Between the ages of 11 and 15 I had been sexually touched by adult men on 5 separate occasions. These men, chronologically were a Doctor (age 11), Preacher (age 12), Preacher again (age 13), a Street Vendor (age 13) and a group of Indians (age 15). As I am typing this, I am shaking and thinking of that old childhood rhyme..."Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief, Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief". I have learned to despise this rhyme.
This diary was inspired by tonyahky's excellent diary of a girl she knew as a child named Annie. The diary is called "At age 13, She was Ruined". If you haven't read it, please do so. In this diary I expiate some personal demons from my own childhood, and exhort members of this community to speak up about their own ugly childhood experiences. It wasn't until yesterday at the age of 49, that I realized how much poisonous shame I had been lugging around from childhood experiences for which I bore ZERO responsibility and how those experiences, so warped & twisted my spirit & psyche, my very sense of self in the years that followed. I feel very free today. Free and inspired to ask of this community, "What then must we do?" What must we do to help young women/children of both genders, honor themselves avoid predators, and blossom into healthy adults who respect their place in this world? More beneath the fold.
First, a little background: I am a preacher's daughter. I can honestly say that in matters of sexuality, I was raised in an over-protected environment. The facts of life were explained to me on a very clinical level beginning at age 5, when my Mom pulled out my Baby Book & showed me pink, black & white graphic drawings of fallopian tubes, eggs, sperm, and a uterus. (There were no drawings of penises. Just sperm). Nonetheless, my Mom, a Biology Major in college, did explain the whole process to me. As a 5 year old, I was more interested in getting back to listening to my Disney records of Snow White & Cinderella & "Someday my Prince Will Come", than getting a science lesson). I recall my Mom putting the whole sex thing in the context of it only occurs when a man and a woman are in love, married and for the purpose of having children. As I understood it in early childhood, if you had 4 children, you had had sex exactly 4 times. In all fairness to my Mom, I did go back to her multiple x between the ages of 6-10 and ask her to explain the finer points of this stuff again. But it never was really clear to me. In summary, I entered puberty with an overall picture of human sexuality in an ether cloud of vagaries.
Fast-forward to age 11. My period started that year. 5 months later my family had moved to South America to be missionaries. We lived at a Pentecostal Holiness Camp. These Pentecostals put the "H" in Holiness. Translated, it meant that I had to dress modestly. I had to give up all my blue jeans, shorts and pants of any kind. All my mini skirts had to go, knees must be covered, and my elbows had to be covered at all times too. (To this day, I can't explain the Pentecostal rationale as to why exposed elbows are sexually arousing, so please don't ask). Finally, I could wear no make up or jewelry, and had to wear my long hair up in a bun. (A woman's hair is her glory and only to be let down in the presence of her husband). The "Holiness Makeover" was traumatic. Prior to my parents getting involved with the pentecostals, I had been quite the early 70s fashion plate, love beads, hot pants and all, when I wasn't busy outside being a tomboy.
Not that any of my clothing matters, but it offers some context as to my outer appearance when the Doctor accosted me on a public bus. My family had been in Ecuador exactly 2 weeks. My Spanish vocabulary consisted of "Buenas Dias", "No speaka da Espanish" and "No." Public buses in South America were left over buses from the 1950s imported from the U.S. Rickety, noisy, back-firing contraptions in which Maximum Occupancy signs were routinely ignored. I found myself on such a bus, for the first time with my 2 brothers and an older H.S. girl who provided transportation for us to and from Quito and school every day. That afternoon her van broke down and we caught a very crowded bus on the way out of town to Conocoto. Max. Occupancy was 55 and it was standing room only when we boarded the bus. After about 10 minutes of standing, school books in tow, a seat opened up near the front of the bus. My siblings and friend were spread out all over the crowded bus. I took a seat next to a man in a doctor's coat carrying a doctor's bag. As I slid by him to sit in the window seat, I felt my maxi dress catch on something. (An arbitrary nail, I thought). Seated with my books on my lap, absorbing the smells and sounds and colors of being on an Ecuadorian bus, I suddenly felt a hand underneath my dress, placed solidly above my right knee, gently squeezing my right thigh and slowly, silently, heading North. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this moment. I turned and looked at the Doctor and said "What are you doing?" He offered no response or eye contact and stared straight ahead. No acknowledgment. Like the proverbial "deer in the headlights" I was rendered temporarily mute. I had no idea what his hand under my dress heading up my thigh meant, but I knew I didn't want it there. Mortified, terrified, I took my substantial stack of school books and pressed down hard on his hand. I kept looking at him with horror on my face and he kept staring blankly straight ahead. I kept pressing my books HARDER now on his hand and then I just started saying "No. No, no, no, no, no, NO." His hand had migrated to my upper thigh as tears welled in my eyes. Suddenly without warning, he stood up, leaned over, rang the bell and jumped off the bus at the next stop. Wiping the tears from my eyes, I was relieved that a Quechua Indian woman took his vacant seat. I didn't make a scene, I didn't scream at the doctor, because nice girls don't make noise. Shame #1.
