I’m seeing the twentysomething tonight and it’s long overdue. I’ve been craving this boy since our last few flings before I ran off to Europe, and I’ve been thinking about him ever since. I want him as a permanent fixture between my legs.

The twentysomething is ultra-masculine, more conventionally masculine than most of the men I date. He boxes, for example. He drinks whiskey. He watches porn. And sports. He rivals my fuckbuddy in hyperbolic maleness.

“Yeah. I’m pretty much the stereotype,” he says, as he tugs my underwear down. “All my friends’ girlfriends hate me.”

*

When I first moved to Italy, I didn’t know the language very well. I could read it well but I hadn’t learned to speak it, so I spent a few rocky months struggling with basic communication until my speaking skills caught up. During those rocky months, I met a man named Giovanni, who couldn’t understand a word I’d said. I would struggle and strain, but he’d just pat my shoulder. He thought I was charming in all my clumsy, stuttering glory. La Muta, he called me. The Mute.

We met in a piazza, and while he invited me out a few times, I declined with a rapid shake of the head. It wasn’t for lack of attraction, because I thought he looked amazing. He was dark Italian, extremely lean and muscular, and fairly tall. His attention made me shy and awkward and the language gap made me self-conscious, but my shyness just encouraged him. He’d chatter on and on without pause while I’d hurry through the side streets and over bridges and through the tunnel-like sottoporteghi until I’d get to my apartment, tucked to the side of a small, dark square. My landlady was perpetually drunk; my neighbor was a lunatic known locally as Il Matto. And each time I’d get to my door, he’d try to come up.

“Ma dai…” he’d say. I’d just scramble with my key, shake my head furiously, and then close the door quickly behind me. And then I’d hear again, through the door, “Ma dai…”

It’s how I learned the expression ‘ma dai.’ It means something like ‘come on…’ Through my door – over and over – come on, baby.

He was relentless, for weeks. I’d cross a particularly social square and if I caught his eye, he’d run after me, and when I’d walk faster, he’d run circles around me until I stopped. I thought he was funny, ballsy, persistent, and maybe a little crazy.

And then, one evening, I was sitting at my desk with the windows open when I heard him down in the campo calling up to me. I heard, “Muta… Americana...” and when I stuck my head out the window, he waved furiously and then gestured for me to come down. I just shook my head, but he was making such a scene that I attempted broken Italian to hush him up. And when that didn’t work, I grabbed my apartment keys and ran downstairs to stress, emphatically, that he needed to go home. But the moment I cracked open the door, he pushed his way inside.

I broke into nervous laughter because I couldn’t believe the gall, and I tried to push him back out, but he wasn’t having it. He just pushed me against the wall and ground his body against me while he mumbled words I couldn’t understand. Ever the American, I thought, Is this legal? Can men do this?

I pushed him off and shushed him, and I was worried my drunk landlady would stumble out into the hallway and see us, this – she was already a little too curious about my love life. So when I couldn’t get him to leave, I made my way upstairs to avoid a scene, maybe to quiet him down. As it was, I felt self-conscious enough as the conspicuously single girl from a country best known for its porn and its Pamela Anderson.

The second I opened my apartment door, he gripped my body with both arms and threw me down on the bed, kicking the door closed behind him. It was like getting hit by a tidal wave – I felt completely out of control, a little afraid, rendered mute by the rift in language. My mind was buzzing with incredulity. Can he do this? Is this rape? What the fuck. I tried to speak but I wasn’t understood, and there was a moment when I knew I could’ve made myself clear, in any language, but I chose not to. I wanted to see what would happen.

And for a moment I panicked, worried about the condom, but then I heard the package rip.

He had me flat on my stomach, pinned spread-eagle under his body. I turned my head to stare at his forearm as he held my arms down, and he was so strong – I’d never known anyone to use all their strength on me like this. It was disorienting, exciting, terrifying. I liked it.

And he thrust into me in one strong stroke, hard enough to make me jerk under his body and try to buck him off. It was out of a porn video or an improbable fantasy, this swift thrust, and that’s how he went on to fuck me, in steady, strong, complete strokes, to remind me, again and again and again, that I was being penetrated. I remember him being so hard, hard enough to bruise me, and I kept my eyes fixed on his forearm, the veins, the sinews, my mouth open with perpetual surprise. The gall. The gall to fuck me like this. There’s no way this could be legal.

And I had dangerous thoughts. The fact I liked it felt dangerous. The fact it resembled rape and yet my cunt was the wettest it had ever been felt wholly anti-femininist, or the fact he was so hyper-masculine, brutish, muscular, animalistic, the fact there was no way we had any emotional or intellectual connection – I was La Muta, to him, not a reasonably intelligent woman with a reasonably prestigious grant. The way he fucked me, like he was fucking me into submission, felt dangerous. This was a politically incorrect fuck and I was a bad feminist for loving it. And wanting it. And wanting it to go on forever.

But I loved it because thinking didn’t matter. I could, and can, intellectualize any sex act, apply all sorts of rationale to certain behaviors, and I liked that this rapey behavior circumvented it all. I was just a body to be fucked, a cute, mute thing that ran away when chased, and now caught, I was being treated as nothing more than a hot, throbbing, and increasingly slutty cunt to be held down and fucked hard.

I love having my intellectualism kicked out from under me.

He fucked me hard enough to hurt, but it was good. He pulled my hair, buried his teeth into my shoulder, bruised my hips and thighs. And when he came, he rolled off quickly, dressed quickly, and left me buzzing with confusion.

*

I mention this because I remember it whenever I think about extreme masculinity. The gender dynamics were so exaggerated that it made me feel supremely feminine, at my most primal.

I like that sex can trump politics, rhetoric, and logic. And I like knowing there’s something in my life that can shut me up and cut me down to my most basic impulses, where – at that moment – my intellect is irrelevant. Existing in that moment, defined strictly by my body, is bliss.

And then, once I come, my intellect is restored. Slowly. Eventually. In someone’s pheromonal wake.