I don’t normally comment in pit threads, but if you guys’ll go back and read the OP, you’ll see that she said she isn’t always afraid of sex, that she does occasionally get horny and enjoys sex at those times without a PTSD reaction, but that this is not usually the case. I can see where some might read some inconsistency into the two threads, but really, folks, can’t we just once take things at face value?
Ok, I have never been abused. I can’t relate to it, and I can’t understand it though I feel a great deal of empathy for victims. In other words, I sure as hell can’t speak for olives.
BUT, though her post made me also raise an eyebrow, I think I get it. The question was about when we each received The Talk, which olives answered – getting The Talk and receiving or finding information about sex is different from being molested. For me, the key part of her post was this:
Bolding mine. That’s a very different statement than to say she’s balanced, rational and positive on a personal level. This speaks to the therapy she’s gone through and the hard work she’s put in to her understanding of sex. She’s got a great attitude about the idea of it, but still struggles with the personal act of it.
And she’s pointed out in this thread, more than once, that there are times when she wants sex and enjoys it. Moreover, that it’s easier to be sexual with someone who’s less familiar – where the emotional risks are less – than with someone she loves and trusts. It was easy with her first real partner at 18 because she both wanted it and wasn’t emotionally at his mercy.
Anyway. I think it all adds up just fine.
Diogenes is displaying what I have observed to be a typically male behavior: he thinks he can “figure things out” according to what people say. I call this the Christean fallacy, after Agatha Christie, whose detectives always solved mysteries by constructing “psychological profiles” of people. It’s complete and utter crap–especially if the person doing the analyzing has a simple personality. I’ve had no end of problems in my current relationship because Mr. Big Stuff thinks that there is a fundamental “truth” about my previous relationship, which was with a rather unpleasant person we both know, and that he can find out the “truth,” and that when he quizzes me about what “really” happened, I “contradict” myself. No, darling, I’m not contradicting myself. I knew he was a jerk AND and was disappointed that he was a jerk. Big Stuff doesn’t get it.
Having said that,
Olives, you put this thread in the pit, and people are nasty in the pit, quite often to the people who start threads. Also, the Dope doesn’t have the same sunshine-and-kittens atmosphere that some other message boards do. If a Doper thinks you’re being dumb, the Doper will tell you. If the Doper thinks you’re lying, the Doper will say so. That’s what happened here. You don’t need to post such personal threads on public message boards, so I suggest that in the future you don’t, unless you’re fully prepared for the possible fallout. I was actually waiting for something like this to happen–your OP was destined to attract a lot of attention; if I was feeling nasty, I’d say it was attention-whoring. Learning to NOT post stuff just because it seems like a good idea at the time is a valuable message-board skill.
I never questioned the sincerity of this OP until I read that other post. This one didn’t set off any of my bullshit detectors. It looked pretty genuine to me. If anything, it’s actually the other post that seemed artificial, overly cheery and plastic (and a little creepy. Imagine an uncle telling his 13 year old niece about anal sex and showing her porn). Maybe TroubleAgain is right and the other post was a sanitized, “public” version of events, but I don’t think it’s outrageous that someone would see the two posts as incongruous enough to make somebody question what the truth was.
Oh woe! The world is always disappointing poor Sattua, in exactly the ways she expects it to.
:arm to brow, feinting away:
“typical male behaviour”? “I was actually waiting for something like this to happen”? Fuck off, you hag.
Oh, bullshit. I never said I had “figured anything out.” All I did was observe that two posts seemed more than a little incongruous. Since one of those posts involved seeking sympathy for a rather heavy subject, I don’t think it’s unfair to wonder about the sincerity when another post seems to contradict claims made in this one. I took her at her word on this thread until I saw the other post.
I see what you are saying, Diogenes…at first, it looked to me as though these two stories do not add up. Upon thinking about it, though, I think actually the story in the other thread may be additional inappropriate sexual exposure, which might have made everything worse for olives. It is indeed creepy for a 26-year-old to expose a 13-year-old to so much explicit sex talk, and the positive spin olives gives it is, I think, just that…spin.
By the way, I wasn’t the only one, or even the first one to raise an eyebrow at the other post.
Mouse_Maven you’ve got it.
