“Please Don’t Ruin My Dress.” When do we know we're performing?

I leaned over the pool table, my palms pressed into the green felt, my ass pushed back, my dress pulled up, and my thong shoved to the side, not carefully, but with haste and a little aggression.

I hated that my hands were on the pool table.

I knew it wasn’t good for the felt. It might scratch the smoothness, ruining the perfect physics of an otherwise stupid game of hitting balls with sticks into holes. But if I ruined the table, people wouldn’t be able to play. At least, not as well. My hands gripped the felt, but as lightly as I could, supporting my bodyweight with as little effort as possible. I didn’t want to ruin the pool table.

More importantly, I didn’t want to ruin the moment for him. I didn’t want to interrupt the performance.

I leaned forward, my back flat, hair flipped to one side, my weight resting through my arms into my fingertips. Every thrust jolted my body forward. I braced, tightening my core so my hips wouldn’t slam into the hard wooden edge of the table. I tried to absorb the force in my own body rather than drive it into the smooth green fabric beneath my hands. My body responded like I needed it to. Brace, absorb, stabilise; perform like you like it.

This wasn’t a single performance. It was one scene within a much longer drama, full of ups and downs, twists and turns.

With every thrust I wasn’t trying to feel, I was trying to stay still. There was no pleasure apart from knowing this performance would please him. And there was pleasure in that power, that minuscule, fleeting illusion of control. No pleasure in the standard way we talk about sex. No orgasm, no climax.

I didn’t want to ruin my beautiful dress. I didn’t want to ruin the table.

His hands gripped my hips to guide his thrusts. I felt his fingers tugging at my dress.

It was a beautiful shimmery gold, fitted through the torso before flowing softly from my waist to my ankles. It dipped into a V at the front and the back and draped effortlessly over my shoulders. It was like the dress Kate Hudson wore at the end of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, or Belle’s gown in Beauty and the Beast.

Please don’t rip my dress. I thought in my head.

Please don’t get cum on my dress. Please. Don’t.

I looked out through the dirty floor-to-ceiling windows, then back at my hands. We were fucking against the side of a pool table in a dorm lounge. It was a communal space. The only privacy came from the hour; it was late at night, maybe even early morning. Most of the students were asleep, but that was never a guarantee in a college dorm. There could always be someone awake. My friends could have walked by; people we knew could have walked by.

I didn’t want anyone to see me with my hands on the table, ruining the felt and the experience for everyone else. I didn’t want anyone to see me with my dress pulled up around my waist and my thong shoved over, digging into the thin, sensitive skin between my labia and inner thigh. The thong that tugged at my skin with every smack of his pelvis against my bare ass.

This performance was ruining the pool table and my beautiful dress. The scene was taking too long and my sense of power and control was morphing into shame and embarrassment. I was letting myself get fucked, literally, by a guy who had figuratively fucked me over at least a dozen times before that night.

I hadn’t cared enough before that night about myself, but I cared about the table, and I cared about that dress.

Every few seconds my eyes flickered between the windows and my hands. My fingers desperately tried to stabilise my body without gripping the felt. I hoped no one walked by. He looked towards the windows too.

He was hoping someone would.

I was performing the cool girl, down for anything, sexually adventurous; beautiful and slutty. I was good at it. I had been playing this character for a few years, growing alongside her arc, embodying her. I believed she was part of me. I was the character, but deep down it was still a performance, and I wanted someone to call, “Scene!”

I wanted it to end. I didn’t want to be discovered, ruining the table, ruining my dress, and ruining the shards of self esteem I kept putting back together between each break-up, each fuck.

He kept pounding; I took it. I took it well. I moaned and arched in rhythm. I played my part.

His hands kept shifting from both of my hips to one hand on a hip and the other on the small of my back, continually tugging at the gold fabric.

Please don’t rip my dress.

Please don’t rip my dress.

He finally got there. He began to cum, each thrust getting a little shorter; punchy bursts, fizzling into nothing. He came. The tugging stopped. He walked away.

I carefully lifted my hands from the green felt, and with deliberate precision, pulled my thong back into place, relieving my tender skin, made red from the rubbing. I hoped the few inches of fabric would catch his semen before it reached my dress.

Please don’t get on my dress.

I don’t want cum on my dress.

There were no napkins, no wipes, no towels for clean-up. There was no orgasm for me, no reciprocation. That wasn’t part of the script.

The scene was over and I wanted out of that lounge.

I wanted his cum to pour out of my vagina, carrying every sticky strand with it before it reached the hem of my dress. It could run down my legs. It could dry on my skin. I didn’t care. It could gather on my ass and my inner thighs, tacky and rubbing all the way back to my dorm room.

Just not on my dress.

I wanted to feel beautiful in my dress.

I don’t know what happened next. I assume we left the lounge, and went back to his room and slept. It’s possible he went to his suite and I went to mine. I don’t remember kissing him. I don’t remember saying goodbye.

He left feeling like the conquering hero. And I, well, I left feeling like the conquered.

Before I walked away, I do remember glancing at the felt. I had left marks with my fingers. Noticeable tugs along the fabric, sure to change the trajectory of any ball gliding along its surface.

I hadn’t stabilised well enough.

Then I glanced at my hips, at my dress hanging on either side. Left, right, left again. I saw tug marks on the golden cloth. Divots where his fingers had pressed too hard, where his palms had gripped, and where my safety and consent had grown murky.

I hadn’t stabilised well enough.

My dress was ruined.

Notes for my next scene.

Author’s Note

This story is based on true events. I was this girl. I was twenty-two years old, wearing that gold dress I adored, a senior in college, fucking my on-again, off-again boyfriend in a university dorm after our Senior Formal.

This was years before I became a clinician, before I was certified as a sex therapist. It was before I began to understand the complicated relationships among power, sex, confidence, performance, validation, worth, autonomy, insecurity, agency, eroticism, and freedom.

At twenty-two, I genuinely felt powerful.

It is only through the lens of my forty-three-year-old self that I understand this night as the performance of a character I had learned to play.

The boy is not the centre of this story. He didn’t ignore my boundaries or violate my consent. The performance is the story

I was performing. I was the sexy, adventurous girl, eager to please and ready to try anything. But the performance wasn’t for me. It was for him. It was for everyone else.

That’s where the lines become blurry: when performance begins to replace agency, and our actions are driven more by the desire for approval and acceptance than by our own wants and needs.

It wasn’t one particular sexual act that blurred the lines of consent and agency. It was the entire performance. I had become a character instead of fully inhabiting myself.

This story is not mine alone. Women spend years performing versions of ourselves we believe we’re supposed to be, without ever realising we’re performing at all.

We don’t know it’s a performance. I certainly didn’t know; not until many years later. Because we don’t even know we’re performing, it’s incredibly difficult to break free from the character we’ve been taught to become.

An Invitation to the Reader

Where in your own life are you performing?

Not because someone explicitly asked you to, but because somewhere along the way you learned that this version of yourself was more desirable, more lovable, or more acceptable.

We all perform.

The question isn’t whether we’re performing; it’s whether we know we’re performing.