Warning: might be triggering for some.

It Happened to Me: I Had a Golden Shower

Persephone in America

 

Because the body is a map

and because the map I know best

is the one of this country, I pluck her

from the pages of the book of myth

and paste her down here,

on a page in my journal,

in the middle of my life,

in the middle of the country,

wind from the end of the century

whistling around our face and ears.

 

I make her walk beside a wagon to get here.

I pick her up, like Midge or Barbie,

and say, Listen, I know you’re a goddess.

But those white robes won’t cut it.

I dress her the way I dressed myself

in high school so that I can remember

before it is gone – skirts

rolled up too short, white lipstick,

black fishnet stockings that left

our knees printed with diamonds.

I teach her to hitchhike

and take her to Woodstock,

skin bronzed with Bain de Soleil,

her hair streaked California blonde

the way my own was with Sun-In.

 

I tell her, In this country

girls grow up too young, already

worried about their weight at ten.

But I take her out dancing at midnight

across the tawny fields – the Monkey,

the Frug, the Swim – all the way up

through break and line dancing,

the years humming through us

like a fast-forward film,

while she lies down with the boys

and men I remember, and the delicate,

pink rock roses of our bodies bloom and burn

but refuse to die, their petals a flag sewn

in the shape of a woman printed with stars.

 

I take her back. I make

her mother die when she is young

and hold her in my arms afterwards

the way I never was. I give her

a tongue, flickering like a small

green flame or a sprout of corn

in her mouth, and whisper America,

America in her ear while she sleeps.

I snap down the faded oilskin

Mercator projection and teach her

the names of the states, letting her love

California best for its Mediterranean air,

her feet fast in a pair of red Keds

that carry her all the way

from one coast to the other,

western meadowlark purling

a goldrush in our heads,

the history of what the body

can become here as spacious

as the sky arching above us.

 

I tell her the pause between breaths

is what she must always return to.

These mountains, this blue

clarity of thought and air,

golden poppies and owl’s clover

blooming in the clefts left

by earthquake, landslide, the flash-

fire-rape of clinical depression

that abducts us but cannot

keep us down, air breathed

from my mouth to hers, life

animating the pale white form

of a woman I walk back into daylight

with from the world below, making

of us both something greater

than loss, inscribing our names

beside those of Homer, Walt Whitman,

Zeus, and God, because it is already

the twenty-first century, and this

is America, where I say

things like this can happen.

 

 

 

Persephone at the Mall

 

Sleepwalking.

That’s what you think

when you see the girl walking

alone at West Towne Mall; she’s

sleepwalking, trying on the allure

of the body like the platform sandals

and mini-skirts you wore at her age

that have suddenly come back; she’s

sleepwalking, her body a new

continent she is exploring,

her breasts taut under the black

burnt-out velvet shirt,

her legs endless columns of light

spilling from short-shorts

purchased at the Gap; she’s

sleepwalking, entranced

with the spell

of the body, how it drifts

on the surface

of the bustling crowd,

intricate as

the lily she seems

dressed to resemble,

the book of myths

open between her legs,

though she does not

know the story in the book; she

sleepwalks, not knowing

because she does not

see herself, does not notice

how men’s glances

strip her of being, this girl

who slinks and provokes

without knowing

the danger, only

that men look and look; she

sleepwalks, and you know

that she likes it, as you did

when you hemmed your

good-girl skirt into a micro-mini

and ran to the bus-stop,

all legs yourself, nothing

touching your skin but air,

your long hair falling

around you like a veil,

while your stepmother

screamed, Tramp! and You’ll

be sorry at your back;

she sleepwalks, parting

the crowds of people

before her as if this

is the first day of the world,

the mall a meadow where bees hum,

where every nameless flower

anoints her with pollen; she

sleepwalks, lost so far inside

her body you ask, was I ever

that young? She sleepwalks;

and it is not envy you feel

but fear–so many eyes

watching from between blades

of new grass–she sleepwalks;

and despite what you see,

scrying in the soot-blackened

glass of the mirror before you,

staring through the window

into you she has become,

she sleepwalks;

and there is nothing

not one thing

you can do or say

to wake her.

 

 

Alison Townsend, from Persephone in America

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

One: I have my very own counseling info website at www.kerrycohencounseling.com

Two: Watch the amazing Lidia Yuknavitch (read her memoir Chronology of Water if you haven’t yet) and me in conversation about Dirty Little Secrets 

The people who produce and star on these morning shows are always so super nice. New Day was no exception. See the video of our interview about Seeing Ezra here

Buy my single horror story about….a girl. What’s scarier than a little girl?

 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0060C84DW

I am in need of someone in the Portland area who would like to work beneath me as a personal assistant. This is a very brief commitment: 2 months, and then we can reassess. Main duties will be organizational – organizing my Word files, emails, and financials. You will also respond to a bunch of my emails for me, update my twitter and website as necessary, prioritize and update task lists, and, when needed, run a few errands for me, usually writing related.

In return, I will mentor you for an hour each week with your writing and/or loose girl issues.

