When I was a kid, we’d watch TV at dinner. Maybe it sounds like a harmless thing to do, but I don’t think it was. My mom would make a really nice dinner of chicken or fish or whatever, and we’d sit down to dive in. But then, someone would grab the remote and try to find something to watch. I think we’d discuss for a moment what we wanted to watch, and then we’d sit there, like zombies, eating and not talking, while staring at a screen. Not only that, but the TV was pretty high up on the wall, so I remember painfully craning my neck to watch the big black box. Lol it was literally back then a big black square box. Do you remember those?
I thought about it recently because I’m trying to trace where my decision to cam came from. What made me go online and spread my legs when most people can’t fathom doing such a thing? There’s a statistic that most women in sex work were abused in some way. Obviously watching TV at dinner wasn’t abuse… but I do blame a lot of my childhood on the way I view sex even today.
Let’s talk about that. What my view is/was on sex. I started masturbating when I was like 3 years old. It’s a thing, ya know? Little kids masturbating. I can’t remember too many details about it, but what I do remember is that I had this teddy bear that I used to hump. And from what I understand, little kids masturbating is for comfort. We’re so uncomfortable with what's happening in our home, that touching ourselves is a way to self-soothe.
My Mom was pretty shit to me growing up. I mean she did all the necessary things she needed to do- she fed me, bathed me, picked me up from school. But she screamed at me. A lot. And hit me sometimes. She’d slam my door open so hard there would be a hole in the wall from the doorknob. She’d take my computer items and smash them against the wall. She’d push me, scream in my face. She’d tell me she didn’t like me, that I was ungrateful and rotten and mean and bad. Every child reacts differently to this type of abuse. For me- I shut off. I disassociated. Because of this, there’s a lot I don’t remember. I really only have snippets of any of the abuse. Which is scary because there must have been so much more.
I try to make the connection of that time period to sex, and my therapist thinks that it must be partially because my body never felt like it was my own. It totally makes sense. Even now, when someone grabs me, or touches me, even in a way that doesn’t feel totally right, or in a way I didn’t consent to, I just kind of take it. I’ve since gotten better at saying: “stop”. But for years, I let it happen.
I let Henry Carr finger me aggressively and painfully in a bedroom at a party when I was 15 years old. I let a random dude in the back of a car shove his hands down my pants. I wanted to say something, but I froze. I let Tim Roman put his penis in my mouth in the backyard of a party, although I felt scared. I didn’t know I could say no. I didn’t know my body was mine.
To be seen I needed to be wanted. My mother never wanted me, therefore I was never seen. If someone wanted me, I was alive. I was a person within my body.
At my cousin’s Bat Mitzvah, I was 14 years old. I had a crush on one of the dancers. He must’ve been at least 22. I flirted with him. I lied to him that I had a boyfriend and that we had sex. I sent myself fake sexy text messages from my boyfriend and showed the dancer. See? I told him. My boyfriend wants to have sex with me right now. The 22 year old, who should’ve put a stop to it, indulged me and flirted right on back. He told me that he wanted to have sex with me, but that it wouldn’t work. Even then, I needed reassurance that I was wanted.
I was promiscuous as I got older. I didn’t actually have penetrative sex until I got a real boyfriend at 17, but before that, I let guys put their hands on my breasts and their fingers inside me. I let them put their penises in my hands and my mouth. It made me feel something, maybe alive. I used risky sex experiences for excitement, for a high. I’d hook up with other girls’ boyfriends, just to feel like I existed. I never made the connection that this was wrong. It was like something was missing inside of me.
My first boyfriend was my first love, my obsession. I would’ve done anything for him. We had sex and I used to bleed. It would hurt like hell, I had UTIs constantly. No one told me it was supposed to feel good. But I did all the things I was supposed to. I moaned, I rode him, I sucked him off until he came. I even got myself birth control from Planned Parenthood because I didn’t want to tell my mom I was having sex. She handled the whole thing so shittily. Instead of having a nice talk with me about having sex in a safe environment, she’d slam my door open and demand that I tell her if I was sexually active. I’d scream at her to get out until she finally left. When I got my first period she barely looked at me and handed me a box of tampons.
