Last week I attended a poetry recital. Being an old liar, listening to people spill their guts in public feels like showering. Everyone lies a little bit all the time, and I can’t do that anymore. I never chose to stop drinking. I decided to stop lying.

Two poetesses made stark, contrasting impressions on me. I found out later one had just turned thirty, and the other was a little younger. They both wrote about sex and love.

The older of the two I will call A, the younger, B.

In a poem addressed to the future husband she had yet to meet, A talked about longing for a life-mate, her loneliness, her faults, fighting the darkness she recognized in her own strange desires, her growth, her goals, and her self-conscious habits. She was witty and knew how to work a crowd, pulling us down in mellow empathy — then back up, releasing pent up emotion with a punchline. A good poet can work a crowd of people like a musician in concert. And she did.

I think she will find him, whoever he is. I hope so. I liked A. You couldn’t help but like her.

But B frightened me. And this is really more of a B story.

B was angry. She addressed her “mother, dearest,” in an odd mixture of formality and fury as B reprimanded her for worrying about her daughter’s promiscuity.

B embraced vulgarity, in contrast to A who had used it only once, strategically, and to great effect. Both in style and substance, B was as crude as possible. While it felt deliberate, it did not feel strategic.

Her poetry included a list of the many men she had bedded. How, when, where, how many times, how they had begged her not to leave after. But never why.

At no point was one of the men named, each reduced to a job description alone. She never once talked lovingly about a memory. She never described a lazy summer afternoon in a field, or a desperate winter’s night under the covers in a tiny apartment, huddling together for warmth, comfort and dreams for a better future. She never spoke about denying a kiss in the streets of a strange city from a man she loved deeply because she knew that tasting such unattainable sweetness would ruin her.

It wasn’t a sense of déjà vu, per se, but halfway through I had the sensation that I knew everything B would say before she said it. Everything was pure expression, loud, angry, in your face. Her thoughts felt hurried, and her vocabulary entirely ad hoc. The narrative was easy enough to follow and the point was clear from the get-go, but she spoke it with the intensity of a quarreling lover who is so angry with their partner that communication becomes revenge.

I was rendered both bored and horrified. B framed her anecdotes as a discussion with her mother about “Old Grey Women.” Weak hags, living only to torment their daughters, envious of all they had lost. Lonely, sad creatures reminiscing about when they could overpower men, taking out their self-loathing by slut-shaming their daughters. At once, curiously, blaming them for the self-fulfilling prophecy, and denouncing any negative connotation to being a “slut” in the first place. When she spoke in the voice of an elderly woman living in a nursing home, all she made her say was: “I wish I had fucked a fireman when I was 21.”

B displayed the deconstructed, dismembered bodies of the men she had called lovers in a loveless voice, for the same reason anyone displays beaten corpses to the public: to frighten, scare, and humiliate. She rubbed her mother’s nose in her sex life. Not out of a genuine desire to help her mother turn a new leaf, or to be accepted, or to find common ground. Only to hurt her.

Her overarching and many-times-restated conclusion was that she did not want to become a regretful crone like the “Old Grey Women.” The powers she had written this ode to celebrate—beauty, love, sex—were all secondary. The primary concern was not what she wanted to be, but what she would at all costs avoid becoming. “Like her mother.”