Bad Dick (P.1)

The Hot Girl has the perfect amount of hair on her vagina—enough to show her self-esteem but not so much that men don’t want to fuck her.

I’ve always been a fan of obscure literary journals, it’s where I got my start 25 years ago. Over the years, I’ve discovered many writers in those journals. Keti Shea, is one of those writers. Originally published in Oranges Journal, which has since closed, I’m excited to give Keti’s essay Bad Dick a new home at Summer of Men. Bad Dick is the first in my quarterly guest essay series.

Keti Shea is a lawyer and writer. Her writing appears in Reverie Mag, Swim Press, Wildroof Journal, and elsewhere. She is a two-time Best of the Net nominee and a 2025 Pushcart nominee. She lives with her husband and daughter in a former nunnery in Northern Colorado.

BAD DICK (Part 1)

by Keti Shea

When you meet him, Bad Dick will be several years older than you, a lifetime at your age. He will have steely eyes and dark brown hair flecked with gold and he’ll check his phone too much during dates. Over dinner, he’ll announce he likes to role play during sex, sometimes play a little rough. He’ll drop this casually on a third or fourth date, entirely to test you. He’ll suggest that you in fact like these things too, he’ll say all women have a rape fantasy, and he’ll act as if he has been put on this planet to satisfy your fantasies, starting with the ones you don’t have. You’ll be pretty positive you don’t have a rape fantasy, but this man will be incandescent with sex appeal, and he’ll insist that you do. You’ll be a sophomore in college, so what will you know? You will know exactly nothing. This man will be both smooth and sharp, and his dick will be authoritative with veins. He’ll know what you have and haven’t yet been taught, and he will capitalize on the chasm between those two things.

Once he disarms you with several innocuous dates at overpriced restaurants, he’ll buy you lacy underwear, which will feel good because it means he bought you a present, but then you’ll realize the underwear scratches and is too small to cover the stretch marks around your hips. He’ll know you are self-conscious about your body, so he’ll ask you to parade in front of him. He will enjoy degrading you, degradation will be sexy to him, like porn; and you’ll want him to approve of you, so you’ll abandon your instincts. You will dance like a slightly drunk stripper, which will be hot to him, which will make it seem hot to you. You’ll mistake his age for sophistication, so you’ll think you have to prove you are worldly before he cuts you loose for someone more pliable. Someone cooler and hotter. Someone seven pounds thinner than you.

He will produce handcuffs in the bedroom on date four or maybe five, which will make you visibly uncomfortable, and you will start to understand the underwear is not so much a present for you as it is for him. You will contort yourself on the bed so he can’t see your stretch marks. This will make your wrists ache from the handcuffs that are now very cold on your wrists, also too tight. They didn’t start out this tight, so he must have made them tighter, but you will miss that in your worry over the stretch marks. You’ll try to appear relaxed, while feeling increasing uncomfortable, because all the lights will be on. When you find yourself unable to ignore your discomfort any more, you will attempt to shimmy from your restraints, bucking wildly, which he’ll think is hot, so you’ll add vocal objections to the physical ones, because even dumb girls know that resistance is paramount, it is your duty, and he will find this new level of resistance very hot. You’ll give up and just do the dead cockroach thing every girl seems to know about and not make a big deal about, because that will make the moment pass quickly like a freak summer storm. Maybe the vocal objections were too lackluster, tepid as tap water, you will think after, when reordering the memories.

Bad Dick will later tell you to kneel and suck his dick while saying things that make you cringe and him come, and then he’ll buy you dinner, because it couldn’t have been all that bad if he bought you dinner. He’ll know this and that’s why he’ll do it, but you will be young and lonely and seeking approval, so you’ll override your instincts. You’ll let him convince you that you enjoyed the rough dick-sucking, even though in the moment there will be clear evidence you did not. Bad Dick will encourage you to subjugate yourself, because he will know you want to be loved and will do most anything for that love, even if those same things will make you hate yourself afterwards.

For example. You will later agree to gag on this man’s veiny dick because the last time you resisted a blowjob Bad Dick was so annoyed at your lack of compliance, your lack of coolness, that he pushed your head into his crotch until his fingers left welts. His hand on your neck felt powerful. Which was so hot, he will say afterwards, leaving no room for argument. You will say nothing because you’ll feel complicit, an escalating series of events will have led to this one. You’ll feel like there was an off-ramp somewhere that you failed to take. You will wash your mouth with anti-bacterial soap every day for a week until your tongue blisters. Someplace deep down that you won’t like to visit, you’ll feel good that you made Bad Dick erupt like Old Faithful. In fact, his pleasure will elevate just as yours diminishes; pleasure will be linked in precisely that synchrony. Bad Dick will immerse you so powerfully that you’ll be swept away by it, making it both terrifying and attractive, a rip tide.