Look. When I was being molested I didn’t understand it was sexual abuse. I understood that I hated it and viewed it as something I had to tolerate in order to still have a father (this was my fourth chance–my Mom’s fourth husband) and my mother told me if it ever happened again (me being molested) she would lose her mind. So I didn’t tell her and I didn’t think about it. I worshiped my Dad. I thought there was a possibility that what he was doing was my fault and that if I told anyone not only would my mother go crazy but he would stop loving me. I LOVED HIM! He protected me from her, she was batshit insane, my mother used to punch holes in my wall and break windows and threaten to jump out of moving vehichles and attack sofas with butcher knives and threaten to kill me. He kept telling me he wished he was married to me and not to her. She treated me like The Other Woman. When I went out in public with my father, people thought we were a couple. I did not understand this was wrong. I thought it was my fault. I thought there was something bad about me. I only allowed myself to think about it when he wasn’t around–and then, only briefly before I stuffed it back down under. When it was happening I imagined he was probably going to drive me off into a ditch and kill me afterward. I was terrified of him when it was happening, but I adored him when it was not. He started off with words, telling me things like he wished he was married to me and not my Mom. Once when he was trying to report my Mom to social services for threatening to kill me he told me we would have to be more like husband and wife than father and daughter if I lived with him (He was my legal guardian, he adopted me shortly after their marriage.)
It wasn’t until I was barely 17 and my parents moved elsewhere (and left me to finish high school in our original home) that I really ‘‘got it.’’ I ‘‘got it’’ because he molested me in a new location, in a new home, and I wasn’t living with him and he wasn’t protecting me from anything anymore. The reason I know the last time it happened was when I was 17 is because it happened in their new home and I was very sick and remember that incident well. I remember almost telling my best friend but being afraid he would call the police and it would rip my entire family apart.
My only escape was my Aunt (and religion.) I became extremely religious in an agnostic family in the 6th grade. I was obsessed with the idea of sexual purity (personally) and even thought masturbation was a sin (I’d had a nightmare about my Dad that put me off masturbation when I was 12.) My Aunt was very sexually liberal. She took care of me. I was able to address issues of sexuality on what for me felt a safe level because I wasn’t having sex and didn’t intend to have sex until I was married. I asked her questions about sex. At this time I in know way perceived myself to be a ‘‘sexual abuse victim.’’ I did not have a name or a conscious context for what was going on. It was just this horrible thing I had to put up with in order to have a father.
After I ran away from home at 17 and went to live with my Aunt, I was filled with nothing but rage and rebellion and lonliness. I became an atheist. I dated a man who was 27 years old and recently divorced–lasted three days because he kept pressuring me for sex. I told him I didn’t want it and told him I had a trauma history but he wouldn’t let it go. Then I met a guy at work, who was only 16 and really sweet. We started dating. He was hot. I experienced, for the first time in my life, actual lust. At first things were great and I credit that to my aunt, who prepared me. After about a month passed, I began to feel horrible after we had sex. I didn’t really understand that this was connected to my past. I was only in the very beginning of coping with my past, and still working full time and trying to finish school.
Generally speaking, my Aunt has instilled in me a very positive view of sexuality on, as i said, a macro/social level. I am very liberal about what I consider sexually acceptable and have a very positive view about the way sex should be, objectively. I have no sexual hangups when it comes to other peoples’ sex lives. I think sex has the potential to be all things to all people. I resent the villification of sexuality in my own society. Can you accept that?
A small part of the time I am able to integrate this macro/social idealism into my own sex life. The first time I had oral sex, I was surprised as anyone how much I enjoyed it and how confident I felt. I’ve only had 2 voluntary sexual partners in the course of my life, and I’ve only ever had intercourse with my husband, so I can’t extrapolate beyond these two people, but I suspect if I were the sort of person who found one-night stands appealing I would be able to handle them with no problem. I can be quite kinky and lusty when the right mood strikes, when I am in completely control. I credit this, again, to my Aunt’s influence.
The difficulty comes with love and with trust. When I feel safe and domesticated with someone, I have a much harder time wanting to have sex with them because I felt safe and domesticated with my Dad and he betrayed that trust and used it against me.
Again, my only real experience with true domestication with a partner is with my husband. He is my second sexual partner and, incidentally, my second boyfriend (unless you count junior high or anything lasting less than one week.) The minute things became serious with us is the minute we began to have these problems, and they have gotten worse as my love and trust for him as grown.
No, it doesn’t make any fucking sense to me either. I don’t understand why when I initiate sex, which is rare (once a month), I’m a fucking sex goddess but whenever he approaches me I want to go hide under the kitchen sink.
