Sex is a Story You Get to Tell

When I first got out of prison and fully entered the public eye, I wanted to disappear. I wanted to be featureless, shapeless, blurred like a poorly pixelated background NPC. Desire made me a target, or at least that was the message I had internalized. Not just sexual desire, but the desire to be seen, to be known, to connect. To this day, it still stuns me that I had to rediscover my sexuality in the most repressive and punishing place imaginable: prison.

In my book Free, I write about Lenny (not her real name), a fellow inmate who developed a crush on me. She wasn’t the first person in my life to project her fantasies onto me, but in her case, I wasn’t just an attractive object; I was one of the only sources of human intimacy available. That made things complicated. It also made me realize just how fundamental our need for intimacy is—and how deeply, dangerously misunderstood it can be.

I rediscovered sexual intimacy in prison quietly, awkwardly, exploring my own body alone at night between guard patrols, before the next flashlight beam swept through my cell. Masturbation became an act of resistance.

There’s something counterintuitive about rediscovering your sexuality while being vilified as a sexual deviant. My prosecutor crafted pornographic fantasies about me in court, claiming I orchestrated a murder orgy. A pink vibrator became courtroom evidence. A MySpace nickname―Foxy Knoxy―dominated the headlines. What I actually did, who I actually was, didn’t matter. The fantasy won.

Except it didn’t. Because while they were inventing me, I was re-inventing myself. Slowly, painfully, secretly. Not as a reaction, but as a refusal to relinquish everything.

Dan Savage told me recently that “who we are sexually is kind of a story we get to tell and create with other people.” That stuck with me. Because for a long time, I was the subject of someone else’s pornographic fantasy. Others had hijacked my sexual narrative.

The fact that the trauma I experienced was also sexual in nature puts me in good company. Female sexuality has always been a convenient scapegoat. We punish women for wanting sex and for not wanting sex. We punish them for enjoying sex too much, or too little, for not performing it the right way, and for performing it at all.

I still struggle with curiosity and fear, with the quiet, sometimes panicked voice that asks: Am I allowed to want this? Could I ever trust anyone with my unexplored desires? Because there are many things I haven’t explored, not because I’m afraid of the things themselves, but because I haven’t fully regained sexual confidence in myself, and sexual trust in others.

Sometimes I think about what it means to be "sexually whole." Whether that’s even a real thing. Maybe it’s not something you become. Maybe it’s something you practice becoming—every time you choose to listen to your body and reclaim a piece of your desire from shame. Maybe wholeness isn’t a destination, but a daily decision: to believe that your pleasure matters. That your story matters. That you matter. And that no matter how others have tried to define you, your sexuality is not evidence to be used against you. It is a story. And you get to tell it.