What's in your pussy, greenface?

At the end of the Fall 2004 semester, the midway point of my sophomore year of college, I went out for drinks with classmates from Narratives of African Civilization, all women with the exception of one man with the unlikely surname of Goodenough. I didn’t know any of them well. I can remember two faces and none of the women’s names. I don’t recall which bar. At some point, the conversation turned to relationships, and I listened with deepening shock as each of these women—girls, as I thought of them then—talked about their relationships with significantly older men. We were college students in our late teens and early twenties; the men ranged in age from thirty-five to late forties.

The relationships were not happy. One was involved with her professor, a married man who drank to blackout on the nights they spent together. Another described an inescapable entanglement with a whiny and manipulative yoga impresario. Universally, the sex was reported to be quite bad, but no one had plans to cut it off.

I felt like I had landed on a faraway and unwholesome planet. I’m sure I sounded judgmental when I asked where they had met these men. (Goodenough, who had asked “What is the clitoris?” in class earlier that semester, sat in polite silence throughout.)

Oh, you know, the girls said. It just happened. There was a way you looked at a man, a way he looked at you. Then suddenly you were in the apartment he shared with his wife, comforting him over his failed erection, or rubbing his back while he cried in your decrepit Alphabet City bedroom.

I heard stories like this throughout my twenties. The older man who had seizures during sex and woke up yelling at the younger girlfriend who had attended to him to his exact specifications. The evangelical poet-dad who left his wife and kids for a dour undergrad. The disgraced figurehead of sensitive academic masculinity whom, from the distance of Facebook, I watched romance, marry, and eventually divorce an aspiring actress several decades his junior during his post-fall years. She was his fifth wife. (I see he now writes for The Federalist.)

Culture taught me what was in it for the men. But why did the girls do it?

There’s a type of girlhood which I have always watched from outside. It began early, in sixth grade, the year everyone else figured out where to get the clothes that helped them blend in, and continued into high school, during which I watched girls experience a version of adolescence that felt more normative than my own. I was sexually precocious but largely monogamous, at least physically. I had one boyfriend through high school and into college, and then one boyfriend through college and into grad school, and then I got married when I was twenty-four. My life has been chockablock with strange, charged encounters, but almost no hookups. (The closest I ever came was when I was twenty-three and an endless conversation with a stranger at a wedding finally terminated with him ejaculating into his stomach hair while I knelt next to him in a dark room in a hotel in which my parents were also staying that night. I guess he was older.)

By college I had self-selected myself into a proud society of fellow freaks, but right next door in my very university was a college so big and broad it might as well have been a state university, and I knew girls there were living that other life. I saw some of them in my freshman dorm, descending to the lobby in the elevators reserved for the Greek organization houses that existed autonomously inside the same structure, where every Saturday they were received in their prom dresses by suited boys bearing a single rose.

Every time I tried to hop to the central track, I missed. In middle school I begged my mom to take me shopping at the Gap, but my new wardrobe was immediately identified as try-hard and made the bullying worse. In high school could be class friends with the girls who belonged to the junior sorority and straightfacedly did things like Homecoming Court, but we never graduated to hanging out outside of school. I was surprised when I learned that one of them had been dating my paunchy and strange manager at the bakery where I briefly worked sophomore year, a man who looked like George Costanza but claimed to be twenty-four years old. Even though he hit on me relentlessly, it never occurred to me that it was desirable, or even possible, to be with him. It was verboten, and I wasn’t just not attracted to him; I was scared of him, although he was always very nice to me and gave me a book about contemporary British history when I quit. In exchange I gave him a fake email address. But this girl a year older than me, an athlete aiming for law school with tawny hair and perfect eyebrows, had apparently engaged in a multiyear relationship with sad Jason.

In college, the only men beyond my string of committed boyfriends who expressed interest in me were either coequals with whom I engaged in fraught friendships or the most aggressive street harassers in human history, whose surreally violent catcalls fell on me every time I left my apartment. One once so relentlessly shouted the things he would do to me as I openly wept on a phone call with my mother that I finally put the phone down and made him apologize to me, which he did, calling me Miss. But I was a senior then, experienced. Freshman year was intense. “What’s in your pussy, greenface?” A man asked me on the street in the West Village in September 2003. I was eighteen years old, two weeks out of my childhood bedroom with its roseprint wallpaper.