FF to a few months later which found me alone upstairs in Brother Harold's study with Brother Harold. Brother Harold was the head preacher at the Pentecostal Camp where we lived. Brother Harold was a very attractive man in his 30s, with a very strong resemblance to Paul Newman, piercing blue eyes and all. Brother Harold had a wife and 3 children, all of whom were my playmates and friends. I admired Brother Harold for his natural charisma, and more important, I respected him for his obvious closeness to God. So when Brother Harold asked me to sit on his lap, I didn't think twice about it. So I am seated on Brother Harold's lap looking out over the beautiful camp through the upstairs window of the A frame manse. We talked about Jesus. We talked about our love for Jesus. As I sat on his lap, he started stroking my left thigh. (This time I'm in a mid-length dress as his hand was stroking my bare thigh). I thought nothing of it. We were talking about Jesus afterall, and he was SO close to Jesus. He was a revered authority figure to my 12 y.o. mind. So we chatted, he stroked my left thigh, and I looked into his piercing blue eyes as he lead me in a duet of "Oh How I Love Jesus." That's it. That is what happened. It wasn't until years later I learned that Brother Harold was sleeping with the young female acolytes at the Camp on a regular basis. He seduced one 17 y.o. girl into bed by pulling out the Bible and quoting God knows what, to convince her that it was totally within God's plan for her to lose her virginity to him as an agent of God. When she ended up pregnant from this encounter, he again pulled out the Bible and convinced her that it was totally within God's plan for her to take a bus into Quito and get a 3rd world abortion that left her passed out and bleeding in an alley. (My Father, years later, was responsible for getting Brother Harold kicked out of the country to face his U.S. home sponsering church with an official "church hearing" on all of his sexual escapades). His church, surprise, surprise, stood by him as a man SO close to God. The women - all 7 of them - were dismissed as liars and sluts. Shame #2.
FF to a year later. Man of the cloth #2. Now I'm 13 and we're living in Costa Rica so my parents could attend language school. My parents were out of town for 2 weeks. While they were gone I was in the care of our maid Maria. She was a good woman and a staunch Southern Baptist. I became painfully ill in their absence with excrutiating pain over my left kidney which left me bed-ridden. Before, taking me to the doctor, Maria thought it best if her Baptist minister, an American man in his 30s - chubby, pasty, with a bad toupee, prayed for my healing. He and Maria sat on my bed as he asked me to unbutton my shirt so he could lay hands on me and pray for me. I remember looking at him, fever and all, thinking, "You gotta be kidding me. Why do I need to unbutton my blouse and expose my breasts to you so you can lay hands on me and pray?" "Oh and by the way, last time I checked my kidney was below my breasts". Sensing my reluctance, he looked at me smiling and said "It's okay. I am a Man of the Cloth. Jesus has commissioned me to heal." So again, under cover of God, I thought, "Well, he just wants to pray for me." "Maria is here so it must be okay." I dutifully unbuttoned my shirt. He laid his hands on my breasts - both of them - and prayed for my healing. It felt wrong at the time and it feels wrong to this day. But I said nothing. Shame #3.
Now we come to a somewhat amusing encounter with the broom salesman and of all my encounters - the most innocent. A few months after my Man of the Cloth healing experience, I am waiting for the school bus alone on a corner. Here he comes. The neighborhood street vendor, hawking his brooms. As he approaches me, he says, in a hissing sotto voice, "Ohhhh Mamacita, Rubia mia, You are the Sunshine of My Life." This man felt free to get right up into my personal space - 3 inches from my face, eyeing me up and down, gesticulating, hissing....with his bad breath and worse English. After 1 encounter with him, I was determined to tell him off. My Spanish was slightly better than it had been the year before, but was still pretty bad. So that night I went home and looked up the words to say "Go to hell", in Spanish. The next day I was ready for him. As he approached me hissing, and pelvic thrusting, and Sunshine of My Life-ing, I looked him dead in the eyes and said "Vete al Invierno". He started laughing. So I said it again, "VETE AL INVIERNO!" This was my moment of female empowerment and he just laughed even harder - belly laughing. Then he got right up in my space and licked my face. I was furious!!!!! Having been sufficiently humiliated, he went on his way selling his brooms laughing as he made his way down the sidewalk. (That night I learned why he was laughing. Inadvertently I had insisted he go to Winter, not Hell. Invierno =Winter. Infierno=hell). Shame #4.
