The Need To Be Wanted
Trigger Warning: Sexual Exploitation
Molly Thomasin attempted to fall asleep at 8 PM, lying in a state of shock and shame unlike any she had ever experienced. Was this what it felt like to sell your soul to the Devil? She had just deleted all her social media accounts in a fit of panic, and she pondered the merits of going completely off the grid. People survived and thrived before the advent of pocket rectangles; surely they could learn how to do so again.
She’d been told time and time again that loneliness was just a passing phase, not something to base any decision on. Especially the decision to get naked for a complete stranger over the phone. But alas, she always listened to her depleted, nonsensical heart before her healthy, logical brain, and now she had taken such foolishness to the next level, flirting into oblivion with a dating app scammer whose invitation to a spicy video chat quickly turned into blackmail. She was commanded to send over some money, or else the brief footage of her pathetically grinding the carpet while nude would be shared with all her social media followers.
But how exactly did she grow to stoop this low? What happened to the virtuous young woman who promised never to take advantage of anyone, including her own pure self? The answer was simple yet complicated, as all answers were, but it boiled down to jealousy and fear-of-missing-out and all the other misleading desires that had only been exacerbated by the advent of pocket rectangles.
***
“I just don’t get it,” Molly told her college roommate Chase six years before after the latter had finished venting about a slightly traumatic one-night stand. “Why would you set yourself up to get your heart broken just for a couple minutes of pleasure?”
Chase shrugged. “Because it’s fun. Not all hookups end badly. I just didn’t vet him properly.”
“I’ll say.” Molly took a sip of black cherry White Claw, her gateway drug to harder liquor and other substances synonymous with young adulthood. But for now, she contented herself in believing she’d never try anything stronger. “Just reminds me why I’d rather wait ‘til marriage.”
“Oh, you’ll change your mind soon enough. Sex can be bad in marriage too, you know.”
“Yeah, but at least you have the next day to talk to each other about it and move in a better direction. Did you guys even have breakfast together?”
“Of course not. I got out of there as fast as I could.”
Molly just shook her head. “Whatever you think will make you happy.” She always tried not to sound too holier than thou – she had chased plenty of dead-ends in her own emotional life – but it also frustrated her how vapid her generation could be. Was it really so important to have a “body count” when young adults in war-torn countries were literally counting bodies outside their doorway every day? Was a “healthy sex life” truly a basic human need when some people were sleeping on the streets and digging through trash cans just to find some Cheesecake Factory leftovers? It seemed Molly’s peers turned first world problems into first world necessities, and she was not okay with that.
Nevertheless, she also had a bit of an Ariel complex, longing to be part of the world were sexual satisfaction was as ubiquitous as a good piece of chocolate cake, and there were frequent reminders that her body was desirable. She’d tried to numb the void with autoeroticism – she possessed an active imagination and could easily turn her brain into the pornographic film of her choice – but this didn’t change the fact that there was no warm body lying next to her when she opened her eyes. She also feared the consequences of turning people into fantasies over time, and how this might affect how she actually spoke to them when they interacted in the real world.
Oh, life was so much more than sex. And besides, Molly remained a hopeless romantic; she wanted to be swept off her feet, not squeezed for a night and then hung out to dry over a moldy bathroom floor bursting with pubic hairs. Surely the curse of her sexual inexperience would someday be revealed as God’s greatest gift to her, a chance to experience real and lasting love without the heartbreaking stepping stones that so many others endured on the way there. Still, as long as a gift seemed like a curse, it would be treated as such; Molly became increasingly curious about the hookup world and wondered if it was not too late to join it.
College went by without any cherry-popping moments or even a first kiss. It sometimes comforted her to remember that Jane Austen, the creme-de-la-creme of romance authors, had never married and most likely died a virgin, but then this comfort would disappear as her roommates came home raving about their passionate makeout sessions in dive bars and steamy bedroom exchanges with musicians who led with their hearts of fool’s gold. “Omg, it was SO amazing! I hope I never see him again.”
A statement like this would catch Molly off-guard the first couple times she heard it. “Wait, why?”
“Because it’ll probably never be that amazing again! Sometimes you’ve got to let a moment stay a moment.”
