when I started to want to be touched and touch someone besides myself, I picked out an incredibly small guy who wore eyeliner and lipstick and most definitively was an unrepentant sex fiend. Not in the way that so many teenage boys are, with their gross language about “boning”—you know, all the Brock Turners or medium-grade Brock Turners of the world. A sex fiend is someone who actually likes sex, not just the getting-off part but the dirty parts, the salty mess of it. And so my androgyne boyfriend liked the mess, and so did I. Grinding that’s good enough you don’t need to tell anyone about it. He certainly didn’t tell anyone about it, because the other eighth-grade boys mocked and ostracized him for being small and femme and freakish. But he was the only one getting it. I’m telling you this now because I hate the way this possibility of experience for boys and girls and everyone in between gets drowned out in moralistic crap about power and consent, all of which is necessary but eclipses the real divine electric dirtiness that is possible between excited young bodies who have accepted that they have desire and somehow manage to find each other. I want people, especially girls, to know that that’s possible. It’s possible even when you’re thirteen, fifteen, and it can be great.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/darling-nikki