Somehow at age 14, I escaped any unwanted physical contact from grown men. By age 15, I had become used to the cat calls, whistles, and verbal harassment of South American men. It was just something I had to live with - different culture and all of that. By age 15, I thought I had become somewhat sophisticated in my "risk assessment" of which strange man on the street was most likely to harass me. By this time we had returned to Ecuador, and this was my third year in the country. I spoke the language, understood the annoying aspects of machismo as stupid culture, and had this whole thing down pat. So, I thought. So I'm walking home from school one day, and went to cross the street when I noticed a couple of young Ecuadorian men of Spanish descent, eyeing me. Split-second decision, I decided not to cross the street. Walking along in my Jackie O sunglasses I approached a group of 6 or 7 Quechua Indian men, laughing, cutting up and talking among themselves. In Ecuador at this time the Indians were considered lower, than low. They were regarded as nothing. Literally nothing. I did not feel this way about them, but in my "risk assessment" I knew I had nothing to fear by the Indians who always kept their heads down and went about their business. As I started to walk by them, all of a sudden one of them grabbed me and threw me against a wall, while he and the other 5 or 6 of them had a raucious grab fest of my breasts, my butt, my vagina - laughing the entire time. One of them tried to stick his tongue in my mouth. This is in broad daylight on a public street at 3:00 in the afternoon. Once they had their "fun" at my expense, they slapped each other on the back and continued on their way down the street, one of them looking back no me smiling. Shame #5.
I have no joy in these memories. For those of you who may think this has everything to do with Latin American culture, and little to do with American culture, I can only say HAH!!! Are you for real? I have limited myself in sharing those experiences that met 2 criteria - 1. That I was inappropriately physically touched and 2. I was underage when it happened. These experiences laid an internal foundation within myself that I as a female was a target. An object, not respected in the world at large. This is what I internalized from my childhood experiences. Without going into detail, in my adulthood here in the U.S. sexual harrassment on the job by lawyers followed, as did an attempted rape, more than one flasher - an 11 y.o. boy and a grown man, and an actual rape. So U.S. culture did nothing to dissuade me of the lessons I learned in childhood. If anything, they just confirmed the soul-killing objectification I had already experienced.
My point in sharing this here at Dailykos is that a person's corporeal being should be respected by law and when it is not, the predators should be HARSHLY punished. Pedophiles, rapists, and "pro-life" abortion doctor killers should face the same stringent punishment that we hold for all murderers. Pedophiles and rapists attempt to kill, and sometimes suceed in killing the life spirit of their victims. Pro-life doctor killers - wow, now that is an extreme twisted pretzel logic, have NO respect for life, and in the end are murderers.
I don't understand Republican logic. They want little to no government until it comes to governing a woman's BODY and/or what 2 people of the same sex do in the privacy of their bedroom. How is that "getting government off your back?" I read a few years ago that "Jane Roe" of Roe vs. Wade fame, has since come forward and is making the Republican Christian speaker rounds of her deep regret over having had an abortion. Mine is only 1 voice and 1 opinion, but even with my own evangelical background, long abandoned, I THANK the government for doing this bare 1 minimum thing that says to me " I (the government of the U.S.), RESPECT women as individuals -fully capable of making this decision on their own." In other words, a 1973 sane Supreme Court recognized that the government doesn't own a woman's body. The government gave sanction to "corporeal respect". As an adoptee, and as a woman whose birth was the result of statutory rape BEFORE Roe vs. Wade, I know full well that I may not be here to type this had abortion been legal. This thought was also on my mind the day before I myself had to have an abortion. Nonetheless, I support full throttle the statement that Gloria Stenhem said best, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." Women are NOT the second sex. We are not "God's afterthought." Now it is time to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Lets codify the respect that all women deserve and let us as a society imbue in our young girls the full on ownership of their own lives, their right to say no to abuse, and yes to the full realization of the beauty of their lives, their spirits and their contribution to society. I am aghast that we have the hyperbolic nerve to criticize other culture's treatment of women, when we as a country have not codfied the Equal Rights Amendment.
Wed Jun 29, 2011 at 5:05 PM PT: A note on Latino Culture and the indigenous Quechua. What happened to me at the hands of the Quechua men was HIGHLY unusual and I hope my diary reference to Indians is not misconstrued as "racist" in anyway. I simply mention that the men were Quechua because they were. Interesting supposed fact, rape in latino culture is not as prevalent as it is here in the U.S. "Propinos" (verbal "flattery" or "harrassment"-depending on your pov) on the other hand is quite common.
Wed Jun 29, 2011 at 5:54 PM PT: Thank you to all of you who shared your stories, and/or otherwise offered your wise and kind commentary. I hope this diary has helped those of you with your own skeletons to abandon any residual misplaced shame. Special thanks to tonyahky who "rattled the bones" of my own skeletons & helped free me from shame. Healing & peace to us all.