “New & Noteworthy” Book

“Want Me is complicated, fun, shocking, and heart-warming all at once.”
—Jessica Valenti, New York Times bestselling author of Sex Object

“Intimate, challenging, and so very smart. Want Me is a gift.”
—Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad

Tracy Clark-Flory grew up wedged between fizzy declarations of “girl power” and the sexualized mandates of pop culture. It was “broken glass ceilings” and Girls Gone Wild infomercials. With a vague aim toward sexual empowerment, she set out to become what men wanted–or, at least, understand it.

In her moving, fresh, and darkly humorous memoir, she shares the thrilling and heartbreaking events that led to discovering conflicting truths about her own desire, first as a woman coming of age and then as a veteran journalist covering the sex beat. Tracing her experiences on adult film sets, at fetish conventions, and during an orgasmic meditation retreat (to name just a few), Clark-Flory weaves in statistics and expert voices to reckon with our views on sexual freedom.

Want Me is about looking for love, sex, and power as a woman in a culture that is “freer” than ever, yet defined by unprecedented pressures and enduring constraints. This is a first-hand example of one woman who navigated the mixed messages of sexual expectation, only to discover the complexity of her own wants and our collective need to change the limitations of that journey.”Luminous, funny, big-hearted… this is a book of insight, both cultural and personal. It is majestic to behold.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] heartfelt, darkly humorous memoir . . . [Clark-Flory] chronicles her experiences on adult film sets, at fetish conventions, and during an orgasmic meditation retreat, all while weaving in statistics and expert voices that challenge common views on sexual freedom.” —Cosmopolitan

“A fun, intimate and honest look at how modern women can and do approach their own sensuality.” —PureWow

“[Want Me is] a rallying cry for the generations of women coming up behind [Clark-Flory].” —The Los Angeles Times

“A complicated account that wobbles between the hilarious and the devastating, and will ring true to many.” —Vanity Fair

“It is a wonder to witness an essay about Magic Mike Live (the Vegas strip show response to the 2012 film) become an existential exploration of mortality. The book is so brilliantly niche that it becomes completely universal.” —Booklist (starred review)
 
“Savvy, deliciously racy… A provocative, resonant memoir of emboldened self-discovery.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Tracy Clark-Flory is among the first of a generation of young women to grow up in a digital world, an Alice shaped by the web’s wonderland. Her journey reveals possibilities, but also the impact of turbo-charged messages that present ’empowered’ female sexuality as all about performance: being desirable rather than recognizing your desires; pleasing others rather than understanding your pleasure; being wanted rather than asking for what you want. This book is absolutely, crucially important to read in order to understand the world in which all girls, and boys, now come of age.”
—Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex

“Alternately wild and tender, sexy and sweet, Tracy Clark-Flory’s story reminds us that each generation re-invents rebellion, that politics and passions often collide, and that a real sexual education is not a moment of awakening but a lifetime of discovery.”
—Sarah Hepola, New York Times bestselling author of Blackout

“A bold and unpredictable sexual awakening, propelled by wild and vivid stories and illuminated by feminist critiques of what sex is and what it should be.” 
—Heather Havrilesky, “Ask Polly” columnist and author of What If This Were Enough?

“Tracy Clark-Flory expertly explores the messy line between the lust, the pleasure—and the lies— of being desirable. Her writing is a beacon. There is a way to find unmanipulated desire. We owe her a debt for her clear-eyed look at the intersection of sex, culture, and lived reality.”
—Susie Bright, author of Big Sex Little Death

“This book is about much more than sex—it’s a candid and brave story about the collision of fantasies, ideals, and truths; it’s a story about the search for self.”
—Daniel Bergner, author of What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire

“I loved reading Want Me – its joys and sorrows,  laughter and pain, all the memories and mysteries that resonate with women of all ages who wonder how we got here. A compelling, important read.” —Debby Herbenick, author of Because it Feels Good

“Tracy Clark-Flory is one of the best journalists of our generation writing about sexuality. When she turns her incisive lens on herself, the results are revelatory. The book is everything I want a memoir to be—a bracingly honest, messy, self-aware, inspiring road map to sexual selfhood.”
—Tristan Taormino, sex educator and bestselling author of Take Me There

“A courageous story about moving out of shame and into sexual integrity. Her vulnerability is off the charts.” —Lisa Palac, psychotherapist and author of The Edge of the BedTracy Clark-Flory is a senior staff writer at Jezebel. Her work has been published in Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire, Marie Claire, Salon, The Guardian, Women’s Health, and the yearly Best Sex Writing anthology. Prior to Jezebel, she was a senior staff writer at Salon. She has appeared on “20/20,” MSNBC and NPR. Tracy lives in San Francisco with her family.