I didn’t want an older man and so I didn’t have one. But I did have the sense that wanting one, or more exactly making myself available to be wanted by one and following the breadcrumb trail of his desire into what came next, was some rarefied threshold, dangerous and hallowed. This logic was a cousin of the Cat Marnell quotation that has haunted me for over a decade:

I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to be a real girl. Well into my thirties I wanted that so badly that I didn’t let myself call my eating disorder an eating disorder because it never landed me in a hospital. It was the same longing that made me wonder if there was something wrong with me because I had never had—been had by—an older man.

In an essay that I have tried to publish for four years, I write about my attempt to be desired the way I had been told that girls were desired.

Experiences like this one confirmed my sense there was no automatic New Yorker publication waiting for me on the other side of some dad’s poorly concealed longings, a conclusion that was underscored when I began working at that august magazine the following autumn and overheard editors speaking derisively of that professor’s habit of sending variations on the same piece in for their review every few months for the past two decades. His power was flickering, limited. It probably didn’t really exist at all.

When I finally had my first older man experience, it wasn’t exactly what I thought I was signing up for.

What I thought I was signing up for: elegant evenings out, reasons to dress up, a man who smelled like smoke and leather, I don’t know, a nice apartment? Social capital. A way of skipping the line. You know. Everything they say it is.

The thing is, I actually thought that essay was pretty well-written. It’s easy to dunk on the author, but to do so fundamentally misunderstands the editorial wiliness of The Cut, a venue that will both publish thoughtful reporting on reproductive freedom and braindead trend pieces about “French girl beauty.” Of course they would publish a piece called “The Case For Marrying An Older Man.” It’s not that the writing is so bad, it’s just that—as in the case of this banger of a Dorothy Fortenberry piece—the author is describing something that sounds fucking awful as if it is highly covetable. Her loopy reasoning and fictive storytelling, which holds that a thirty-year-old man is a mature adult and that a life married to your father-landlord in which your primary pastime is “think[ing] in delicious circles” is any wise person’s goal, is a fun hate read indeed. I liked her Instagram face piece better.

The deus ex machina of the older man is like the idea that you can will yourself into literary success, that if you play your cards right from your first move—eschewing all small-time literary journals, reserving that initial publication for some impossible-to-access venue like The White Review, working on your debut for that impossible-to-determine perfect amount of time—you can ensure you’re read seriously and well. That your career unfolds as a series of exact steps, a staircase leading you to your perfect destination. This story makes about as much sense as reading Lolita in the Harvard Business School library to attract a good husband, but it passes through generations of writers like a mind virus.

You will always meet people who believe these stories and other stories like them and can’t be told anything different. And then it’s your fault: how you were treated, how the choices you made landed or failed to land.

In her lambent memoir I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, a powerful work about identity and the inherently isolating nature of its contemplation and transformation, Lucy Sante writes:

It is seductive to embrace an idea about sacrifice and control than to confront the fundamental terrifying ambiguity of all human endeavor, especially and most of all our personalities and the lives they lead us into, the codes we write within them to keep ourselves safe.

I never befriended the girls I had drinks with that night in 2004. I saw one of them again, once, years later, when I was getting ready to graduate. She called out to me one day as my boyfriend and I were walking in the East Village and came to me with great warmth. She kissed me on the lips, which surprised me, and held her face so that I would kiss her, which I did, baffled. We spoke for a moment and parted. No plans were made.

After, my boyfriend said, “You were so cool to her.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You just had a total gangster demeanor, like you didn’t care about seeing her at all, and she was fawning over you,” he said.

That wasn’t how I thought I had been, not at all, I don’t think I’ve ever been like that in my life. But when I remember that encounter now, I feel the unnerving seam between my sense of myself and the way I am perceived in the world. How I was, why I behaved the way that I did, what I wanted, how I thought I would get it, is as much a mystery to me now as it must have been then. Even more as the years slip by.