Okay, fair; Molly understood that there could be as much beauty in transience as there was in eternity. Still, something didn’t add up; if you truly enjoyed someone’s company either physically or emotionally, why wouldn’t you want to see them again?
A couple years after college, Molly finally had her first kiss and her first mini-relationship. They never went all the way – the lover in question was an on-and-off-again Christian who remained terrified by the mere possibility of getting a woman pregnant out of wedlock – but they had at least done some passionate touching, and Molly achieved her first semi-climax without the assistance of private fantasies. It wasn’t amazing, but it was better than nothing.
Then after this relationship ended due to diverging plans for the future, Molly was hurled back into the anxiety-inducing world of locking eyes with beautiful strangers in coffee shops and parks and laundromats, never once summoning the courage to go up and say hello. She’d been rejected enough in her lifetime; no need courting it unnecessarily. Still, she’d always spent the rest of the evening agonizing over what might have been. Ugh, that would have been such a great meet-cute story! Guess it’s back to the apps…
Although the apps ultimately provided even more anxiety and heartache than the mirages of chance encounters in public places. She matched with people plenty of times, but the conversations almost always ended in a brick wall, and when they didn’t end in a brick wall, she found herself projecting more than her already overactive imagination could handle. It was just so damn exhausting; why did we need to be wanted? Why couldn’t we be content with a nice bathroom mirror and the slight faith that God or the Universe or Someone Up There loved us more than any human was capable of? Alas, we were physical creatures at the end of the day; emotional and spiritual consolations could only do so much.
Whenever Molly rode public transportation, she tried to look at her fellow passengers and put her loneliness in perspective. Unhoused individuals were an easy target, but she never wanted to use their obvious pain as a means of feeling better about herself. There were more nuanced examples of desolation though. Fatigued college students with giant headphones to block out the stressful noises around them. Fast food workers counting the change in their pockets to see if they could afford a load of laundry after enduring passive-aggressive comments from the shift lead about keeping the countertop sparkling. Elderly women reading from Bibles their children had rejected as a Christmas gift. Surely they needed to be wanted to, but other priorities had taken over; Molly doubted they were selling their souls to Tinder on a regular basis. But God only knew.
Then like all brief moments of grace and mature perspective, Molly’s heart soon sunk back into a state of near desperation, and she downloaded the apps she had sworn countless times to never download again. Recently she had taken a few “artistically composed” nude photos just in case anyone ever asked for them. And even if they never did, there was something empowering about looking at them. She was sexy! She was desirable! Sometimes the reassurance that she deserved to be wanted distracted from the unfulfilled need to be. But then the distraction became engulfed in greed and lust, and she grew determined to find someone who would crave to see the photos.
Tinder was the perfect place to find such a person; on one particularly lonely night, she matched with some hot guy in Southeast Asia who appeared to be more eloquent than the usual horny swiper, not to mention genuinely interested in who Molly was as a person both naked and clothed. He suggested they shift the conversation to Instagram or WhatsApp, and Molly willingly gave him both her handle and her number; conversing over a less embarrassing platform seemed logical enough.
The conversation continued in its too-good-to-be-true flow and subject matter, and Molly dared to hope she might actually be on the brink of getting laid for the first time. The man said he was visiting a friend in the area and could maybe hook up with her on the following Sunday. Then he pivoted and said he was really horny right now, and he asked if Molly wouldn’t mind a spicy little video chat. Ignoring all red flags and lessons she’d been taught about cybersecurity, Molly immediately obliged; surely the only way to make loneliness disappear was to surrender to it in all its carnal perversion and patheticness. Then she could only go up from there. But oh, how wrong she was.
Unbuttoning her shirt and spreading out a blanket on her bedroom floor, Molly sent a message saying she was ready, and the man promptly video-called her over WhatsApp. His face seemed slightly different from what Molly remembered seeing on his Tinder profile, but the ethnicity still matched, and Molly just assumed he had led with his younger, more polished photos.
His shirt was off, and he began licking his lips.
“Hello!” Molly said in her best attempt at a sexy voice.