Chapter 1

 

Perfect 10

 

I like to say that I was raised in Berkeley, California, by a pair of pot-smoking hippies. This is factually true, but it gives the wrong impression. Tie-dyed shirts, Birkenstocks, unwashed hair, co-ops, free love. Berkeley in the sixties, basically-the identity to which the city still so desperately clings. This creates an easy shorthand for a childhood lived outside the norm, but the abnormal aspects of my childhood can’t be summarized by such a clichŽ.

 

We lived in a Craftsman in North Berkeley on a busy two-level street bisected by the Hayward fault line. You could walk a couple of blocks-down a secretive sun-dappled path, beyond the fence that neighborhood kids had, in a united act of delinquency, covered with discarded bits of bubble gum-to nearby Solano Avenue. There was a small movie theater with a vintage marquee, a progressive bookstore, and a wide array of “ethnic” restaurants, as some graying white hippies would imperiously call them.

 

It was small-town living in a not-so-small town. One that trumpeted its liberal politics and famous history of war protests, and above all embraced the giddy spectacle of people doing their own thing-like Pink Man, a guy who donned a head-to-toe hot-pink bodysuit and silver cape and rode around town on a unicycle. “Berserkeley,” I called it, smiling proudly. Across the sparkling blue-green bay was San Francisco, or the City, which I understood as a kid to be kooky in its own way. Although, all I really knew early on was Pier 39 with its kitschy souvenir shops and stinky, raucous sea lions-essentially, the opening credits to Full House.

 

Despite the setting, my childhood wasn’t organic greens and whole grains. It was Lay’s potato chips and party packs of Pepperidge Farm cookies (see: pot-smoking hippies). My mom had brought her Midwest roots with her to the crunchy Bay Area, so we didn’t go to farmers markets, join a co-op, or grow vegetables in our garden. We didn’t even compost. Instead, we bought Coca-Cola by the case and went to Disney on Ice. My parents rebelled in other ways, though, like the pot, and my last name: Clark hyphen Flory. It was what so many people did in their milieu at the time, which paved the way for plenty of jokes about a future Berkeley populace full of double and triple hyphenates. It’s such a small thing, that hyphen, but it represented the kind of partnership that they wanted to have: emphatically, sometimes inconveniently equal.

 

My mom ran her own graphic design business in San Francisco and woke while it was still dark out in an attempt to beat traffic across the bridge. That meant my dad, a programmer at a Berkeley tech start-up, got me ready for school in the mornings when I was little. He supervised tooth brushing, poured my bowl of cereal, and combed out my long mass of hair. A “rat’s nest,” as he called it, often developed overnight, and he would take me out onto our sunlit porch so that he could delicately pick at it with a comb, whistling to himself while French-braiding my hair, a skill he had picked up from some moms on the playground during his paternity leave.

 

Even in our sensitive, liberal climate, my dad was unusual for a man. In my mom’s circle of predominantly queer women friends, I would hear things like, “He’s a special guy, your dad.” He was stereotypically masculine-deep booming voice, copious body hair, towering stature-but quick to tear up at little things, like a thoughtful gesture or a dramatic movie scene. During college he had trained to become a peer counselor as an extracurricular activity and went through emotional workshops where, as he put it in his characteristically confident and unselfconscious way, “I got really good at crying.”

 

Right on up until puberty, I spent every Sunday afternoon adventuring with him-rock climbing, windsurfing, skateboarding, hitting balls at the batting cages. It was our version of church, the objects of worship being nature, sun, and sweat. Sometimes he brought me to a sprawling park in the Berkeley hills, where we climbed through a creek looking for water skippers, threw whistling Frisbees on the grass, and picked blackberries from gnarled thickets. My tan scrawny legs were often caked in dried flecks of mud, my feet slipping and squishing in soaking wet Keds.

 

In those days, time with my dad always carried the thrill of possibility. We were going to go do things in the world. Things that made me burst through the front door with an exciting proclamation. I threw a Frisbee! Look how many blackberries we got! I scraped my knee, but I’m okay!