If you’re interested, please send a cover letter and resume to kerry@kerry-cohen.com

Because xoJane.com won’t publish any of my It Happened to Me’s, I have decided to simply publish my own…I hope they won’t sue

My book Dirty Little Secrets: Breaking the Silence on Teenage Girls and Promiscuity came out in early September, and because I am well versed in haters because of Loose Girl, I was surprised that no one had hated on it yet. And that’s where GMA comes in. But I’ll get to that in a second.

First, check out the hotel where we did the taping. This is the lobby:

We taped in the penthouse suite. Honestly, I can’t even begin to imagine how much that cost since the rooms themselves – tiny little things – were about $600. We taped in the living room of the suite, which had a beautiful terrace as well.

Those men in the back were the camera and sound guys. Super nice people – I’m pretty sure they were uncomfortable with all the talk of blow jobs.

Juju interviewed me for the segment. I absolutely adored her. She asked great questions and was so fun. Afterward, she emailed her boss to ask if we could say blow job on Good Morning America because I forgot to use something more appropriate, like, I don’t know, knob job.

Also, I should say that my interview was a good half hour. I said all sorts of fabulous things that are now lost forever on a tape in the storage room of GMA. That’s how it goes on TV.

After my interview, my two girls (ok, one was actually 29) got interviewed. They were both fantastic, especially since this one had been hysterically crying the night before afraid she was gong to shame her family by speaking about her sex life on national TV. She was so sweet and vulnerable during the interview. I hope she knows how beautiful and brave she is.

I wore an outfit that day from Abrahams & Duffy, a local boutique in Portland that I love. One of the owners Daisy told me that they want their customers to feel intimate with what they wear. They use select designers – each item in their store has a story attached. How much do I love that?

I tried on about five different things in her store. It was so hard to decide. Part of why I settled on this one is I once had a psychic tell me that if I wore red on TV my books would be very successful.

After our interviews they took some B-roll, which is those images of people walking or sitting on a bench being thoughtful, etc. Then we moved on to a satellite ABC studio to tape the panel with four more teens, or The Tattletales,as my friend so aptly named them.

I have to say, I still don’t understand GMA’s decision to have on girls who were “good girls” in order to get information about the “bad girls.” First of all, whatever! I definitely call bullshit on the idea that these girls didn’t go to those parties they talked about (where girls made out with six different boys! Oh gasp!) Second of all, if that’s true that they don’t do any of those things, then their comments are hearsay. These were the girls I knew nothing about when I was in high school. Their lives seemed a million miles away from mine. They had involved parents. Happy homes. Somehow they didn’t feel dependent on boys’ attention. The girls on this show were so judgmental and nasty, perpetuating the same old ideas about loose girls, painting them as girls who simply choose to make bad choices because they want “attention.” God forbid, you know, a girl want attention in our culture – it may as well be a crime. A couple times one of my girls tried to explain to them that not everyone has access to good parenting and care, not everyone has the wherewithal to stay away from something that feels better than the rest of her life, but they didn’t hear her.

In the end, we taped for a good two hours. GMA edited it down to about five minutes. This is how it goes. I’m immensely grateful that GMA did the segment. I’m most pleased because people watched it, learned of my book, and hopefully read it so they could see more of what I have to say.

This seems obvious to me that GMA will cut anything that is too shocking or different from viewer’s expectations. Our entire culture works like that. If you can’t put it into a sound byte, no one will hear it. We are all programmed to disregard anything else. So, I was surprised when Slate had a blog posting about how my book was supporting the same old shaming of teenage girls and sex that GMA did. Jesus, I really wish journalists were actually made to read the books they trash. And, again, the writer’s commentary was basically the other sound byte we hear: that girls should be able to have sex whenever they want. Yes, yes, of course they should. They shouldn’t be shamed for it, absolutely. But we are also not at a point in our cultural growth on the issue that girls can have sex whenever they want. More often than not, girls are choosing to have sex because they desire something other than sex: control, power, love, attention, worth. Girls don’t have any sexual agency. They just don’t. That’s where we need to start: get to the place where girls can have sex because they want sex.

Before we got off those chairs in the tattletale room, Juju, bless her heart, wished those girls good sex lives. They looked stunned and uncomfortable. And I told them that girls don’t have to have sex to be sexual. They could choose outercourse. They could choose masturbation. They looked like they wanted to die. Nowhere in their lives was their room for sexual expression. Just as Deborah Tolman discovered when she asked her subjects about their sexual desire, they went mute because we don’t have that language in our culture.

Here is the final segment.

 

 

If you’re in the Portland area today, you could have caught me on AM Northwest today. If not, never fear. Here is the link to my interview. I really love those guys on AM Northwest. They’ve always been such kind supporters of my book (speaking of, I’ll be on again next month for Seeing Ezra – date TBA). Also, I want Helen’s job! It looks like so much fun, just chatting with people all day. I’d be so good at that. So, AM Northwest, if you have any job openings, let me know!

Tonight I will be having a conversation with Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Chronology of Water. We will be talking about Dirty Little Secrets, but you should know about her memoir. It’s extraordinary (plus, you get a free blurb from me, which is on the book). Afterward will be a Q&A and books for sale/signing. Oh, and In Other Words Bookstore is the bookstore Portlandia based their women’s bookstore on.  Hope you can join!

