Wow. I'm 27 years old and have never experienced any of the shit you're talking about. I wonder if I should be happy or a little bit worried
Like I said, outsider to human sexuality. My only experiences of sexuality have been people (men and women; mostly men) forcing their affections on me. Mostly friends of my parents. Once you're a psychologically and socially impaired person, and it's obvious that you don't know what to do in life or how to act, all the people who want to be around you are people who want to take advantage of your ignorance and obliviousness. I basically had the kind of horrifically abusive and neglected childhood you see every few years in the newspaper. Except for having access to books and occasionally other people (although never long enough to form actual friendships), I would have been much more obviously feral.
I would probably have been a linguistic prodigy if I had had a normal childhood. I didn't. Until about the age of ten, I would be locked up, me and my brother, for hours. We'd go days or weeks without interacting with anyone else, not allowed to leave the house, not allowed to use the phone, afraid to leave the room for fear of being beaten. Food sometimes, if we could hide it away while my mom wasn't looking, or if my dad ever showed up. Could use the bathroom most of the time; sometimes we couldn't. I don't know if my dad knew my name; he called me by a nickname. I'm certain he didn't know the color of my eyes, or my favorite color, or anything else about me. He never once made eye contact with me, never had a conversation. The closest that we had to conversations would be being forced to sit still and listen to him ramble incoherently about vaguely religious or political topics.
Then sometimes my mom decided I should interact with others, and would throw me into situations where I was with other kids my age. Bowling leagues, tennis, softball, drama. But by then, I was so socially retarded that no one would talk to me or play with me, so I ended up spending the whole time alone in the corner or wandering off into the woods. As I got older, more and more of my time was spent in the woods. There was a forest behind my house, a government-owned wildlife reserve; I'd hide there from my mom when she'd go on one of her psychotic rage trances where she'd try to hurt or kill me.
All kinds of animals would come through the woods. Deer lived there year round; so did geese, ducks, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, herons, small fish, and foxes. Occasionally a larger predator would come through. There were reports of bears; one climbed into a neighbor's backyard and attacked her dog, but I never saw one. Once I did see a cougar. Beautiful, beautiful animal. It was sleeping on a rock. If I had to die by an animal, I would totally choose a cougar.
Sometimes during my teens, other kids about my age would move into the neighborhood, but invariably they started talking about sex or potential sex partners, and I lost interest in being friends with them, because I had nothing to say on the subject. I grew farther and farther apart with my brother, the only friend I'd had as a kid, for the same reason. When I learned he'd had sex with a 14 year old girl, I was disgusted and furious. I blamed myself for a long time, believing I had failed to raise him properly. As the older sibling, as his protector and his moral guide, I should have been there for him more, I should have made him a better person than that. My only consolation was that he vowed he would never allow my parents to become grandparents.
I fully expect a day will come when I will be asked to comment on his having being arrested as a serial killer/rapist. I don't even have emotions about it. I just am resigned to it, and when that day comes, I will point out that if anyone had stepped in to reduce the abuse we suffered as children, this would never have happened. If anyone had brought to light the fact that we were horrifically neglected, that I ended up being personally responsible for making sure he didn't die during his first years of life, that I had saved him from his attempt to throw himself off a balcony as a toddler while my parents stood down in the parking lot, that I had saved him from sticking his hand in a beehive just a few months later, and that a four year old should never have been left alone to babysit a toddler, if someone had said something, maybe this wouldn't have happened.
So when I got thrust into the world (when my parents threw me out on the street) in my late teens, I was a grownup with all the social skills of a feral child. I didn't know how to act around people. I either emotionally clung to them or feared them. I spent years trying to find replacement parents, someone to give me the love and support I'd always needed. I went from abusive relationship to abusive relationship. Didn't realize the problem was me, that I was such a broken and neurotic person that of course I couldn't get a person who wasn't either broken and neurotic or trying to take advantage of my being broken and neurotic.
Only in the last couple of months (at the age of 26) have I been able to start looking around at the shards that are my life, pick up the pieces, and try to forge a new person. A person who isn't owned, defined, submissive, cowering, neurotic. Trying to form a person who can talk to people, analyze things they say, judge their opinions on their own merits, make decisions, have the strength of character to stand up for myself, to think for myself, to figure out who I am for myself. It's really hard. And often pretty scary. But yeah. Fuck people who think they have the right to own me. And especially the ones who convinced me that that was their right.
Topic: Wali Info Sticky Notes/"Doing things properly"