My sexual past is messy, depressing and extensive. It doesn’t make me a slut

Hi, my name is Devin and I’ve hooked up with countless people. No really, I have. I would go to frat parties on the weekends and drink and make out with people. Some I even had sex with.

Now, if I told you I was a guy named Devin, that makes me pretty awesome, right? I get all the action, I have game, I’m the man. You want to compliment me on my body count, slap me on the back, tell me I’m doing college right.

But what if I told you that I’m a girl named Devin? I’m a slut, right? I’m such a disgusting whore, why would I do that? Ladies should keep themselves pure and unobtainable, otherwise no man is going to want you. Welp, guess I’m damaged goods now.

Truthfully, I am a girl named Devin, and I really did (before my relationship) participate in the hook up culture that we have  engrained as the norm into our society. I have had sex with people and immediately regretted it, I have had sex with people and not felt a thing. I have done things that I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell even my closest friends about, and I have grown to hate myself with an intense disgust every time I recall spreading my legs for every faceless guy who was supposedly “different.”

My sexual past is messy, depressing, and by the societal interpretation of the word, my sexual past makes me a slut.

The most monumental sexual experience I had wasn’t losing my virginity (though that was a huge mess), but actually the second time I had sex. That was when I was really ruined.

Background: I lost my virginity at 16 after a few too many shots in a crowded basement, to a boy that I really just wanted to impress. I don’t remember most of the encounter. I remember fumbling with the condom, reaching to turn the light off (heaven forbid he actually see me naked), and I remember him asking “Wait, are you a virgin?” To which I replied, “Sort of…”

He never acknowledged my response and he didn’t seem to mind.

After we had sex I didn’t hear from him or see him for two years. He left for college the month after and cut off our communication. I’m not sure if it was a fear that I was taught, or one that I developed on my own, but I was convinced that the worst mistake I could possibly make in life was losing my virginity to the wrong person. You can’t get it back, it’s gone. You will always remember them because they were your first, but they’ll forget about you down the road as you fade into one of the many welcoming vaginas that brought them about five seconds of bliss for one blurred evening. So, I made the ultimate mistake, and let me tell you it was just as awful as I thought it would be.

So, for the next year I cried. I cried to my friends, I cried to my mom and confessed what I had done, and I cried as I scrolled through his Facebook looking for an emotional fix but coming up even more empty than I was when I started. I couldn’t bare to be touched by any other boys, partly because I was so scarred by the situation that I couldn’t stomach the thought of another person’s skin sliding against my body, but also because I never wanted him to hear about me with someone else and think that I wasn’t available to him. Then I met a new boy, let’s call him Tyler (because that’s his name – fuck you, Tyler) and I came out of that encounter even more broken than the first. Now it had been engrained in me that I was just a tool for men to use and abuse, and I was sent down the rabbit hole.

Tyler was charming, attractive, not very bright, but knew the right things to say to get a girl in bed. He was nice to me, he was playful and funny. His ploy was that he needed help putting on aloe (which of course was in his bedroom), to get me upstairs. He had it all worked out from start to finish.

No really, he had it all. Including a girlfriend who had cheated on him, and the idea to lie to me in order to get me to have awkward, clumsy sex with him and get back at her. Then he cried to me about how guilty he felt for what he did with her.

They got back together and I was torn apart. And so it goes. From then on sex just became a search for someone to love me. I was flushed with the classic “but if I have sex with him maybe then he’ll like me.” I was so desperate to feel anything but rejection from sex that I just binged and purged on new sexual partners. I had sex, felt that crippling regret, and then vowed never to touch another man.

Until the next came along.

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I went on like this for a long time, convinced that the way to a man’s heart was through his urethra (or out of it I should say). I should have realized that instead of wanting me, men would be repulsed by my willingness to hop in the sack. I wasn’t the kind of girl you dated, I was the kind of girl you fucked.

I got used to this treatment, it became the norm. Eventually I even liked it. Sex was fun, the attention was nice, my self worth was at an all time low. Healthy, right? But I was so convinced that the only reason I felt bad for doing all of these things was because society told me I should be. What defined my sexual acts as mistakes were the TV shows and movies where the girl who was a mistake slept around and the girl the boy fought for held out.

It took me a long time to realize that I was hurting myself every time I just closed my eyes and relaxed until that night’s leading man rolled off of me. And it wasn’t because sleeping around is slutty, because women can’t want to have sex just as much as a man, or because having sex with people you aren’t committed to inherently means that you have low self esteem. It was because I was having sex not for my own enjoyment, but for the faintest sliver of hope that someone would want me after they were done.

Then came the first time that sex made me feel dirty and used. It was my freshman year of college and I went out one night and had too much to drink. I didn’t remember much about the rest of the night, but I woke up at around 5am in my dorm room naked with my covers strewn across the floor and just a throw blanket on me. I couldn’t remember exactly what I had done, but I knew who it must have been with.

I had to be told that I had sex that night, if you could even call it that. Of course, just like many college students around the globe I had had sex while drunk. But the difference here was that this was a boy that I had been sort of seeing, this was a boy that I had told while sober that I did not want to have sex with him. Every other person who I had had sex with may have been a mistake, but they were all men who in the moment I wanted to sleep with.

I’m sure that in my drunken state I endorsed everything, and I would never say that I was violated or worse, because that completely takes away from the countless women who are survivors of rape and abuse.

But that was my wakeup call. It forced me to look back on my sexual history, and realize what part of it was to please myself and what part was to please someone else. The ratio was not good. I tried to find ways to make it better, to make what I had done be OK on an emotional level and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t cope with the parts of me that I had given up for other people. I withstood physical pain, rejection, and men claiming pieces of my body like it was just theirs to take.

At first I didn’t know what to do, I tried to make light of it and make jokes to people about what a whore I was. They laughed, because I really am legitimately funny. And I liked when they laughed because it made me feel like something good was coming out of the quick use and disposal of my body.

I regressed three years back to being sixteen again, crying about sex and hating myself for the things that I had allowed to be done to me. Then, like winter to spring, I started to heal. I’m not quite sure what exactly happened or how I started to live my life again, but slowly I put myself back together, and I started reclaiming the things that I had lost.

I realized something truly life changing. I, as a human being, am not defined or limited by my mistakes. The things that I had done did not become who I am, and I could continue to breathe and love and grow despite however dirty I had previously thought myself to be.

I am a student, a sister, a daughter, a friend, a cook, a dancer, a terrible singer. I am not a slut. Why plaster a label so dirty onto myself when there are far better things I could be? When there are far better things that I am?

A sexual past does not define a person – man or women – and it does not change the myriad of radiant experiences that they have lived.

My sexual past is my past and it does not have any effect on my future. I’m sure that I will have more sexual partners and I will probably have another one night stand. But I will go into those interactions and experiences with myself in mind.

My name is Devin, I am a girl, and I am so many things that are much, much, more than a slut.