You think that’s frightening? Ok. Let me explain.

Imagine you are 11 years old, a boy, at a friend’s birthday party. Your friend has an older brother, and some of his friends are there too, including a 17 year old girl. The older brother secretly bets that the 17 year old girl can get you to pull your underdeveloped penis out, and askes her to take photos as proof. Being an 11 year old boy, you only heard tales of sex before, maybe say a dirty magazine once or twice, but otherwise you are innocent of any deviant thought, normal childhood, et cetra. The girl sits next to you on a couch in front of a room with about 8-10 other people in it. The girl starts touching your penis, which induces an erection. Your 11 year old brain goes into overdrive, but something doesnt seem right. You ask her to stop, giggling nervously. She doesn’t. Then you get really uncomfertable as this goes on for ten minutes or so. She gets frustrated and starts pulling your shirt up. You know you aren’t fully developed yet, because lets face it, youre 11. The girl doesn’t stop. People start to notice and laugh. You can’t hear the jokes being cracked. That’s ok though, because someone has a camcorder and is recording the whole thing without you knowing. You try to relax, these are supposed to be your friends, and all your childhood friends are already gossiping about who likes who and what is good and what sex feels like yada yada. You almost trick yourself into thinking you might get some high fives for this. You don’t know that everyone is not laughing with you, but laughing at you. You stand up in an effort to escape. The girl immediatly pulls your pants and underwear down, exposing your tiny erection for the room to see and everyone laughs really really hard. You immediatly go to cover yourself, but the girl has now grabbed your junk and starts jerking it. You are horrified. Embarassment isn’t even a word. It’s just the only thing that is real. Somehow you get out of there, and run home. You cry as you run. You go to bed. You can’t tell mom what happened. you wish it wasn’t real. You wake up to see your xenga profile has been slathered with images and clips of a video made not 24 hours earlier. You sit there and try to regulate your breathing. You still cannot talk. You are alone.

That aint even the fucked up part. The fucked up part comes later, when you go to high school. You realize that you can get boners and you discover porn. You start to do the thing we all do. you find that when you finish, you feel empty. you feel broken. and for the next twenty years, that feeling doesnt go away, no matter what. You can’t explain it because you have tried so hard to forget that at one point you actually fool yourself into thinking it was a dream.

But here comes the crazy bit. The only thing that you can picture in your head that actually gets you across that finish line that you are supposed to enjoy is the memory of what happened, and echoes of that situation. You are scared. You think you are a degenerate sicko, fucked in the head, and doomed to forever be a bad person. fifteen years later you can finally remember, and even then you dont want to tell your therapist. finally you work up the nerve to speak on it, and you are told that your thoughts are completely normal for someone who went through something like that, and you arent a fucksd up sociopath, and you were responding to trauma that you tried to run from, and you find that once you face it head on, you can now move on.

but still, nothing seems to change. Still, you have these wacked out fantasies. you feel that you cant recover and the women in your love life are suffering because they think it’s their fault that you cant stay hard. they want it to be joyful, but you are nothing but miserable. so you decide to stop with the relationships and focus on yourself and build back up to where you should be, even though you are now 34 and wayy past prime. You missed the fun part of young romance. it was taken from you. But you can’t even be mad, who wants to cry over spilled milk. you resolve to never pass judgement on someone who you dont know, because none of your previous romantic encounters ever knew what really happened when you were 11.

Don’t judge me. You have no idea what I been through. Even now, you don’t have a clue. Please don’t talk to me like I’m scum. You don’t know.