The night immediately preceding that sex-positive post, my husband and I had sex therapy and for the first time in probably three years HE initiated sex with ME. My initial response was to curl up in a ball and cry and feel betrayed, but using some stuff we’ve been working on I was able to recognize that this was just the PTSD talking. So I said, ‘‘Okay, we can try. But I’m afraid. You have to let me stop if we have to stop.’’ And it was fucking hard. There were times I wanted to quit. But we did it, and overall it was a lovely experience. And it gave me so much hope because it’s been years since I’ve been able to trump that initial fear with my desire to enjoy sex.
So the next day I wrote a sex-positive post. What you didn’t see was that in that post I almost wrote (my PTSD not-withstanding) under the ‘‘balanced, rational, positive’’ comment along with an explanation about how my Aunt through her sex-positive messages has given me hope for what our sex life can be if we work at it, because I have a strong positive base fighting against the negative experiences of sexual abuse.
The reason I didn’t write that is because I didn’t want to be the annoying girl dragging my past into every post. And because I was feeling positive and felt it unnecessary to insert the negative.
Believe me, I WANT to be making this up… it destroyed my family. But unfortunately, I’m not. If you can’t respect that there are two sides to every story, I really don’t know what to say to you.
Diogenes, I’m not going to jump on you for saying the two posts seem incongruous. They do, you’re absolutely right. But I want to add my voice to the formerly-abused list and say that, yes, often times we’re completely ambivalent about sex. “Ambivalent” in the “having strong feelings both ways” meaning, not the common misuse to mean “uninterested.”
I’ve had times in my life where I was having panic attacks when my boyfriend kissed me, only to go out the next day and give a lecture on female reproductive health and sexuality. I was both a performer in bondage shows and a fantastic liberated sexual being and a frigid emotional basketcase. I both praise my mother for being a great teacher and introducing sexual information early and appropriately, and curse her for making my abuse possible.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that one of the most damaging parts of childhood sexual abuse is this double life, schizophrenic thing that it does to you around sex. If I just hated sex, I wouldn’t have gotten married. It’d be easy to avoid. If I loved sex, there wouldn’t be a problem. The problem arises because it’s not consistent, even in my own head.
If anything, the incongruities serve to further my conviction that olivesmarch4th is being totally honest. It’s the sort of detail that a pretender wouldn’t be likely to get right.
You could have said this the first time instead of giving me the “how dare you” speech. If you read both of those posts back to back without knowing who wrote them, would you think they were written by the same person? It’s funny that i was accused of “psychological profiling” earlier on because I was not trying to clinically analyze the psychology of the poster and just taking the claims of each post at face value.
Like I said before, the stuff you say about the abuse actually sounds more sincere to me than the other other post, but come on, was it really so outrageous that someone might think these posts were contradictory?
(I’m not sure your aunt was such a great person, by the way. Aunts and uncles don’t normally engage their young nieces and nephews in exetended, explicit discussions of variant sex and show them porn. Compared to the rest of your life, though, I can see why it wouldn’t have struck you as inappropriate at the time).
I don’t like that line of reasoning because it relies on a projection of subjective criteria. A person cannot exhaustively cover every conceivable nuance or explain everything in advance of what someone else might zoom in on. In our streams of consciousness, it is easy to skip ahead of ourselves or presume as granted that which others will end up wondering about. I like to cut people slack when they have to clarify because it happens to everybody. It’s just that it tends to bother people more when someone else does it than when they do themselves.
Please try to understand that the ‘‘How dare you speech’’ was triggered by an extremely painful history of being consistently criticized and analyzed by family members for inconsistency in my story. At the time I wrote the ‘‘sex positive’’ post it occurred to me someone might want to know how both can be true at once, but not that I would be accused of lying. That this happened came as a shock. I remember reading that thread about some kid’s romance story that was attacked as sounding ‘‘too perfect’’ and remember being afraid that if I eventually came out with my history on this board something like that could happen down the road to ME.
At the time I wrote the sex-positive post, I wondered if I should mention PTSD, but thought it would be arrogant to assume people would remember this thread and maybe they could just take my statement at face-value as a ‘‘normal human being.’’ It’s hard not being normal. I can crack dirty jokes with the best of them but underneath I have a very confusing sexual identity, which contains some very real positivity but also fear and self-loathing and trust issues.
