After I ended my 12-year marriage, I wanted to fall in love with men. In the school pickup lane, on my morning run, sitting in a Lyft—I』d close my eyes and imagine kissing a man on that spot where the jaw meets the neck, feeling the bristle of hair against my lips. Or maybe he』d be clean-shaven, and I』d follow the angle of his mandible with my tongue. I didn’t care which. I』d see a man, and I』d imagine singing in the car with him. Pressing my face into his shoulder. Scratching his head while we watched a movie.
It was the fall of 2017, and a very bad time to be in love with men.
On October 10, The New Yorker published its story about Harvey Weinstein, in which women called him out as a sexual predator. The #MeToo movement, which social activist Tarana Burke had started in 2006, took off on October 15, when the actress Alyssa Milano asked women to share their own Weinstein-like stories. Stories about Matt Lauer, Al Franken, Mario Batali, and Lorin Stein leaked out. More followed. Women broke at once, and out from the cracks of us came the stories we』d been holding in—the stories of what men had done.
I was working for a magazine at the time, editing. Soon it seemed that every submission was about a woman hurt by a man. I would edit them and cry. I'd think about my sisters, my mother, myself. Each of us had a scar. One we』d believed had healed but was now split open.
I was also in the middle of a divorce and receiving a barrage of emails from my ex-husband that told me in no uncertain terms how horrible I was. That season I read the news, the pieces for my job, the emails. I couldn’t escape the constant torrent. A Greek chorus of women across America spoke with a single voice. 「Men are bad. Men are trash,」 the women said. And yet all I wanted to do was touch men, taste them—I craved them.
I was raised evangelical and homeschooled. I was a virgin for a long, long time. I was raised to believe men wanted only sex and that I should stay away from them. I was raised to fear men and all the things they would demand from me and my body. Until I married one, of course. And then I was told to give him whatever he wanted. I carried these messages in me, even as I grew older.
I didn’t date much. In high school I』d had crushes, but no one ever asked me out. I was freshly out of homeschool, plus a speech-and-debate nerd who liked to wear jaunty denim caps. I never had the gumption to ask anyone out.
In college I dated the man so many of us dated in college. He played the guitar and video games. I made out with him on a futon while we listened to Smashing Pumpkins. He made me a mix CD with Ben Harper on it. But he was mean—always making fun of me, my glasses, my body, my large ears and crooked teeth. When I broke up with him, he slept with every single one of my friends on my dorm floor. Then I dated a man I met through debate tournaments. He was funny and charming, a perfect dream, who did impressions of a Wookiee having an orgasm. But he didn’t seem to like me. I was confused, so I broke up with him. Years later I learned he married his partner, who is also a man. I was so happy for him I wept.
After that, it was the man who would become my husband. We had known each other since I was 18. We married when I was 22. I did what I was supposed to. I gave it all. I moved for him, gave up career aspirations for him, waited for the time when it would be my turn. I cooked and decorated and worked small jobs and had children. While my friends made drunken mistakes on floor mattresses, I picked out throw pillows and made stews from the Joy of Cooking. I didn’t want what they had. I truly didn’t. I was content with my little life, content with the promise of more, later, eventually. But 「more」 never happened.
So when at 35 I found myself completely unmoored, I decided to just fuck up. I plunged into a world of canceled men, dating apps, dick pics—the bad men, who were in fact bad, the good men who tried so hard to prove they were good, except what? Put on a condom, you say? In letting go of my marriage, I let go of everything I had known and understood about sex and relationships and men. And I did it as all the women on earth had turned into open wounds.
「The floor must look like the tide at Omaha Beach,」 I joked. Then I passed out again.
That’s what October felt like. The tide at Omaha Beach. Watching in pain as my blood, our blood, spilled all over. It’s also what November and December and all the other months since have felt like. News alert after news alert. Famous man after famous man. Then not-so-famous men. My friends texted, flooded with memories of that one man that one time, or that one boyfriend, or that one coach, or that friend of their parents.
At night I would dream I was drowning, pulled underwater by the hands of men reaching up to me from below. But all I wanted to do was fall in love with men.
I began sleeping with men in earnest. My whole life I had had sex with only one person, and now I was determined to know men. To feel the bone on their hips, the divot in their elbows. I wanted to press my palm against their sternum. To feel their heart beating through the pulse in their thighs. I wanted to slip my hand in theirs. To rest my cheek against the soft skin of their waist.
I should have been repulsed. I should have been angry. I should have shut down. Instead, at work, I was sobbing. And after dark I was fucking.
I wanted to understand men. I wanted to know the fleshy reality of them. So much of my life has been spent twisting and turning myself around them. Moving my body to avoid their elbows on airplanes. Stepping aside while they walk down sidewalks, oblivious.
Apologizing when they accidentally kick me in bars or restaurants. In my marriage I slept on the side of the bed I didn’t like, curling up to an edge to escape the hot presence of a man. But now I didn’t want to avoid them. I wanted to see them, and I wanted them to see me too.
Dating men, studying men, sleeping with men—it felt like lancing the blister. A mixture of pain and release. There was the polyamorous poet. The writer who told me I was overrated and insisted I listen to his vinyl collection. The very nice lawyer. The former white nationalist turned librarian whom I ghosted with no shame. The man who, when he saw a professional accomplishment of mine, told me it wasn’t as impressive as his dick. The politician who told me to tell people he had a big dick. (It was average.) The woke professor who talked a lot about feminism but refused to put on a condom and scared me when he grabbed my neck and kissed me, leaving bruises. There was the wedding hookup. The married novelist. The date I walked out on 10 minutes in, after he told me if I wanted to be with him, I would need to be a better cook. The sports editor who pulled out his phone and read Seinfeld plot summaries to me. I walked out on him too.
And then there was no one. When I watched Christine Blasey Ford testify about now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the Senate, I stopped. I sat on my bed and sobbed. I remembered a night in college, the beer and unwanted hands and indelible laughter. I』d worked so hard to forget it because I knew if I ever told my husband, he』d think I was damaged. Now I had no reason to forget, so I cried and remembered.
How could I learn to love men? So much of my life had been ruined by them. The man who molested my sister and ripped our family apart. Men in school who』d hurt me in ways I had long repressed. A man who』d made me feel so small, hounding me at a conference, insisting I come up to his room. The constant battering of words and judgments and hands from men. I still wanted them. I wanted them on new terms.
As women we are taught that we need to close ourselves off to survive. A good woman is a woman who doesn’t wear low-cut tops, doesn’t have sex with men on the first date, doesn’t weep in a Jimmy Johns, doesn’t crawl under a table at a restaurant to avoid a man she once hooked up with. We are taught this for our protection. But protection is just another form of control. I don’t want to be controlled. I want to be a mess.
I used to think that love was knowing. If I could know someone in their absolute fullness, I could be in love. And so I pushed deep into men, their skin and their mouths. I wanted to excavate all that desire and hope, if only to stop the hemorrhage.
Lyz Lenz is a writer based in Iowa. Her writing has appeared in Pacific Standard, Marie Claire, Jezebel, and The Washington Post. Her book God Land is out in August 2019. Follow her on Twitter @lyzl.