If.

There are times when I think about how things would have been different growing up if teachers and other adults had chosen to express that whole idea of kids “being inappropriate” (re: making sexual comments in class and stuff) as… like… a matter of appropriate boundaries between themselves as adults and us as kids, rather than as one of the Rules, the way “do your homework” is a rule and “be respectful of the teacher” is a rule.

I mean what if those adults had told me and other kids that it wasn’t that talking about sex was taboo, but rather that they just didn’t want to necessarily share those conversations with us (outside of formalized sex ed) and that if an adult DOES want to share lots of sex jokes with a kid and share sexual conversations with a kid, that we should regard that adult as suspicious.

What if they had actively encouraged us to judge and be critical of the way adults treated us, in case of an adult stepping over a line, and what if those boundaries were genuinely treated like something for our benefit rather than another excuse to control us and scold us and brand us “bad kids,” and what if “breaking” that “rule” about appropriate talk for the classroom was reframed as not yet having learned how to set good enough boundaries for ourselves and how to be more wary of what we share with people in a position of power over us, not for fear of wrath or deliberate punishment but because there are people we will meet who will try to exploit us.

Like what if the way adults acted towards us didn’t put the idea in other kids’ heads that sex was this edgy rule-breaking thing and that having any kind of boundaries about it ourselves meant we were goody-two-shoes stuck under an adult’s thumb.  What if not setting boundaries for yourself well enough wasn’t ever framed as “acting out.”

How would my life have been different then?  Can I even imagine that?

On abused consent

Hey guess what I’ve been thinking about again also.  Did you guess CSA rhetoric?  Because the answer is CSA rhetoric.

Consent as an Incomplete Metric for Morality

[tw: tangential to David-Bowie-is-a-pedophile discourse and blunt CSA talk in a linked post, w/ my input having a more specific focus on the concept of “consent” and what it means]

I think it’s interesting to see this conversation happen, not because any particular statement within it is especially insightful (although there’s some of that), but because I think it’s illustrative of complications in delineating what constitutes consent & the relationship between that and delineating what constitutes abuse.

sad child props for your righteous rage

Anyway #2, Queenie covered most of this kind of stuff already in her series, but really, to reiterate…  If you’re gonna do things like 1) postulate one monolithic narrative for recovery (or lack thereof) and spell doom as a blanket statement for other people, and 2) talk about CSA survivors as eternal children and ruined un-beings who can’t, like, live and become adults and be aware you’re talking about them in this weird infantalizing almost fetishistic way, and 3) dehumanize them while putting them on a pedestal as “angels” or whatever, and 4) describe sexual violence in a way that puts less emphasis on the meaning of violation and trauma and exploitation and more emphasis on the end “product” of a pitiable broken Thing, whose picturesque deficiency you paint in loving detail, practically salivating over a slew of hollow-shell imagery, then I’m going to see you as a threat.

And it’s going to seem a lot less like you care about what kind of support a diverse group of people actually needs and wants, and it’s going to seem a lot more like you care about using abused people as a pretty toy to wank to your own benevolence.

contrarian

Anyway… even though there are times when overt hostility just makes me avoidant (see: aces & sga being a contentious subject), it’s odd to me how (and this has happened with multiple things) I can have so much build-up of handwringing and identification anxiety and authenticity anxiety over whether my experiences fit under X umbrella & not wanting to shoehorn myself in where I don’t belong or hurt or mislead anyone more valid than me — and then see some clown spouting off on the subject and drop all equivocation on account of being personally enraged.

Thanks for the unintentional validation, I guess?

“innocence” and its dual meaning

[cw: CSA stuff, mostly about how it’s talked about]

A Love Letter

[CW for sexual violence, but this is a happy post, I promise.]

I feel fortunate to have gone through the channels I did.

When I came to the ace community, I sought out the places and the people who were making the most sense to me, and — although it wasn’t my priority at the time — that happened to bring me into an environment where people where challenging the idea of the Unassailable Asexual, arguing that asexuality doesn’t have to be “natural” or innate to be legitimate, and pointing out that saying “asexuals haven’t been sexually abused” is unfair to aces who have been sexually abused.  I just happened to find people who were vocal about these things.  And I’m fortunate to have been drawn into that atmosphere of support and inclusivity.  I’m fortunate to have been taught about the intracommunity issues and instilled with the right values and taught some of the ways to explicitly prioritize survivors.  I’m fortunate to have been immersed in that environment well enough to have been saying things like this…

…long before it even occurred to me that the ??? that happened to me as a kid technically fits some definitions of sexual violence.

When that dawned on me, I wondered if it meant I should reconsider how I conceptualize my sexuality and my bouts of sex aversion, but by then, I had already been assured and assured others that it didn’t have to matter.  I had already read about others processing the same challenges and invalidation and considered myself thoroughly on their side.

Even before I knew that that meant I was on my side, too.

This is a love letter to all the people who contributed to making that happen.

Thank you.