 

He never treated me like a princess, but then he did build me a castle-a large wooden structure that sat in our front yard, looming over our five-foot fence, with a drawbridge, stairs, and even a turret. He painted it gray to approximate the color of ancient stone and flew a rainbow-colored windsock at the top. But if I was a princess, he made sure that I was a roller-skating, creek-jumping princess who kissed banana slugs, and without any hope they would turn into a prince. Then again, I also was a princess who stopped using her castle when spiders moved in and spun pillowy nests of eggs in every corner. But he tried, really, he tried, to counteract every other message I might absorb about what it meant to be a girl.

 

 

My mom was what many men pointedly called a “strong woman.” That’s because, you know, she was smart and had opinions, but also because she made it clear she was not ever going to be stepped on, especially by any man. “Watch it, buster” was a signature line, said if my dad impishly overstepped even small bounds, like lightly teasing her about the trivial talk show she had on or stealing a bite off her plate. My mom had developed this defensive posture growing up with a 1950s caricature of a dad who worked too hard, drank too much whiskey, and, in her words, “ruled like a tyrant”

 

She was no tyrant with her “little bunny.” From those early years, my mom lingers as a sense memory of safety and comfort: her hair-sprayed perm pressing against my cheek as she hugged me, the drip of wet washcloth held to my feverish forehead, the smell of Kraft singles melting onto a sizzling pan as she made me a grilled cheese. All the pain she experienced as a little girl and beyond? None of that for me. Maybe her daughter wouldn’t have to be such a “strong woman.”

 

My mom didn’t exactly identify as a feminist-she preferred the term humanist in part because she felt there was something pleading and fragile about feminism-but the definition of the word described her fundamental belief: men and women are equal. That belief fueled her arm’s-length relationship with feminine presentation. Her closet was filled with loose-fitting blouses, stretchy black cotton pants, and sensible flats with flexible rubber soles. She didn’t own anything more than a modest kitten heel. During the workweek, she put her hair in curlers, unwrapped her flowy tops from the dry-cleaning plastic, and applied chalky makeup that dusted the top of her dresser, but she made a point of telling me that she had to do this to be “professional,” not because she wanted to or believed in it. For my mom, makeup in particular was a drag, and a kind of drag.

 

She didn’t work out or diet, either. My friends’ moms owned pastel-colored dumbbells and aerobics VHS tapes, while mine proudly called herself a hedonist, stocking the freezer with Drumsticks. My mom thought it was silly for women to punish themselves for aesthetics, whether it was aggressively counting calories or wearing blister-causing high heels. When I asked in fourth grade to buy a razor to start shaving my legs, she told me, “Once you start, it’s hard to stop,” as though hair removal was a gateway drug.

 

Even absent any great feminine suffering, she made a value judgment about relying too heavily on your looks. After one of my dad’s old college friends came for a visit with a busty girlfriend wearing a low-cut bodysuit, my mom remarked dryly, “She led with her chest.” My mom led with her mind. That phrase “Beauty is pain”? The message I got from my mom was “Beauty is dumb.”

 

My dad seemed to agree. One night, channel surfing across the Miss USA pageant, with its parade of women clad in neon swimsuits sashaying before a panel of judges, he tsk-tsked and shook his head. “Some people have such a limited idea of what makes a woman attractive,” he said. “Your mom is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.” At the time, I was twelve years old and entering puberty’s hormonal assault. I had a thick mat of blunt-cut bangs that dusted the very tops of my eyelids-my awkward attempt at hiding the mountain-scape of zits on my forehead. I wore baggy T-shirts, wide-legged jeans, and skater shoes, feeling that it was safer to dress like a boy than to attempt to look pretty. My dad was trying to assure me that I didn’t need to look like these women.

 

He was always finding these teachable moments, casting aspersions on titillating Victoria’s Secret catalogs and emaciated Calvin Klein models. I would roll my eyes, as any young person does when cornered with one of their parents’ life lessons, but it made me hopeful that the boys at school might see beyond my not-so-secret pimples and tomboy style. It also gave me hope about the adult world, the world of men, ahead of me.

 

 

I don’t remember many specifics about what my parents told me about sex. By sixth grade, it had become one of the topics I cared about most-I was always sneaking off during family trips to the bookstore to read snippets of Our Bodies, Ourselves-but I didn’t want to hear about it from them. The general message, though, was that sex was a beautiful and spiritual act that took place between two loving and equal adults. Later, my dad would describe it as “two star systems colliding in outer space.” That was the kind of vibe I got from them even as a middle schooler. When done right, it was this ineffable, magical thing-an idea that raised more questions than it answered.

