Photo by Danis Graveris via Unsplash
For as long as I can remember, I have always had a romantic partner. Not necessarily in a boy-crazy, new-love-of-my-life-every-week kind of way, but in a once-I-get-into-a-relationship-it’s-serious kind of way. I’ve only been in three relationships, but they’ve all been more or less back to back. At the conclusion of each relationship, my friends and family would all tell me that now was the time to focus on my life, independent of having a partner, and to develop my own self love.
For the most part, their assertions fell upon deaf ears. At the fundamental level, I understood it. Being in a committed romantic relationship means having to always worry about someone else’s needs and always having someone else to go to in a crisis situation. But, in my eyes, having experience with those things didn’t make me a less whole person. It wasn’t as if I was seeking out someone to fill some sort of perpetual emotional void — I just happened to keep running into guys that I liked who happened to like me back. While I didn’t think that I had any problems with generating self love as a result of continuously having romantic partners, I did recognize that growing up always reliant on another person in some capacity had created a situation where I struggled to feel empowered or in control of my life. After breaking up with my most recent boyfriend, I decided to challenge myself to stay away from romantic love to try to determine what self love meant to me.
Even though I was able to highlight something that I wanted to work on, I still wasn’t able to create a big picture image of what I wanted it to look like after I had gone through the process of self improvement. The closest approximation that I could come up with was that of a subgenre of girls that I’ve seen on TikTok that I have affectionately started to refer to as That Girl. That Girl lives her life in athleisure and cute thrifted outfits. That Girl wakes up early to do 12-3-30 and skin care before she goes out to coffee with her friends. That Girl makes “day in my life” TikToks, to show how easy it is to achieve simple happiness and productivity, where the comment section seethes in jealousy with their inability to achieve the same lifestyle. Though I’ve never identified with one of those girls, I recognize that the way they live seems to be productive, and if I had no image of how I want to be, then I might as well just take on the ideal that everyone else has.
In the months that followed my decision, I experimented with all sorts of things to try to see what stuck (mostly the stereotypical things that influencers like Emma Chamberlain and Emily Mariko tell you to try). I took up exercise and meditation. I started reading self help books. I spent more time trying to make new friends. I made it a goal to try to do nice things for the people around me. Doing all of those things made me feel okay, but not particularly different from the girl that I was when I was dating someone, and it definitely didn’t make me feel any more empowered. I didn’t feel better or worse about myself, and that made me feel kind of bad because the girls I see online make it seem so easy to take control of their lives. I knew it wasn’t that big of a deal because I still felt okay about myself, but I felt a bit of remiss abandoning my quest for … whatever it was that I was chasing.
Even if I had decided to stop trying to be That Girl, I decided to still incorporate aspects of it into my life (like doing nice things for my friends). Some time after officially abandoning my quest to be That Girl, I was talking with one of my friends who mentioned that he had always wanted to try pegging. Despite the fact that I had no sexual interest in pegging (and the fact that he didn’t actually ask me if I would do it), I agreed to try it with him.
Pegging refers to the use of a strap on by an AFAB (assigned female at birth) to anally penetrate their AMAB (assigned male at birth) partner. The term was popularized by sex columnist Dan Savage and his column Savage Love in 2001. A study by Dr. Evan Goldstein found that of the 72.1 percent of Americans who had tried buttplay, 16.7 percent of them had tried pegging (with millennials being the most likely age group to experiment with pegging). One of the primary benefits of engaging in pegging is the stimulation of the prostate gland, which can lead to more intense orgasms for the AMAB partner.
I didn’t go into my first time pegging as somebody with many expectations. I knew it wasn’t going to provide any sexual stimulation for me, especially because I typically took on a submissive role in sexual situations, and taking on the dominance of pegging someone would be totally unfamiliar to me. Despite that, I wanted to make the experience everything my friend had ever dreamed of — so I donned black leather pants, a lingerie top and a full face of makeup in an attempt to channel my inner dominatrix. Armed with an old bath towel, anal lube, glow in the dark condoms and a newly acquired $50 strap on from Spencer’s, I was mostly just excited to cross pegging off on my list of things to try at least once.
To my surprise, the actual experience of pegging wasn’t awkward at all. Being the one in control of the situation was completely new to me, and yet I was able to easily fall into the role. My friend is a male, 6’2” athlete, and I’m a 5’5”, 110 pound teenage girl, yet in that moment it made total sense that I was dominating him. I had agreed to do it without thinking I would get anything out of it, but during it I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I realized that I looked sexy and powerful and I was in total control. I looked like That Girl (or at least my version of it).
It makes sense that pegging was so empowering for me. My partner was a cishet straight white guy (and thus at the top of the societal hierarchy), and I am a queer black woman (and thus a bit closer to the bottom of the hierarchy), so dominating him was a complete subversion of our typical societal roles. Society has coded penetration as “powerful,” and though I am wary about the implications of that, I recognize that penetrating someone is incredibly empowering for me as a woman (even if that isn’t true for all women).
In that moment, I realized that having control over your own life didn’t always have to mean meal planning and waking up at 7 a.m. I was putting so much stress on myself to conform to the image of “togetherness” that TikTok created that I never stopped to realize that none of those things served me. I have no interest in being awake before nine, and it has never stressed me out to have to spend all day thinking about what to have for dinner. Those things don’t make me less functional, they just make me who I am (and I’m starting to love that about myself).
I felt way more empowered and in control of my life in the 20 minute time period that I was pegging someone than I did in a month of exercise, meditation and face masks. Though I know I can not use that as a means for empowering myself all of the time, it has helped me realize that the journey to order and self love in one’s life is probably not as linear and uniform as it seems online. I can’t try to force myself to adhere to the typical benchmark of what it means to love yourself and have your life together if it doesn’t ring true to who I am and what I’m interested in.
Everyone has the capacity to be That Girl in whatever form that looks like for them. For some people that means Kiehls skincare and Chloe Ting — for others it means pegging your best friend and then telling people on the internet about it.