Finger Banging Slutty Young Woman
By Caiti Quatmann
This poem contains themes and explicit descriptions of trauma,
including sexual violence, misogyny, and systemic oppression.
Readers are encouraged to approach with care.
When you’re the first girl in third grade
that has to wear a bra (the same year
that spice girls release their first album),
the boys will start calling you “Slutty Spice.”
& the next year, when you get your first period
(well before the health teacher comes in
to even tell you what it is, so your mom finds
you crying in the bathroom with blood
on your hands, as you ask her, am I dying?)
your name will just become “Slut.”
& by fifth grade (as you cry each night
in the bath from growing pains) when
you’re towering over every boy who won’t
start growing ‘til seventh grade,
the world will call you a young woman.
& it will tell you:
You look so grown up.
You should be a model.
& men will whisper as you walk past
the restaurant bar, following the hostess
& your family through a maze of tables
& chairs, “Look at the tits on that one.”
& your Mother, during
appetizers, will tell you,
“I would have killed
for boobs like that.”
& in the summer before sixth grade,
you’ll ride bikes with your childhood friend
to the playground at school. It’s Saturday,
so no one is there, until her older
boyfriend appears with his friend.
& when she rides off with her boyfriend,
while you’re crawling through the tubes,
his friend will slide in next to you.
& as he slobbers on your lips
& shoves his hand down your shorts,
you’ll stiffen & think about
the texture of plastic, & how the blue
is faded where the sun has bleached it.
& after labor day, when you
start middle school, you will learn
this boy has a sister in eighth grade
who told everyone to call you “finger bang.”
& in seventh grade when your friend tells you
how the math teacher (who is also your volleyball coach)
seems to call on you all the time & asks you
to walk up to the chalkboard,
& that he won’t stop looking
at your chest the whole time—
you don’t notice.
& because you’ve become so familiar with
the discomfort of men’s (& boy’s) attention,
you can’t even point to it as the reason
for the omnipresent tightness in your chest
& lump in your throat that grows bigger
& bigger each day. You’ve been desensitized
to the male gaze, learned that your body
is always available for viewing & comment.
& when you go to practice that evening,
you wear three extra sports bras
to make yourself smaller.
& in eighth grade when your friend
asks you what a blowjob tastes like
you don’t wonder why she would ask you,
why she would think you know
(you don’t actually know).
& because you’re “a Finger
Banging Slutty Young Woman,”
you explain it the best way you can.
And you tell her it tastes sweet
(because Ask Jeeves told you that
semen contains a high amount of fructose).
Caiti Quatmann (she/her) is a disabled poet, writer, author of the chapbook Yoke (MyrtleHaus) and Editor-in-Chief for HNDL Mag. Her poetry and personal essays have been published by manywor(l)ds, Samfiftyfive, Thread LitMag and others. Caiti lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. Find her online @CaitiTalks.
Photo credit: “MacArthur Park” by Amy the Nurse via a Creative Commons license.
A note from Writers Resist
Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.