That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields by David Shields, Samantha Matthews

fire in your house and you suddenly have the brilliant idea to take all your clothes off, tie the pieces together to make a rope, and escape out the window, etc., etc. The exercise wasn’t optional. Our acting professor was quite intimidating, and you just did what he said. This was part of being an actor—being able to be naked onstage—and we better be prepared for that. Of course I, particularly, was terrified.
    We all started saying we just weren’t comfortable doing this; the exercise should definitely be optional; it was a little weird and maybe even a little creepy, etc., etc. And then it went sensationalist Puritanical American. Now it was a violation. Everything is in America: it’s dangerous, it’s scary; people kidnap you, they rape you. There’s always an underlying agenda, and even if there isn’t, you should always be wary. This is how our thinking evolved about this exercise we’d been asked to do. Next thing you know, the sexual-harassment committee on campus was contacted (actually, I think my socially minded boyfriend was the one who made the call), and the committee asked for a meeting with all the students and faculty of the grad program. Our acting professors, who’d been putin an incredibly uncomfortable position, called off the assignment, probably fearing they’d lose their jobs. Phew. No one was going to do it. I was saved. But then suddenly everyone felt awkward. We remembered we were in drama school, not business school. After all, standard social conventions don’t apply in The Theater. Were we just scared and using this committee to get out of it?
    Now that it wasn’t mandatory, the group suddenly craved the challenge and decided to organize a special class outside of class, and whoever wanted to participate in the exercise could. My socially minded boyfriend who made the call to the committee was the first one to say he was in. What the fuck? I was trapped again. I was going to have to do it. I had to do it—not as an acting exercise but because I couldn’t bear the thought of him being naked in front of everyone and me not being there. I couldn’t handle the thought of him seeing the other girls naked. And I didn’t want to miss out on the taboo experience as a viewer. He wasn’t allowed to have an intimate experience without me. We got in a huge fight about it. I pretended I wanted to do the exercise when, deep down, I felt sick about having to expose my body to the other classmates—well, to the men. My private parts were incredibly private; if they saw them, my classmates would know what had happened to me.
    In Code 46 , a girl has a virus that makes her physically repulsed by the man she loves. She asks him to make love to her when all the while her body is thrashing around, violently rejecting his. For me, each piece of clothing I removed during that exercise was an act of violation. My body, my guts were screaming no , but the virus inside me “wanted” to do it.
    We all went out for a drink afterward to talk about it. I was in a sort of shock state. Everyone thought it had been a revolutionary, cathartic experience, whereas I’d just publicly humiliated myself. I wished the life-or-death improv would have killed me with all my clothes on.
    The whole time America has believed it’s under “constant threat of attack” for its choice to be “free,” I haven’t lived there.
    I went to a photo shoot with a friend, Elena, who was one of the models, and there were a couple guys who were assisting the photographer. I’d met both of them in a bar with Elena a few weeks before the shoot and they seemed accessible and warm, intelligent; we had some candid but “normal” conversations. She already knewthem, so conversation went to a more intimate level, as she tends to talk to people that way as well.
    The photographer started shooting her, and one of the guys sat next to me on