Until recently, I haven’t really been used to getting comments here, and I’m definitely not used to those of the dramatic kind.  So when I got a response at all to Reveling in My Sexuality, I was shocked.  When I read what it said, I sort of laughed it off and forgot about it.

My mama didn’t raise no fool.  I don’t look gift horses in the mouth and getting a response at all is a gift.  And when it comes to silly people, you ignore them and they go away.  Then you gots no drama.

Except…  Master and Cin read it and said they read the same thing I did.  And I just really needed to respond to the response.

Yes, it was worth coming out of hiding for.  Lol.  Truth be told, aside from totally panicking over M going back to work (His work schedule has kept Him home since Wednesday night), I’m doing pretty okay today.

Abs said:

Wow, that actually made me sad…you weren’t fingered as a kindergartener, you were molested. You didn’t know what was going on and that was wrong, whether you knew it or not. I wish the person who did that would have been persecuted*.

All in all, it’s a pretty innocuous statement.  I mean, the country’s falling all over themselves to prove to themselves and everyone else that we are not a nation of pedophiles.  That we do not condone the sick, twisted behavior that goes on in secret in some of our homes.  That places that have given up on destroying their child prostitution rings need our help and tutelage.

We have gone to such lengths as criminalizing five year olds experimenting with each other and being too intimate when they hug their teachers**.  We’re jailing eighteen year old boys for having sex with the girls they’ve been dating since they were fourteen simply because their girlfriends of four years are seventeen.  Offenders are no longer allowed to live their lives after serving their sentences.  States are making laws to make it impossible for them to live anywhere at all within their borders.

And I see some of you shaking your fists.  I see you agreeing with every word.

“They should be punished!” I hear you saying.  And “We have to protect our children!” And “Most of them re-offend!”

But they are punished.

In this country, you’re supposed to be able to serve your sentence, pay your debt, and then live a normal life.  They’re not supposed to be allowed to hold you based on what you might do.  In this country, we do not have thought police.  At least, we’re not supposed to.

And what incentive do we give these men to stay clean?  We show them there is no such thing as forgiveness and they will always be outcasts.  So why should they stay clean?

We don’t care what happened in their past to cause them to be the way they are (And usually, it’s at least as horrifying, if not more so, than what they do to their victims).  We’re not interested in helping them change.

No one will employ them, but they’re required to have jobs.  No one will give them a place to lay their heads at night, but they’re required to have an address.  They’ve got no money to buy food, but they have to eat to survive.  Their country hates them and makes sure they know it.  And their families don’t want them anymore.

If that’s not hopeless, I don’t know what is.  And I don’t wish that on any of the people who have attacked me in the past.

Let me tell you about Travis***, since Travis is who prompted your comment, Abs.

I don’t know if Travis had been held back so I don’t know exactly how old he was.  Here in the states, kids are usually fourteen or fifteen in ninth grade, so Travis could have been around that age.  I was five or six and ecstatic that an older boy was interested in hanging out with me.

He had a little sister my age.  We’ll call her Jamie.  And she was a little bitch.  We never played with her unless no one else was around.  But she was hardly ever outside, anyway, and none of us would  have dared venture inside their house.  Looking back, I suspect what was happening to her was far worse than the fingering I got from her brother.

Travis and Jamie lived in the single rundown house in our neighborhood.  Their parents owned five pit-bulls.  They were trained to be mean and kept in their backyard behind the privacy fence.  They also had a boy and girl cat that lived in the house and bred constantly.

No one knew their parents.  No one had even seen their parents.  Until I split Jamie’s lip the day she was beating all my friends with a dog chain, my parents hadn’t even spoken to their parents.

That was odd back then.  Back then, parents called other parents no matter what the event.  Sleepover, birthday party, study group, just hanging out… the parents were called.  But Travis and Jamie always said they didn’t have a phone.

Their cats were always having kittens and Jamie just loved kittens.  So their parents would feed the kittens to the pit-bulls and make her watch.  And when Travis was being particularly ornery, their father would bury the kittens to their heads in the yard and make Travis mow the lawn.  That’s not sensationalism.  I witnessed both.

They were both always filthy.  I don’t know if Travis just never learned hygiene or didn’t care or was too insane by that time to even notice.  But they were so dirty that, for a long time, we all thought they were Hispanic due to the color the dirt stains had turned their skin.

