Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Antwone Fisher, child sexual abuse, cortisol, crazy, foster parents
Yesterday I was in a crowded room while listening to a trauma expert speak. In her speech, she showed the movie “Antwone Fisher“, and there was a terrible scene of child abuse. I had already read the book years ago, but the movie’s scenes were horrific. I, of course, wanted to cry and gasp. But I was in a crowded room and I didn’t feel safe enough to emote, so I comported myself as though watching this terribleness meant nothing to me.
*** POSSIBLE TRIGGERS***
In the movie, we see Antwone’s foster mother beat him unconscious with a towel. The next scene is him in the navy. Some asshole is joking around with everyone, and he is obviously bothersome, but Antwone acts like he doesn’t even hear him. The guy comes right up to his face and says some shit to him. Antwone still acts like nothing is wrong. The guy gets a towel and snaps it around jokingly. Antwone punches him in the face.Â
The whole time I am watching, I am stone-faced, as if watching children get hurt means nothing to me. As if the hurting of me as a child has not formed everything that I am now.
The trauma expert stopped the movie there and said “Did you notice how Antwone didn’t react at all even though this guy was bothering him? Traumatized children generally have a hyper-startle response to things that the rest of us don’t even notice. This is because their cortisol levels have never been normalized and they always stay at high alert. However, noticeably reacting to things makes them vulnerable. So they become very very good at hiding their hyper-reactions to things.”
I almost started to cry then, right there in that room full of people. Because, of course, she was describing exactly what had just happened to me. If people see that I am reacting, they will know I have a personal connection to it. If they know that, they will know I was abused. And then they will think I am crazy for reacting like that to scenes that they can somehow callously watch without any reaction.  This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.Â
I am not crazy. I am abused.  And even if I weren’t, we should all be reacting terribly when we see people hurting kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: child sexual abuse, cuts, cutting, self injury
One summer when I was 20 and pretty suicidal, I went with my aunt and cousin to a local pool. We sat there with my aunt’s friends. I took my shirt and pants off, and sat there in my bathing suit. I had very recently cut my legs up, and there were angry red criss-crossed scabs all over my legs.  I was sitting right next to my aunt’s friend, and that woman stared at my legs pretty hard. I knew what she was looking at, and I felt uncomfortable. I am not sure if she understood what she was looking at, but I could tell she was uncomfortable too. No one said a fucking word. The whole thing was so surreal.
I often think about that day. How could all these people see my legs and not say one word to me? It’s kind of like with sex abuse – you know good and damn well that people suspected that shit was happening to us. But no one said a word.
This is the after-effect of surviving child sexual abuse. We cut ourselves and it shows on our legs when we are trying to just spend a day with family at the pool.  That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
I read celebrity gossip websites, and I love them. One that I have been reading for a long time is “Crazy Days and Nights”, and one of the reasons I like it so much is that the owner of the website always takes the right side in the war against child abuse. In a recent post, he wrote about Roman Polanski, and what a disgusting shithead he is for drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. In case you don’t know, Roman Polanski is a very famous director.
Some asshole made this comment about the 13 year old girl: “As for the victim, have any of you ever read her deposition, which, by the way, was obviously coached. She admits to having had sex before and being a drug user. I’m so sick of people acting like the girl was this pure little thing that Roman dragged off a playground swing.”Â
Okay, obviously the commenter is an asshole, but really what he is saying is something that most people are thinking. His line of shit is exactly why most of us don’t go public with our history of abuse. Somehow this person thinks that since a 13 year old girl has tried drugs and also had sex, then the fact that an adult raped her is somehow less valid than if she were a 13 year old girl who had never tried drugs or sex. For me, I don’t see the connection, but to this asswipe, there is one.
His thought process, that children who have tried drugs and sex are less of a victim than those who have not, is the reason that many juries do not convict child molestors. I have written before about this, but I’ll say it again. There is a need for people to believe that bad things only happen to bad people who deserve bad things to happen to them. I guess it comforts this idiot to believe that this 13 year old child was not innocent and thus ‘okay’ for rape. I know the truth and it keeps me awake at night: bad things happen to good people every day, and it just fucking sucks. 13 year old girls are raped by famous directors and they never get justice. He lives in his fucking chalet, and she lives with her nightmares and under-the-bed-and-in-the-closet-and-behind-the-door checks every night. She gets startled by noises and is always looking over her shoulder because of what he did to her, while he directs movies and makes shitloads of money.