My first boyfriend ended up cheating on me with my best friend. At the time it was the most tragic thing that had ever happened to me. I was distraught. I cried so much I couldn’t breathe. I screamed at my “best friend” in a car, begging her to tell me how she could do this. I remember crawling into my bed and not seeing the light of day for as long as I could. He left a rose on my doorstep. I ended up never speaking to my friend again, but I was so in love with my boyfriend, I would beg him, even then, to still be with me, even though he was the one cheating. He didn’t want to be with me, he was sleeping with other women. I would hear things through the grapevine. I just loved him, I wasn’t rational.
At least I got that intense kind of love out of the way as a teen. I don’t know if I’ll ever have it again.
I finally got over him when I went off to college at a huge party school, to study something I more or less randomly chose. Looking back, I guess I was so scarred from my childhood that I just went kind of insane. I was ADHD undiagnosed for sure. My hyperactivity and inability to focus was at an all time high. I drank like a fish, I spoke in lectures, I skipped class, cheated on tests, hooked up with random boys. I remember the first guy I slept with in college. The sex actually felt good this time. He was visiting from another school and we had sex while my roommate slept in the bed next to us, pretending not to hear. It was the most fun sexual experience I’d ever had at the time. I think we spoke a little bit over the years, but not much. He then transferred to the school I was at, and got a girlfriend. Pretty sure he cheated on her with me maybe once or twice.
After that first sexual encounter in college, I just kept on having more and more sex. I was fucked up most of the time, too. I’d end up in random boys beds not remembering how I got there. Where were my friends protecting me? Making sure I came home? I had a group of friends and we no longer speak. They were party friends, friends I got drunk with. At the time I thought they were forever but we were toxic. We spoke about each other behind our backs, we didn’t take care of each other. It was all superficial.
I remember one night going to a guy’s apartment to drink a few beers and then waking up in my dorm with my contact lenses lodged in the back of my eye socket and my vagina hurting. He must’ve touched me, maybe even drugged me, I don’t remember. I can think of 10 instances like that. I remember watching at a party once as a girl I knew was half passed out with a group of guys behind a half closed door. They passed her around. I wanted to help, but the guys told me it was fine, and they closed the door. I can’t even imagine what they did to her.
I get jealous when people talk about their college experiences being positive. At the time, I’m sure I thought that I was having a blast. Living without parents, drinking and smoking and snorting things. I’d cut class with a guy I liked and go to his place and snort xanax and pass out on his couch. But it wasn’t fun. Was I making lifelong connections? Hell no. I didn’t have a boyfriend all 4 years that I was there. I remember a girl wanting to set me up with her friend, and I watched at a party as she tried to make it happen. The friend seemed into it as she told him. We made eye contact and smiled. Then he asked his other friend about me, checking if I was a good catch. I saw his friend mouth the word: “slut” to him. Referring to me, of course. My spirit was crushed. I was a slut.
It’s a label I got not only in college but also back in high school. There was a tradition in my high school called “the slut list”. It was something that came out when we had a pep rally, and the seniors would list all who they deemed sluts from the lower grades. I was on it, of course, labeled “the little slut”. I remember feeling numb about the whole thing, even as my friend who was on it completely flipped out and had her mom call the school. For some reason, I wore the label proudly. It meant guys liked me, that they saw me as worthy of touching. I was so disconnected from what it meant.
So I guess now it all makes sense, right? I go online and have 900 guys watch me “act like a slut”. Sometimes they even call me a slut, and it kind of turns me on. It all adds up. The label that held so much trauma for me for years has now been transferred into a sort of pleasure.
So that’s a bit of my childhood. An ex once reminded me that I had a bit of a rough childhood. And I guess it was rough. I never thought of it that way because I had everything I wanted on a surface level, but things deep inside my home were rotten, and scary, and broken. But to the rest of the world, we were a good, functional, perfect little family. It’s kind of like camming. To the users I’m a happy, sexual little pixie, but after a cam show, I lay there broken, empty, my tank out of gas. Lying to my family, struggling with relationships of all kinds. I guess we recreate our childhoods as adults. Is it something you do?
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