Mom and Dad…you might want to skip this bit. Maybe the whole book. Sorry again that I didn’t go to college for English like you wanted…
I went through my first dry spell very early on, right after I had identified “love.” This probably does not read as alarming because I was a child, but I refuse to believe that my sexual awakening did not occur until I was a sexually active teenager. By dry spell, I mean I did not identify love with anyone else for a period of about 7 years. Be it dry as I was from love, I became drenched in the fascination of my own body and maybe a few others. This irony is almost depressing.
I myself became Four.
My vagina and I have been great friends since about age 5 or 6. I learned what it was capable of feeling before I learned what it was, before I could comprehend basic human anatomy. In this respect, I have concluded that I am almost always driven by physicality before logic. Before I came to utilize my body for what it would eventually be taught to do, like dancing or playing soccer and identifying pain, my body was exposed to physical pleasure. The time frame of the discovery of my genitalia spreads across a few specific incidents, each of them as unique as you might imagine.
What initially awoke my sexual being, (because I believe it is a separate identity of mine) wasn’t human touch. It wasn’t even my own personal touch. When I was nearing six years old, I woke up one morning with my beloved, burly, hand-stitched Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal between my legs. In a half awake stupor, I acknowledged a warmth, a buzz like bees in the twitching of my soft inner thighs. Without conscious reasoning, I let my hips buzz back. I calculated, by subtle movements what kept that buzzing and what made it fizzle away. Without hesitation, I obeyed my body rather than my mind.
The dry spell was set in motion now, but I mean that in terms of other human stimulation. I had myself, and that was enough for a fairly long time. All I desired and thought about was bringing that buzz back. As I grew slightly older, I realized that this “buzzing” I referred to in my head was just how I recognized arousal. In talking about this to other people as I matured, I always felt slighted but somehow more empowered by the way my arousal controlled me. Everyone else’s interpretation was always less drastic than mine, as if they were able to not succumb to the feeling. For me, it was no longer limited to just a buzz in my thighs or a twinge in my cunt, but my entire body needed it. Once I was able to touch myself, my whole body became alive and seemed to work better. I am in my purest form when I feel that arousal. My head goes dizzy, I forget what to do with my mouth and my legs shake or tap. Once that is awakened in me, I cannot get back to rest.
I found myself looking at things with a sense of touch rather than my sight, and a desperate desire to feel. I turned to physical objects to make me feel that familiar sensation when I grew tired of my own hands. I would spend hours laying on my bedroom floor, dragging the soft bristles of paint brushes up and down my thighs. I humped every single stuffed animal in my house. I moved like a rotisserie chicken in the shower, rotating slowly to learn the way something beyond my control could interact with my skin. At my birthday party in kindergarten, one of my friends bought me a stuffed dog that was lifesize, slightly larger than I was at the time. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw it was that I couldn’t wait to get home and feel that faux fur rub all over my body. No, I know, that’s distorted, right? It’s fucked up, isn’t it? I bet you’re thinking it’s fucked up. You’re also thinking why the fuck you chose to read this.
You might be wondering by this point where these ideas came from, and how they finagled their way into my child brain. How the hell did I even understand what sex and masturbation was before I finished the first grade? For that, I can only blame illegal file sharing, pornography, and the internet chatrooms our parents tried to keep us out of. Unfortunately, my lustrous desires did not keep me safe from the dangerous things my parents feared. As a millennial born in 1993, the Internet just simply was what it was for me as a kid. I was introduced to it at such a young age that it doesn’t seem abnormal in the slightest that it became a part of my everyday life.
I remember a time in which dial-up was still necessary to access the internet. I’m not quite sure how, but I managed to always spend my time on the internet in chat rooms. These chat rooms are where I was able to converse about the things I had only imagined on my own. I talked to what were most likely actually old men who would ask my a/s/l, what I was wearing, and other things I didn’t find creepy but strangely intriguing. Looking back on this, I really wish my parents restricted my screen time.