A long time ago, I made a life rule for myself that I would never lie. I live by this rule. I do not lie. If I am unable to tell the truth in a particular situation (i.e., with my mother in law), I just do not speak at all. My thought process is that if I never ever lie, you will never have reason to doubt my words. Thus, if and when I go public with my history of abuse, you will never have cause to disbelieve me. You will know I am telling the truth because I have never told you a falsehood or lie of any kind.
See how I think? I am so sure that all of the shitheads in the world will not believe me, that I have formed my whole life around it. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alfred Kinsey, child sexual abuse, Harvard, susan clancy
A psychologist (Susan Clancy) has written a new book called “The Trauma Myth”, and the title alone should tell you how she feels about survivors of child sexual abuse. I am not linking to it, because I don’t need her getting any more sales off this book from my blog. Anyway, she argues that it is not the molestation that bothers us, it’s the fact that all the adults in our life and the media told us that getting molested was bad. See, we are stupid naive young children, and were it not for the fact that we were sent the message that it was wrong, afterwards, we’d all be okay with our bodies being used against our will, provided there was no violence involved.Â
This is yet another version of the rape myth, and Alfred Kinsey (the famed sex researcher) originally posed this shit about child sex abuse as well. I am using this blog to respectfully call this mindset a bunch of horseshit.Â
The problem with Susan Clancy’s (and Alfred Kinsey’s) logic is that it doesn’t take into account several things:
1) The child has negative feelings during the abuse.
2) The child tries to dissociate from the abuse by concentrating on something else, since she is entirely powerless to someone else using her body.
3) Many times, no one in the child’s life is denouncing the act afterwards, and instead they tell her to just shut the fuck up because it really isn’t so bad.
Harvard (of which Susan Clancy is a graduate) is constantly putting this kind of horseshit into the forefront, and because it’s Harvard, people are all “Wow, that’s so smart, I never thought of it that way.” They hold onto this shit because again, it is much easier to believe that kids aren’t so fucked up by abuse. And yet, I have now written 147 reasons that being a survivor has fucked me up, fucked my marriage up, fucked my life up. Harvard would argue it’s because I came to find out later that what happened to me was bad. I would argue that that is a bunch of horseshit, and that I was afraid from the moment it all started with the babysitter, and that I was never the same again. Everyone became a potential predator from the moment that babysitter touched me, and everyone in my family noticed the stark difference in me at the tender young age of less than five years old. This is, of course, why shouldn’t fuck kids.
It always comes down to the same shit. You either believe us or you don’t. You can’t say on one hand that child sexual abuse is bad, and then in the same book say that the effects of it are not as real as we think they are. You are either on the right side of this war or the wrong side, and this book, unfortunately, is going to be touted for years to come by people who want to believe that is is okay to fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: child sexual abuse, ex-girlfriend, Goo Goo Dolls, lesbian, the color purple
Have you ever seen the movie “The Color Purple”? The book is wonderful, and so is the movie. This woman, Celie, has her sister cruelly taken away from her by her shithead of a husband. When Celie confronts her husband about it, she says “She was the only somebody who loved me.”Â
We survivors of sexual abuse hold onto the littlest bits of love that you are willing to give us, and we treat these little bits as though they are mountains of gold. It kind of reminds me of a song lyric from a song by the Goo Goo dolls that says “And the least they ever gave you, was the most you ever knew”.
My ex-girlfriend got in touch with me recently. I was thrilled to hear from her, as it felt like she had fallen off the face of the earth. I had been searching for her for years, and it looks like she was searching for me too.
When I made the decision to get involved with her, I knew she was a survivor of incest and child sexual abuse, like me. I thought of us as two survivors who fell in love.  For a long time, it felt like she was the only somebody who loved me. I was wrong, but at the time I thought I was right. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter-child sexual abuse, brother-sister incest, child sexual abuse, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, father-daughter incest, Jane Seymour, Joe Lando, rape, Sully
I was watching this episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (on TiVo), where this guy raped a teenaged child, and murdered an elderly woman’s husband. They had a trial, and he was pronounced guilty, and it was decided that he would hang for it. All the townspeople got pretty excited about it, and pronounced “Ladies and Gents, we have ourselves a hangin’!”
