will you feel uncomfortable with me for a moment, please? I want to talk about what I mean I say I was "groomed on the internet as a teenager".
I felt like experimenting with adults was safer, in the sense that they were safer from me than people my age. I'd been taught over and over again that I could hurt people with sexuality, that I was being punished to prevent me from becoming someone who would hurt people. I didn't want to hurt anyone.
I wanted it. I sought it out. I felt powerful and in-control, nobody tricked or forced me into doing anything. I can tell you a funny story about having a threesome when I was 18, the husband insisted that we wrestle and I choked him unconscious twice in five minutes. fully asleep and snoring, I put him in the recovery position and made small talk with his wife while we waited for him to wake up.
I'd been talking to both of them, and a bunch of other adults in that community, since I was 15. it was the only place that I felt desired, they treated me like a kid but didn't think less of me for it. I don't have an uncomplicated Law and Order: SVU episode plot to give you, I can only tell you that I felt bad for that guy after that. I didn't mean to humiliate him, he never did anything like that to me.
it took me many years into adulthood to understand that I was trading sexual access for social access. I don't even really think that was necessary, nobody asked me to do it, I just wanted to feel something besides shame. I didn't know that I could be valued for other reasons, yet. the adults in the room should not have let that happen, they failed me, but honestly? I think the adults in my house failed me a lot harder.
everyone fixates on the sex, but to me that has only ever been a symptom, not the problem. have you seen people jokingly refer to things like being 13 and emotionally supporting a 35 year old woman through her divorce on World of Warcraft? that's a symptom of the same problem and it was more harmful to me, personally, than any of the sex.
and yet we can joke about it, because it's not about sex. we don't use scary words like "groomed" and "molested" even though that's how grooming happens. why?
I found out, years later, that a girl I thought was in her early 20s was lying about her age so that she wouldn't be excluded. she was too scared to tell me that we were the same age, 16 at the time. we would talk for hours, watch movies, and she'd change in front of me sometimes. she specifically told me that she did that because she felt safe with me, I was so proud of myself. she was my age that whole time and I just didn't know, I spent years thinking of that as part of the grooming. and it was.
two decades later and I'm here, looking around at the hypersexuality of queer/transfem spaces (not inherently a bad thing) and wondering, "do you know that you don't have to do that to be loved?".
on a cultural level, we don't have anything approaching a good understanding of these dynamics, much less how to avoid harm. there will never be a simple answer.
we have to engage with the complexity, we have to learn to talk to each other about these things.
I can't wrap this up in a bow for you, I'm sorry. can you please feel uncomfortable?
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