A running thread

 I started this post to talk about grooming and didn't even get there.

Because when I found out that my friend had died, it came up in conversation about it with another person that someone I had cut out of my life rather earlier had also passed away (of skin cancer of all things). I realized I'd cut out a large part of my formative social scene because of the hurt (and let's face it, harm) they'd done me over the years. I said something to the effect of "Lot of people who won't hear 'no' in that group". And it hit me; this is where it started. 

I loved the place I went on Tuesday nights to dance to a local band and talk about nerdy things. I felt seen for who I was, I felt supported, I felt attractive, I felt safe; all things that I did not feel at home nor at school. I finally found a place I could take some more tentative steps towards my own erotic fulfilment, and it was mostly with people my own age. But I also endured the advances of some much older men who I did not find attractive, while considering the advances of some men who I did.

We were all subject in myriad ways to the Five Geek Social Fallacies, spread over a community of a hundred or more people. These dynamics are toxic and harmful enough in small groups, but at that size the problem is exponentially worse.

There goes my brain, trying really hard not to think about this again. 

It starts simply enough with affectionate words from a man of the group. These are missing at home and so welcomed, and so is the chaste affectionate touch that follows. With some of them, it becomes less-chaste, but never outside the bounds of some group-understood propriety. You are underage, and you are safe. And because you're safe, you let them do things that maybe you wouldn't let other people do if you didn't know they were safe. A touch that lingers. Some inappropriate comment. You don't notice it slowly ramping up. You are exploring with other young people your age, and you interleave the humiliating and awkward things you do with people your age with the interactions with the older crowd. You're praised for being so "mature" and so in control of yourself. If you stand up for yourself, this approval is rescinded.

I gave up seeking my mom's approval in 2016. It is only now, some five years later, that I realize that the gap where I was trying so hard and not getting it, was a time that left me vulnerable.

I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager. But the simmering anxiety that was bent to someone's (or someones') selfish purpose led to the inability to say no that marked so much of the last twenty years of my life. I said yes to a lot of the things I wanted, and I said yes to things I didn't want, over and over and over again, because I thought it would make me a good person. That gap in the armor made me hyperaware and a people pleaser, which left me open to emotional abuse. I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager, but I was sexually assaulted, regularly, by an intimate partner for several years as a grown-ass adult. It's taken me so long to admit that that's what happened that it's a whole new form of embarrassment to have it out there in the open.

It made me popular (for a time) in a way that I'd never been popular among my peers in school. But more and more as I look back, that time was extremely bounded: between 18 and 23. The five years in which I could still be mistaken for underage; the years in which modeling requests came with a frequency that was annoying, but also rather flattering. The years when I was frequently asked to dance, winked at, pushed, prodded, hugged, fondled and groped.

I am thinking about this because I was thinking about the person I'd cut out of my life who'd died of skin cancer, and how in our shared high school theater classes (he was an upperclassman), he insisted on hugging me. Insisted. To the point that even when I didn't want to hug (when he started getting handsy and I started saying no), he made a joke of it with another guy in the department, and they made me their "hugging post". They hugged me while I stood defiantly stiff and glaring. They hugged me when I said no, laughing and high fiving each other. And then that guy who died of skin cancer wondered why I never wanted to speak to him, once it was made abundantly clear (a few years later when I was of age) what he wanted from me. 

Older men, this behavior is on you. It's not enough to say "sorry, you're jailbait". It is not enough to say "let's not date until you turn 18".  It is not okay to cultivate friendships with underage women on the chance that they might fuck you once they're legal. It's not okay to only withdraw, or threaten to withdraw, emotional support and friendship when they don't want to fuck you. This needs to be taught, along with the curriculum in consent that's now coming to the fore, to every man on reaching the age of 18.

I am now, twenty years later, still crippled with fear in the face of making new connections, because am afraid that I am valued only for sex, and I cannot believe that my desires would be accommodated. Let me say this again. I am nearly 40 and I am afraid to date because I am afraid that the people I form intimate connections with only care about fucking me and will not stop when I say no.

I am unpicking this thread from the weaving, bit by bit.