My first thought was how beautiful it was that the whole town rallied around this girl to support her, and to support the death of her rapist. Can you imagine how much quicker all of us would heal if all of our friends and neighbors supported us and believed us like this? In real life, children are raped every day, and whole towns of people call us liars or whores. Â
I thought about the public hanging option, and I thought about it in terms of my three abusers.Â
I thought about my brother. He was a child when he started molesting me. If I was somewhere between 6 and 8, that would have made him somewhere between 8 and 10. Should he hang for what he did? I mean, he said he was sorry and I believe he truly is. No, better not to hang him.Â
Then I thought about my father. He’ll never be able to admit what he’s done. But we are healing. Or at least we are trying to. I don’t particularly want him hung either.Â
Then I thought about the babysitter, whose hurts against me are so bad I couldn’t even type “my babysitter”, lest she be even more intricately involved with me than she already was. She needs to be “the” babysitter, not “mine”. My immediate thought, filled with revenge and hatred was “Fuck yes, hang her”. But the truth is, I don’t know her well enough to pronounce this declaration of death on her yet. Who is she? Were we the only ones? Did she fuck other children before/after us? Is she still raping children? Has she turned her life around, asked forgiveness, done healing work with those she has wronged? I want to believe yes. Maybe she was just a scared confused teen whose father or stepfather or whoever was fucking her. Most probably this is the case. Still though, it is quite a decision to go from victim to victimizer, no?
And these are all the thoughts I have running through my head as tears seep from my eyes while watching an episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman on TiVo. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter, brother-sister incest, child sexual abuse, Precious, repressed memory
Have you guys seen the movie Precious? (SPOILER ALERT)
It’s about a child whose stepfather rapes her repeatedly. And her mother lets this happen.
My mom took my brother (one of my three molesters) to this movie. It was actually my brother’s choice, to be honest. Just to be clear – my brother apologized to me years ago about the sexual abuse, and I have long since forgiven him. He was just a child when he molested me, and I now understand that he was just doing what the babysitter had done to us. However, be clear that forgiving does not mean forgetting. I am not mad at him anymore, but I am still afraid of the kind of person that he was/is.
Anyway though, Mom said that after the movie, both of them were very upset. My brother was upset because of what he did to me, and Mom was upset about hiring that babysitter. I said “Mom, you are not guilty here. You did nothing wrong. You hired a babysitter, and everything in your previous experience with all other babysitters told you that hiring babysitters was a safe action. This particular one was not safe, and you didn’t know that. You are judging yourself for knowledge that you have now, but you didn’t have that knowledge then. If you want to blame someone, blame HER. She wronged us, not you.”
I, of course, am still in this horrible place where I have exactly no memory of this babysitter. All I have are these fears that have plagued me since she came into our lives, and my mother’s and brother’s memory of the events. The funny thing is, apparently about a year after she molested us, after we had moved out of the area, I told my mom “I saw licking the babysitter.” So, apparently at some point I did have conscious memory of it, but no matter how hard I try now to remember it, I cannot. I wish I could, so I didn’t have to be afraid all the time.
My mom and brother saw a movie. An innocent action that brought up a lot of shit. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blowjob guy, child sexual abuse, hillbilly, incest, therapist
When I was in therapy (at 19 years old, for wanting to kill myself), I told my therapist that I didn’t like it when people made incest jokes. She had no idea what I was talking about. She said “Who makes incest jokes?” I am now realizing that maybe if you are not a child sexual abuse survivor or incest survivor, maybe you wouldn’t be sensitive to this shit the way I am, so maybe she didn’t realize how we as a culture like to downplay and make fun of incest.
When I was dating blowjob guy, he told me a story about how he knew some guy whose daughter was now a teenager and wore bikinis. The guy made some joke to blowjob guy about how he had to control himself around his daughter because he found her attractive. Blowjob guy laughed while he was telling me this. As someone whose father did not ‘control himself’ around me, I didn’t think it was funny.
