Girl Talk

From 1/7/10

It was a free period. Now we were almost fourteen and in third form we had two each week. It was meant to be a sort of preparation for having to organise our own time more in fourth form. We needed the help! Most of the time, all we did was sit and talk. I think we were supposed to do home work or assignments, use our time wisely! Perhaps that prudence would come at the end of the year!

One day a few of us were sitting around the radiators, some on them, some on desks alongside them. Trying to keep the cold at bay. A cosy scene really. The rain beating down on the path way outside the window made a sort of soothing, relaxing rhythm to punctuate our talk. Free time without teachers listening in. Naturally the conversation focused on more illicit topics. Boys usually. Stuff I was fascinated by, but rarely contributed to.

Listening to the girls talk, the room kind of misted over. Like it did in the woods when the weather was beginning to close in, descending slowly and steadily.

They were bragging. Comparing notes. Sharing stories about their escapades with boys.
‘I went out for a walk with Brad after the party. Out to the park down by Folkestone Lees. We snogged for ages. I thought I was never going to be able to breathe again!’
‘And then what?’ Someone chimed in and there was silence as the girl talking was deciding how much to admit to or how much to make up. ‘When he was kissing me he had his hand up my top, touching my tits. Then his hand down my pants. But someone came and I said I had to go home.’
Another girl spoke about being interrupted on the back seat of the bus when another passenger came. I couldn’t imagine enjoying these things. I certainly couldn’t imagine feeling comfortable being close to anyone in those very public circumstances but they spoke about it as if it made it all more exciting.
One of the girls said, ‘Simon and I went all the way,’ and someone else asked breathlessly, ‘Was it your first time?’
‘Yeah if you don’t count all the other stuff we did first!’ and everyone laughed imagining, or maybe remembering what all the other stuff must have been.
‘Let’s all talk about first times,’ one girl said.
Lots of the others had a story to tell. ‘I was still in first form,’ one said. ‘It was in the holidays,’ said another.
One girl said ‘I’m waiting till I meet my true love,’ and everyone laughed.
‘Good luck then!’ someone had said and the whole group were in stitches.

It was all a mystery to me. Not the things they spoke of. With that I was far too familiar. It was as if they were speaking in a language I didn’t know – I recognised the words but their meanings didn’t seem to fit with the words I used to describe the same things.

I was usually completely silent during these ‘revelations.’ I had no doubt they all thought it was because I had nothing to tell, that my silence indicated a lack of experience. As far as they knew, there were no boy friends and no encounters to recount. If they had known the stories I could tell….

The mystery to me wasn’t about what they knew, or what they had participated in, but that it seemed to them a good thing. Something to be desired. Something they initiated even. Pleasant. Enjoyable. Exciting.

And yet…..and this is the really confusing and most painful aspect of the whole thing. There were moments. Times when Dad stopped at just touching me. Fleeting at first, but growing in direct proportion to the changes I observed happening in my body. Moments of such intense pleasure. Yet surrounded by so much anguish. So much disgust. So much anger. Moments when I felt betrayed by my own body.
It was on one of those nights in Tricia’s flat that I felt it for the first time – pleasure in my body while Dad was groping and touching me. It was momentary, a rush of gratification and then gone almost as soon as it came but it shocked me deeply. I felt so confused about how I could find anything so disgusting pleasurable.

Total confusion.




It was like a soft-centred chocolate, only the bit inside was shit.

To hear the girls talk, it was clearly not like that for them.

Some years later, as a social work student, I was attending a lecture about rape and I had my first glimpse into one aspect of this. The lecturer was expounding ideas about power and control. I was mesmerised. And then two words floated across the lecture hall to me that finally made sense of the fog, the thick and impenetrable air of confusion that surrounded my experience of pleasure and pain through all those years. Equal and Consensual. She said it again to emphasise her point and I felt suddenly as if I was the only one in the room and she was speaking directly to me. My pen stopped writing and recording her words. I was taken right back to all the times I had felt pleasure amidst Dad’s abuse of me and then also to the times when I had felt terrified at the thought of any kind of intimate touch.

That was what had always separated me from the other girls. There was no equality and not one ounce of consent. We were describing two entirely separate events.

The sense I had of being betrayed by my own body – that would take many more years to resolve.

Excerpted from Not My Shame copywrited SusanWatt