I understand people think the thing with my Aunt was weird. It’s not like people were jerking off around me, they were just conversations and she was just answering my questions. She had pictures of naked guys around her bedroom but she would cover up the naughty bits for when I came over. Once I started getting older she became less careful about the things she said–she kept me shielded until I was 13 from all things sexual, and once I was 13 was willing to do things like play Madonna’s ‘‘Erotica’’ album in the car while I was there.
It’s not entirely accurate that the gay porn was her idea. When I was 16 she had a gay porn magazine and while we were having a party at her house. My high school friends were at the party, teasing me for being such a prude. One of them jumped me when I came out of the bathroom and screamed, ‘‘LOOK! IT’S A PENIS!!!’’ while waving it in my face. At first I screamed and turned away… then I grabbed it and said, ‘‘Wait, lemme see that again…’’ I wanted to know what they looked like when they weren’t erect so she busted out Madonna’s ‘‘SEX’’ book to show me. Her intent was educational, not sexual. I realize her education was rather unconventional, but it’s a positive force in my life and my sexuality, perhaps the only positive force I have… so I’d appreciate at least the consideration that this was something healthy and not creepy.
If people still feel it was inappropriate, I can’t say I’m surprised… a lot of people do. But I love her and she is one of the few persons in this family who has loved me unconditionally, who took me into her home when I had nowhere else to go and who helped me so much in getting through these painful years. I think of her influence as 100% positive and I probably always will.
It’s one of the dirty little secrets of sex abuse that sometimes the things that happen to a molested child feel good physically. Yes, on a psychic and emotional level the abuse is horrifying, but on the purely physical level the nerve endings DO respond and there is response, which exacerbates the guilt and shame of the experience and increases the disconnect inherent in the situation.
One of the hallmarks of the sexually abused child is a hypersexuality that’s inappropriate to the age level of the child. The girl who molested my daughter had been molested herself and was acting out and trying to work through her powerlessness and her dichotomous reactions to the experience by putting herself into the abuser role in order to understand what had happened to her. She never got therapy, and I’ll bet she’s a basket case these days. My daughter had many of the same reactions, but since she DID get therapy she was aware that these impulses might surface and she had the knowledge of how to process them without being a victimizer in her turn. She’s a healthy woman with a positive attitude toward sex these days, but she also has that early experience in sexual activity that does color her knowledge and her responses. She’s pretty upfront about sex and she understands that it’s a deep subject with very few cut and dried, simple explanations for even the most “normal” and vanilla drives let alone the knotted and complicated drives that sexual abuse victims can end up with. It makes her very comfortable to talk to because she doesn’t shock easily–actually, it’s pretty impossible to rock her at all.
I find it very understandable that olives could react to her victimization by trying to face it down and take the upper hand in a sexual situation. I can also see how that would have been a liberating experience and give a starting point toward regaining sexual health. I’ve seen sex abuse victims who became incredibly promiscuous and indiscriminate, some of them are the most amazingly orgasmically competent women you’ll ever see–but it doesn’t mean they’re happy or balanced in their sex lives, it just means their damage took a different aspect.
Olives appears to be trying to get control of her fears and traumas within the bounds of a loving, consensual relationship and I think she and her husband have a good shot at making it work. I’ll make the wager that there will be pendulum swings of some fairly extreme proportions in their future sex life as she finds her balance point and relearns and integrates her early sexual experiences with her adult ones. Some of it’s probably going to be a lot of fun for both of them, and unfortunately a lot of it’s going to suck, but not in the good way. I fully expect that thought experiments, roleplaying scenarios and venting on this board will be a part of the process and that some of it no doubt will seem incongruous to anyone who hasn’t been through a process of this sort. However, olives also seems to be an intelligent and articulate young woman who appears quite capable of not only defending her position, but also in using the insights derived from doing so to further her own progress. As long as the dialogue on this subject is as respectful and contained as it’s been so far I think it’ll be a positive experience for us all and a poster child case for fighting ignorance all around.
olivesmarch4th, I hope you understand that no-one here is keen to paint an abuse survivor as a liar, especially in the likely event that this will open wounds that are already only just healing over. On the other hand, it’s not likely that everyone will think “oh well, but no-one would lie over something as terrible as that”. Were your abuse story false (and I do not think it is), it would hardly be the worst instance of lying ever seen on the Dope; and from what I’ve seen in a few years here, liars get roasted in just such measure as the truly abused get support. It works out more or less fair in the end.
Then it was a really poor idea to post on a message board, and expect anything better.