Last night, the huz and I went to a dinner theater event. We’d been planning it for a few weeks, we never go out and do fun things (because we have a baby), and we were really looking forward to it. The play was about hillbillies (seriously, the title had hillbillies in the name). Within the first few seconds, they started incest jokes about dad having sex with daughters, and all other family members fucking each other too.
We planned a night out, for fun. And here I am, yet again, an incest survivor, supposed to laugh and act like none of this shit is personally hurtful to me. I am unable to find the humor in child sexual abuse and incest. I was pretty pissed that we paid $70 to basically hear jokes made about the most hurtful part of my life. And yet again, a perfectly innocent night out to try and relax and enjoy life becomes a reason you shouldn’t fuck kids.
If a veteran came home from war, and we joked about the fact that he had to kill people or see his friends’ heads blown off, no one would think that is okay. Yet all of us fucked kids are subjected to these disgusting jokes that make light of not only our suffering, but also the events that caused our suffering. It’s not right, and I am ashamed that I gave my money to this dinner theater event.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: child sexual abuse, consensual incest, father-daughter incest, Mackenzie Phillips, the mamas and the papas
I am sure that by now my survivor readers have heard about the Mackenzie Phillips case – her father was a member of the musical group, the Mamas and Papas, and also a shithead disgusting pervert incester.
She calls it “consensual incest”, and in my mind, there is no such thing. Here’s the thing: there is always a power differential between parents and their children, no matter how ‘grown’ the children are. We always revert back to our original roles with our parents. They always have parental power over us. Even if she walked naked to her dad and said “Fuck me now”, (which by the way, she did not), any normal father would have said “Mackenzie, no. I will never have sex with you. I am your father. I will protect you, and I am going to help you find counseling.”
Like many incest survivors, she feels somewhat responsible for this incest that happened to her. (I would call it rape, by the way. But I am using her word, incest.) She is not responsible. What kind of disgusting pervert fucks his own daughter? The kind that would also somehow help her to understand that this was all somehow her own doing, as if he was some sort of innocent bystander in a seduction game. I mean, seriously, come on. They’ve been pulling this sort of shit since Freud. This is how the abusers work – first they call you a liar, and then when they realize no one’s buying that story, they say “She wanted it.” I mean, seriously, how do people keep falling for this shit over and over again.
This perv is dead, and as usual, there is a debate as to whether she is telling the truth, whether she wanted it, etc. People need to think that all rape is violent. I mean, it’s just so stupid. When people fuck kids, it generally doesn’t start out violent. And sometimes it’s never violent. Fathers who fuck their daughters already have all the power, and you see what happens when daughters tell the truth – a whole world is ready to condemn her, ready to call her a liar or a seductress. She herself is the first one calling herself these names. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids. We’re not liars, and we didn’t seduce you. You know what you did, and we know what you did, and soon the whole world will know what you did, just like Mackenzie Phillips.
I stand behind her, and I am proud of her for telling the world. When one of us goes public, we save many.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: child sexual abuse, Jaycie Lee Dugard, Leavenworth, public health issue
I can’t help but be entranced by the Jaycie Lee Dugard case on tv. Look at what happened there. This asshole kidnapped and raped some woman in the 1970’s, was sent to Leavenworth, was freed after 10 years, and then he kidnapped and raped Jaycie Lee.
If people would start conceptualizing child sexual abuse as a public health issue, maybe this wouldn’t happen. Think about it. If this shithead was in jail where he belonged, or dead, frankly, then he wouldn’t have been free to kidnap a child and rape her into having two children.
From a public health standpoint, child sexual abuse is bad for society. All the work that is lost, the productivity, the sick time – it is shown in studies that survivors of abuse tend to get sick more and miss work more than our un-fucked counterparts. Most of the time I don’t want to leave my fucking house because I am so afraid of what’s out there. It takes an enormous amount of self-talk to get out the door every day.
I am one of the lucky ones, for now. I am not in a mental institution yet, and I haven’t killed myself. Other survivors are not as lucky. It’s a public health issue.
Reasons You Shouldn't Fuck Kids 