Where I realize that this sounds a lot like a desire for attention, I have argued within myself that attention and importance become two different entities for me. When someone gives me attention, that does not deem me important or special. What makes me special is that I could stir something in someone else, I could give them exactly what they wanted while still satisfying myself first. I won’t say this wasn’t selfish, because as far back as I can recall I have always possessed narcissism. I poured it over my cereal every morning. It made the rest of the world digestible.
I quickly learned how to lie in order to please someone else. I was seven or eight years old, telling a stranger online that yes, I was horny and yes, I will put a cucumber inside me, when all I did was sit there and read the words we typed. I don’t know what the appeal was but I could not resist talking to people. I think I possessed such a strong desire to learn about sex because I didn’t quite know what it was just yet. All I did know was what my body could feel, and intertwining someone else into that picture was a thought that drove me crazy with eagerness. It grew to be a sense of importance, knowing that I could say a few words and have someone respond that they felt turned on or horny. It was bewitching and nothing else had sparked such excitement in me before.
Within the same year (around age 8 or 9), I unearthed the excellence that is pornography. This, however, I did not do alone. The first time was a genuine accident, and I have never been one to use accidents as an excuse. My neighbors and I were in my basement, illegally downloading music. Both my brothers and I used this site to download songs, but there were also videos. When I clicked on the downloaded video section, I wrongly assumed we were stumbling into a folder of popular music videos that my brother had already downloaded.
“Oh, click that one! It says Britney.” My neighborhood girl friend #1 exclaimed.
I abided, all of us under the impression that we were about to open a Britney Spears music video. I hope you’re catching on by now and can already guess that we were astonishingly wrong. They may have been disappointed, but I was not.
What immediately opened and began playing showed a girl and a guy sitting on a park bench. She was moving around in her seat with a curious look on her face. It was a look I had never before seen. She knew I was watching, somehow. She slid up her skirt to reveal that she was (surprise) not wearing any underwear and was ready to show what I had somehow already known to be a vagina. Next thing we see is the two having sex in broad daylight, in the middle of a park.
I still can feel tingling in my forehead when I think about it. I was transfixed, watching this act materialize in front of me. It was almost as if I had imagined what sex looked like but the vision of it inside of my head was fogged and I could finally see it clearly.
I swear that video played every time I closed my damn eyes. It burned forever into my retinas and began a permanent aching between my own legs. We all watched the computer screen without speaking, my chest pounding. I forgot there were three other people standing behind me. I wish I had been alone. But from this moment on, sex became something completely solitary to me and when I was absorbed in it, the rest of the world around me began to dissolve.
After this event transpired, my friends and I started looking for these videos and pictures sometimes when we were together. This hobby we developed was entertaining and sometimes funny for us, but we eventually knew what we were doing was wrong in some way. One of us would just mutter the question of if we should look for “the stuff” again, or watch “those videos.” Despite however much guilt or confusion we might have been feeling internally, none of us verbalized it. We found pictures, we downloaded videos, all buzzing with intrigue. Some of these videos were cartoon trees with massive dicks, fucking girls that looked like flowers. This discovery of cartoon pornography eventually leads to a problem in which every time I watch cartoons on tv, I start getting horny. To date, I’ve never even told my therapist this and I just don’t know if there will ever be a right time to explore that.
I then took to this search with an obsessive desire, alone. This continued for years but there was never a long lasting satisfaction. There was always new information, new words, new pictures and ways to understand. I found online forums and stories talking about sex and all of its inner workings. I found the word masturbation and realized I had already jumped the gun. I felt surges of power, knowing I had already done something that my friends and strangers on the internet were just beginning to question. Growing up as the youngest of both my siblings and friends, I finally had something that gave me the upper hand.
Where there is intrigue, there soon follows the potential for an unhealthy obsession. My compulsion to touch myself became unbearable. Throughout elementary school and middle school, I would wake up some mornings, so painfully focused on sex and the idea of masturbating that I pulled my strings, faked sick from school and did what I did the entire day. My sexual being originated as a selfish lover, and I have no reason to believe much has changed. Even when watching porn or fantasizing in my head, the focus was always on my own body and my pleasure. Granted, I did not physically learn how to please someone else for years to come. That being said, I was a ravished dog always waiting to be fed and a full bowl was never enough.