At this point, you’ll be tempted to ask friends whether they too have been glossing over the bad dick of their pasts to ascertain the ultra-fine point at which bad dick becomes rape. This will be a delicate process, one you’ll decide is best left to silence or therapy. Therapy will prove useless because therapists will think everything is rape, because they’ll have forgotten what it is to want someone to want you. Silence will allow you to convince yourself everything is your fault, and so you’ll opt for silence.

You’ll eventually change your number and stop talking to Bad Dick, which won’t mean much because the memory of Bad Dick will linger on your skin like a taunt. You’ll come to understand there are critical factors, essential criteria, that make bad dick ipso facto rape, and these criteria will be characterized by an absence rather than a presence. Rape starts where linearity ends. It is rape when time stops, when the sky sucks its breath and holds it, so the entire scene is suspended before you, and you rise above to watch like a dirty third party. It is rape, you will come to understand, when your brain stacks memories in a flipbook out of order; it is watching a movie with the scenes in a jumble. Your body will bear bruises that you won’t remember receiving. And because you won’t fully remember the course of events in which you were involved, you will come to question the sanctity of your memory, your sense of self, your grasp on reality even.

You will eat less because concavity will feel good, it will feel like a much-needed punishment.

A sentence will then flicker through your brain, a neon sign in a charcoal night: If you wish to survive you must first try to die.

You won’t reach critical mass yet, you’ll still have a long way to fall, nine circles of hell and all that, so at this point you’ll seek to understand. How in the actual fuck did you end up here? You’ll see you must first unpack your conditioned responses to sex, to your body, to the qualities you believe make you desirable to men. You won’t yet question why it is you must be desirable to men; that will come later. First, you’ll dig through the trash heap of your past and catch a glimmer of an answer, well before your first junior tampon, when your vagina was hairless and hymened and your chest was unmounded.

The answer will rest that far back—when you first met the Hot Girl. The Hot Girl is the epitome of desirable. The Hot Girl is blithe, assured, down for whatever, not because she is a whore but because she has mastered the art of divesting emotion from sex. The Hot Girl is effortlessly undramatic. She is slightly tomboyish, so she can hang with the guys. She doesn’t flinch when asked to perform adventurous sex acts. She does not gag when bad dick ventures too far down her gullet. She is neither a slut nor squeamish about sex, a fine line to walk. The Hot Girl is smart and funny, never bitter. The Hot Girl has the perfect amount of hair on her vagina—enough to show her self-esteem but not so much that men don’t want to fuck her. The Hot Girl goes to many parties because she is well-liked, and she dresses in a way that flatters her body without being showy, because the Hot Girl knows that if someone roofies her at a party, her clothing will be the first thing under scrutiny. The Hot Girl takes an Uber home from bars, she doesn’t walk home at night, because walking home at night is an invitation to rape.

The Hot Girl is your beacon, your guiding light, a figment of your imagination, and you’ll now realize she is the ideal against which you have been comparing and grooming yourself since the moment you understood you were an object for male consumption. If the Hot Girl would smoke pot or do ecstasy for attention, you will do those things too.

Once you have popped the pimples of your past, you’ll return to the hideous rash of the present. You will have abandoned yourself for a man again and again, and you will hate yourself for being a doormat. A thought will blossom: You don’t like bad dick, you’re not even sure you like dick at all, but you want it to choose you. And because you were not chosen by it, you will find fault with yourself. The hate will be a wildfire, slow at first then rapidly building as it jumps and consumes everything within its path. This hate will be a wrecking ball that spares nothing. You’ll begin to hate yourself more because hatred conveniently self-pollinates. You will eat even less because you’ll conclude that it was probably the softness of your thighs that got you into this mess.

You’ll remember a comment someone once made about women with perfect bodies having power, and you will decide your body is imperfect. You’ll think that if your body were perfect, Bad Dick would have bowed down and respected you. So that’s it, you’ll decide, you will excise your flaws to become worthy of attention. Only the flaws will seem malignant—self-perpetuating and squamous—and no matter how much of the rot you cut out yet more will appear in its place. You will feel terminal with flaws. Eventually all of this will remind you of that comment your best friend made about your nipples in front of everyone when you were thirteen and still had headgear and no one wanted to go to the homecoming dance with you, and you will skitter across the floor to land headfirst in a roiling snake pit of shame. You’ll come to consider your vagina a hideous ogre, a geyser of need and want, it is the reason you are here, and so you’ll condemn your vagina to an involuntary hold in a psych ward for the rest of its days. You’ll try never to look at it.

Bad Dick (P.2) Read HERE

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