Comedy Gold

Someday I’ll have a story about sexual harassment and molestation and assault. I’m not keeping it from you, ashamed or unsure – I do not understand it well enough to tell it sensibly. Some of it is extra old ¹Plus there’s a lot of Mother in the story, which will make people extra uncomfortable. But rending it consumable by others is step next, not step now. and all of it is resentfully repressed with decades of accumulation.

But I watch you not be able to tell your not-sex stories, even though I can see they sometimes press on you. I sense you testing around the edges of it, noting it in others but not quite able to share your own. So I could at least get my own story together, and do work like what I’m asking you for. Maybe it will let me help you with yours.

I don’t think mine presses quite the same buttons as yours. For example, mine is mostly seperate from my adult understanding of sex, because I built many of my defenses long before I had any sexual existence. So my current sex life is mostly unaffected, but obviously they’re not entirely unrelated. And I have impacts in other areas, like non-sexual touch and fashion and hiding.

Mother definitely had weird and hurtful interactions with me about my genitals, when she remembered or noticed they existed. She’s a narc so forgetting is the status quo, but it was a thing I had to protect myself from, to be sure she wasn’t triggered into… a thing that makes my mind blank. Something genital-related intended to hurt and humiliate me, presumably. I never let the “or else” happen anytime after I was old enough to understand what it might have been, so I’ll have to make myself flash back to it and try to make sense from this perspective. That should be loads of fun.

And lots of other bits. But let’s do this one at a time.

Here’s a whole set of examples of people knowing they aren’t allowed to have help, even in their closest relationships, often specifically because of their gender: https://youtu.be/EpuHtO6Zyqs

Here’s a long-form discussion of how the same cultural problem plays out in media: http://popculturedetective.agency/2019/sexual-assault-of-men-played-for-comedy

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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