And they were always sporting new bruises.

But forget all that.  Forget how he was raised and what probably went on behind those doors.  Don’t worry about what may have been a learned behavior.

Let’s talk specifically about what bothers me about the comment.

I know you mean well, Abs.  Probably you or someone you know was molested, was pretty fucked up mentally and emotionally by the experience, and hearing someone so cavalierly discuss what you believe should be a horrifying experience really did make you sad.  But what you said makes it sound like I should be crying in my coffee over it every single day.  Like I should still be in therapy confessing my secrets.

I am not a victim.

Sure, Websters and society disagree.  But I shed my victim skin long before I met Master.  I’ve accepted all the fucked up shit that has happened to me, regardless of the how or why, and moved on.  And I honestly don’t view being diddled by a ninth grader whose parents were probably beating the ever-loving shit out of him and fucking his little sister as something worth feeling victimized over.

Being raped repeatedly (so often that I lost count) by my baby-daddy before I finally started hitting back?  Probably the stuff victimization’s made of.  Being raped by my fiance’s (different person) sick roommate when I was only there to help him get to and from the pharmacy?  Probably the stuff victimization’s made of.  Being diddled in kindergarten by a fucked up ninth grader?  Not so much.

But with all I’ve been through, I think I’m pretty well-adjusted.  The majority of my emotional and mental problems are chemical imbalances.  The rest have been attributed to the way I was treated by my parents, not the fact that I was fingered by a ninth grader when I was in kindergarten.

I know a woman who was molested by her grandfather when she was five or six and she’s accused at least one person a year of some form of abuse since.  Not because they’re actually abusing her or because she’s all fucked up in the head from that one incident.  But because she’s learned that accusing someone of abuse when she’s mad at them will make them go away.

She blames the lying on the rape.  She knows it’s wrong and will tell anyone who isn’t the police (or her accused) as much.  But she claims she’s justified because of what happened to her when she was a child.

She thinks that, because she was raped as a child, she’s allowed to ruin an innocent person’s life when she’s mad at them.  Like we all owe her something because of what happened to her.  Even those of us who didn’t know her then and/or don’t know her now.

She’s the only one who has ever been through what she’s gone through.  No one else has had to deal with it ever.  So she gets a pass on all the fucked up shit she does (and the wolf-crying is only a small part of the fucked up shit that she does).  She will tell you that herself if you ask her.

And she’s gotten out of being charged with perjury because she brought up what her grandfather did to her.

“Ohhhh!  You were molested?  Of course, you can’t possibly know that it’s wrong to lie to a judge at least once a year!”

I call bullshit.

I don’t want you to think I’m calling you out, Abs, or coming at you in a certain type of way, or that I’m even insulted by your comment.  You’re entitled to your opinion and I encourage everyone to express their opinions here.  I love to hear them.

I just read your comment as “You’re a victim!  Act like it!” and wanted to explain why I don’t.

I’m not sad about what happened to me.  I liked when he touched me.  I was still too naive to think it was “wrong”.  I hadn’t been taught enough about sex to see it as “bad”.  And “How to Raise a Street Smart Child” (the way my parents taught me to stay away from strangers) said bad touching feels bad.  His touches didn’t.

I refuse to go backwards.  I refuse to feel and act like a rape victim just because society has this ideal of how rape victims should feel and act.  Jumping at shadows, locking myself away, crying myself to sleep at night…  What good does that do me?  It just gives my attackers control over me.  And they don’t deserve that.

And of all my attackers, Travis was, by far, the least harmful.  He was gentle and caring.  The way a young boy might be with his first girlfriend.

I’m glad I never told on him.  I’m glad the only thing my father ever saw was Travis giving me a massage.  Because that boy had a rough enough life.  He was the one who needed saving.  Not me.

*I’m pretty sure Abs meant  “prosecuted”.
**I don’t remember how old the child was who got arrested for “bad-touching” his classmate or how old the one was that hugged his teacher “too intimately”.  But I could probably find some whisper of their stories buried in the muck that is our media if I tried.  The stories died almost as soon as they started.  There wasn’t enough of an outcry for blood, I suppose.
***The names have been changed to protect the innocent.