 

At school, the message was presented differently. In sex-ed class, I heard about the literal ins and outs of sex: here is the urethra, here is the cervix, here’s how babies are made. I wasn’t sure how to reconcile the abstract poetry of my parents’ sex talks with these antiseptic medical diagrams. Meanwhile, the culture at large seemed to say that sex was something else entirely. It wasn’t a biological phenomenon or a spiritual experience. It was college students during spring break gyrating in wet T-shirt contests, taking tequila shots from pierced navels (I rued my outie), or enacting things like the Triple Kiss (two girls and a guy kissing at the same time).

 

Of course, I knew that none of this stuff was actually sex, but it did seem to reveal something about what sex was, and that something challenged everything I had heard at home and at school. Not only did looks matter, they were of the utmost importance. My dad could wax all he wanted about smarts and athleticism, but it wouldn’t change the fact that perfume commercials featured naked supermodels, not women climbing Mount Everest or reciting pi. What was there to conclude, other than that the adults in my life were lying to me about sex? I set out to do some research.

 

Our household was equipped with two towering PCs connected to a modem that beeped, whirred, and dinged like a digital pinball machine. The dining room had recently been converted into “the computer room,” as we called it, which tells you something about the size of these machines and just how much excitement our family had about this new technology. After school, while my mom watched Oprah in the neighboring kitchen, I would repeatedly swab my face with Stridex wipes and log on to AOL. I could have looked for other girls with similar interests to mine: art, animals, poetry. Instead, I looked for any chat room that seemed even vaguely adult. Eventually, I began looking for the boys, the men.

 

The first thing everyone wanted to know was “a/s/l?” At first, I told the truth (“12/f/California”), but soon I started lying (“21/f/Florida”). On one such occasion, I entered into a private chat with RedSoxxx72, or some such, who typed these words: “hey sweetheart.” Eek. I pushed myself back from the computer desk, traveling a few feet in my roller chair before coming to a stop. Then I spun myself around a few times, as if to embrace the roiling of my stomach, and scooted back to the keyboard, summoning the women I’d seen in late-night phone sex commercials. “hey big boy,” I wrote as goose pimples spread across my forearms.

 

We exchanged the stock self-descriptors of “tall, dark, handsome” and “brunette, tall, skinny.” Then I added: “busty too.” He asked for my bra size and I told him, “36DD.” The truth: a training bra. Next came that ubiquitous question: “whatchu wearin?” I looked down at my Dr. Seuss T-shirt with a cartoon of Thing 1 and Thing 2 and wrote, “red lace stockings.” He did not delay. “I’m taking those red stockings off right now and slowly licking up those long luscious legs.” That was as far as I let it go before hammering out: “IM 12!!!!!!”

 

I used the same escape hatch whenever things got too intense during these online chats, inaccurately assuming the revelation of my age to be a universal mood killer. Then I would buckle over the keyboard snorting with laughter, but it was really more like relief. As much as I enjoyed a good prank-calling Jenny Craig was a favorite-these virtual stunts left me feeling disappointed. Were cup size, hair color, and perpetual nudity all men cared about? Some small part of me had been hoping that I would go undercover as an adult and find that I had something to look forward to. That sex was, I don’t know, even slightly romantic.

 

That same year, I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. Then I saw it again and again-nearly a dozen times in theaters, taping each ticket stub to my bedroom wall. I replayed the sex scene in my head many more times than that. Romeo sneaks through Juliet’s window, soaked by the rain. She slowly peels off his shirt. He holds her face and softly kisses her. Juliet’s fingertips brush over the soft hairs on the back of his neck. He takes her shirt off and they hold each other. They hold each other.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.6800 × 5.3000 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143134619
ISBN-10	0143134612
Author	Tracy Clark-Flory
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	SOC028000, SOC032000
Subjects	feminism books, autobiographies, feminist book, gifts for her, feminist gifts, feminist books, biographies of famous people, autobiography books, feminist theory, SOC032000, sociology books, memoir books, biographies and memoirs, good books for women, self love books for women, best friend gifts, sister gifts, feminist thought, history books, feminist, feminism, self help, biography, Memoir, SOC028000, Sociology, gifts for women, history, autobiography, women in history, biographies, women's history month, essays, memoirs, books for women