In Other Words Bookstore

7-8:30 pm

14 NE Killingsworth St.

Portland, OR

 

 

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/excerpt-dirty-secrets-kerry-cohen/story?id=14577601

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/author-urges-parents-break-silence-sex-talk-teens-14580082

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-cohen/sex-education-tips_b_923837.html

Last week, New York required sex education for grades 6 or 7, and then again in grades 9 or 10. Astoundingly, this is news, and not just news but groundbreaking news, because somehow, regardless of everything we know about sex education, regardless of everything we know about how little abstinence education works, we still shudder at the thought of our teenagers learning about sex. We also still have one out of every four girls 14-19infected with an STD. We still have one in two black girls that age with a STD. We still have 750,000 teenage pregnancies reported every year, 82% of them unplanned. And, we still have innumerable amounts of girls who don’t know how to feel about sex at all, who still get shamed for their sexual desire, who wind up having sex when they didn’t really want to, or don’t have sex when they’d really like to.

So, while I applaud New York, which is doing the right thing based on all the statistics (and plain old common sense), more than that I have some suggestions for the sex ed teachers, since they’re going to be barraged by angry, Puritan, head-in-the-sand antagonists anyway, to include in the curriculum.*

1. Talk about desire

How would you answer this question from your daughter: “How will I know when I’m ready to have sex?” The answer is, of course, individual to each girl, but very few mothers, educators, and therapists think to include some attention to a girl’s sexual desire as part of their answer. The bottom line about girls and healthy sexuality is that this must be part of how we talk to girls about sex. Usually, we hand down to them the same useless, often harmful myths. We tell them that sex will get in the way of their happiness and growth. We tell them they must be in love. We tell them that good sex happens only when you are in love. None of those aphorisms is true — not one. Sex and sexual feelings are essential to our happiness. Sex does not make sense only when you are in love. And sex with someone you aren’t in love with can be just as good as sex with someone you do love. Add desire — the acknowledgment that girls have sexual desire — into the answer, and everything can change. Everything becomes more — true.

For one, we can encourage girls to learn to trust their bodies and what their bodies’ tell them. We can also tell them that just because they want it sexually doesn’t mean it will be worth it or any good. We can tell them that sex with someone who wants you to enjoy yourself is a hundred times better than sex with someone who doesn’t care about your experience, and sex with someone you love and who cares about your experience might be even better.

2. Talk about Outercourse

Another assumption we make as a culture is that to fulfill sexual feelings, people must have intercourse. This is absolutely untrue. Sex therapists use the term outercourse to describe the numerous acts that create sensual and sexual pleasure but do not include penetration. Think hand jobs. Think second and third base. Think phone sex. For teens who are experiencing that hormone rush but aren’t ready to expose themselves to possible pregnancies and STDs, outercourse is perfect.

More than that, outercourse allows a teenager to explore and test intimacy, which is essential for building the self-confidence girls need to be both powerful and self-protected in the world of relationships. One sex therapist notes that communication is enhanced during outercourse. Because the sexual sensations can be less intense, there is more opportunity for closeness, for talking, and for full consent from both parties. And, let’s face it, the likelihood of a girl having an orgasm via outercourse is much better than during intercourse. Boys, too, benefit. Boys receive plenty of cultural pressure to have as much sex as they can, even when they aren’t ready to do so emotionally, so outercourse is a more gentle introduction into the world of sexual feelings and intimacy. In case I need to clarify, I believe it makes sense to include outercourse in sex education.

3. Talk about Masturbation

It also makes sense to include masturbation in a sex-education curriculum as a healthy, satisfying way to fulfill sexual desire, especially since a greater proportion of girls between fourteen and seventeen years old report solo masturbation than any other sexual activity. Adolescents have sexual desire. More so, they are in the process of learning about their sexual desire. What better way for adolescents to learn than to explore on their own? Likewise, what better way to help them explore their sexual desire without putting themselves at risk for STDs, pregnancy, and all the emotional ramifications of sex with other people? I’m not the surgeon general and won’t get asked to resign for saying so. But conservatives would be outraged. Why? Because they are stuck in the old, rigid ways of thinking about teenagers — particularly teenage girls — and of believing that any teenage sex is inexplicably, unfoundedly immoral. They are determined to hold on to their beloved abstinence education, which has done not one thing for the state of sexual behavior in our culture, except encourage extremely detrimental shame.

4. Talk about Emotions

In our cultural landscape, sex and sexual feelings are too often removed from emotions, and yet for most people, they are intricately entwined. When we don’t talk about the ways teenagers might feel about having sex or sexual activity, we ignore an essential part of sex education, one that can make all the difference when kids decide to engage in those activities. They need to examine their expectations about sexual activity — what they hope for when they engage in this way. Such a discussion also provides space for teens to discuss how peers and their parents receive their behaviors and whether they are prepared for the repercussions of various sexual acts.
* This list is taken from my forthcoming book Dirty Little Secrets: Breaking the Silence on Teenage Girls and Promiscuity (Sourcebooks, September 1, 2011)