“Can you show me your pussy?” Clearly he had no time for formalities.
“One moment.” Molly was already started to feel weirded out, but lust remained her primary emotion, and she began taking off the rest of her clothes. She felt a little too timid – she didn’t have the masculine need for sporting a decent erection, but she still wanted to be in the proper mood – so she began grinding the blanket she lay on and glancing back at the man on the screen with as much carnal passion as she could muster. But he didn’t seem to be enjoying her antics. “Show me your pussy,” he demanded. Then the video stopped, and Molly’s heart froze.
Was she not attractive enough? Did she really look as pathetic as she felt? A message appeared on the screen – “One sec, going to the bathroom” – and she let out a slight sigh of relief and delusional hope. But the hope was short-lived: The video of her grinding the bedsheets then appeared on the phone screen, followed by a series of messages in all caps:
“PLEASE READ CAREFULLY!”
“HERE IS THE VIDEO OF YOU MASTURBATING.”
“WE WILL SHARE WITH YOUR FOLLOWERS UNLESS YOU CALL BACK TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT.”
These messages were then followed by screenshots of Molly’s followers on Instagram. Shocked and mortified, she went into crisis mode and called back to see what she needed to do to end this madness. They picked up, but there was silence at first, which made Molly even more scared.
“H… Hello?”
More silence. Then a man’s voice that sounded different from the shirtless man onscreen said one word: “Money.”
Molly frantically hung up. She should have expected this, but now was not the time to berate herself for her stupidity. A message soon followed: “So you’re not gonna cooperate, huh?” Panicking more than she had ever panicked in her life, Molly blocked the caller, then deleted WhatsApp and Instagram, praying to a God she only sometimes believed in that it was not too late.
Thankfully, one of her close friends confirmed that no lewd video had been sent to them on Instagram, and she felt slightly better. “Slightly” being the key word. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have let a moment of loneliness potentially turn into a lifetime of shame?
She crawled into bed and tried to take refuge under the blankets, but she couldn’t stop shivering with fear. She played the brief video exchange over and over again in her head as sirens wailed outside, which heightened her anxiety; had she been complacent in some sort of sex trafficking operation? Were the cops coming for her right now?
As she continued replaying the video chat in her head, she felt a surge of leftover lust followed by the peak of shame: she remained slightly turned on by the idea of a shirtless man licking his lips and demanding to see the most vulnerable part of her body. Wasn’t this what she’d been craving for so many years? Wasn’t this the need to be wanted finally fulfilled? Briefly ignoring her shame and sense of decency, she began fantasizing about the man touching every part of her body with his hands and his lips, consuming all her physical insecurities and affirming that she deserved to be desired. Then she snapped out of the fantasy and began to cry; where had she left her soul? Did she even know who she was anymore?
As she continued to lie awake in agony, a bird chirped outside her window. It was unusual for birds to be singing this late at night, but the intonation was unmistakeable. In fact, it sounded just like the bird she heard outside her window every morning, which she had often quipped was her guardian angel.
There was no judgment in the chirping, only understanding and compassion. You are gonna be okay. You let your lust and loneliness be taken advantage of, but there are worse things a person can do. And most importantly, you will be loved and wanted by people you haven’t met yet. But only if you have the courage to keep being yourself.
Molly rolled her eyes at this last cliche she seemed to hear from the bird. Yeah yeah yeah, “be yourself.” Where had that ever gotten her? Although the more she let logic into her still-shocked brain, she realized how grateful she was to be herself. Maybe she wasn’t ever gonna be cut out for one night stands with “amazing” men she then never wanted to see again. But she had experienced so many raw, emotionally intimate bonds with both men and women throughout the years, and she would prefer that over even the most incredible physical validation. Besides, that would come in time; a person couldn’t love nor be loved fully if they didn’t have the courage to be their whole, authentic self.
The End.
Sam Hendrian is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, poet, and playwright striving to foster empathy through art. From writing personalized poems for passersby outside of LA's oldest independent bookstore every Sunday, to making Chaplin-esque silent films about loneliness and human connection once a month, Sam lives to make other people feel seen and validated. More work can be found on YouTube at @samhendrian8658.