My skills at this typical male fallacy have rewarded me with material and personal success. I think I am going to have to go ahead and keep doing it.
It sounds a lot less inappropriate when explained in context. That’s what I mean about the other post sounding more artificial. It sounded unrealistic in a way that this one doesn’t. My impression from the other post was that your aunt’s house was like a constantly running episode of Sex and the City with your aunt and her friends perpetually (and unrealistically) obsessed with never-ending conversations about sex which resulted in overly healthy and positive responses from you. I never would have called bullshit on this thread (by itself), but if I had seen the other one first, I would have thought it had some unbelievable or at least exaggerated elements to it. I guess that would be in keeping with what some people are saying about abuse victims, though.
olivesmarch4th, please be aware that in the past, we’ve had a few people make up shit like this, and try to trigger responses. Not saying you’re doing that, just that we tend to be a little skeptical and all.
Good luck to you.
FWIW, I am a compulsively honest person (okay, I lie to my dentist sometimes… but I feel guilty about it), even on message boards. I am aware that anonymity leads to antisocial behavior on message boards which is why I put up photos of myself and openly share identifying details. These truths have already torn apart my family… putting them out on a message board can cause no more damage than has already been done. And no amount of skepticism shown here can come close to the skepticism of the woman who sat there and watched it happen.
The problem with forums like SDMB is that it’s easy to present a very complex issue like sexuality in a number of different ways depending on mood and the specifics of the question being asked. I posted something positive in the ‘‘The Talk’’ thread because I was in a great mood and didn’t want to ruin it by adding shit about guilt and shame and everything else that comes with abuse. My sexuality and sexual identity has not been solely informed by being abused. It has been informed as well by books I read, people I went to high school with and, in a huge way, my loving Aunt. It’s not an ‘‘all or nothing’’ proposal though I may view it that way when making a given post–obviously I was in two very different frames of mind when writing each post. That doesn’t mean one of them is a lie, it means things aren’t always as simple or linear as we would expect them to be.
I shouldn’t have yelled at Diogenes for not intuitively understanding this. I haven’t been here that long and nobody here knows me in RL. There’s no reason for anybody here to intuitively understand the hell my life has been because of these abuse experiences, and how real they were. There are so many times I’ve wanted to be a liar because then I’d have a family again. But I’m not a liar and I’m not going to turn my back on the truth. I am not shelling out $15-100/week on sex therapy because I’m an attention whore. I did not spend 6 years in psychodynamic therapy learning to cope with this because I liked the attention. I know that I was sexually abused because I remember it and have always remembered. I tried for a long time to say the right thing to get people to take me seriously, but I’m done with that. If people don’t want to believe, they are not going to believe. Their opinions about what did or did not happen to me are irrelevant to the truth. I have people I trust who are supportive to me and always have been–my husband being the most notable. When I came out to my family about being sexually abused (against my will, I might add) I expected everyone to believe me because it was so… TRUE. But everything I said and did was cast into a suspicious light and to have that happen here is quite painful for the same reasons.
Regarding Sattua’s comment about not being able to handle the consequences… I wouldn’t have posted this thread if I couldn’t handle the consequences. I blew up at Diogenes but it took be about ten minutes to regain my calm and realize this was just a case of misrepresentation due to complexity and that no way in hell are people’s opinions on a message board going to undo all the work I have done over the years. So I can handle it quite well, I think. I’m not even shaking as I write this. I’ve come a long way, baby.
To be honest, I’m often quite puzzled about my dual sexuality identities and am working very hard to eliminate the negative one (or maybe I should integrate them, I don’t know…) Sexuality is confusing in the first place, when you add layers of sexual abuse and PTSD it gets even more confusing. I’ve spent many years analyzing every sexual experience I’ve ever had and understanding where it came from – why was I so hot for my first boyfriend at first? When I later began to feel used, was it because of the sexual abuse or just bad sex? Why when I initiate sex am I so confident and so vocal and love it so much? What is the difference in my mentality then vs. when I want to run and hide?
I don’t know. Psychoanalyzing it will make me insane. I’m just trying to deal with what is, right now. Which is: I am a very sexually liberal person with very positive attitudes about what sex is supposed to be. I am working very hard to make my personal and individual attitudes and experiences line up with my general ones. Now that we’re into the sex therapy, I have great hopes that this will happen.
So this reaction makes sense considering that. I understand some people lie and some people are trolls and some people make shit up for attention, but I don’t understand why they would do it.
I am officially not taking this personally anymore.