Infanticide and child molestation. I remember listening to CNN in the airport yesterday, when they described the recent band instructor who’s been accused of molesting his charges. Much like the Michael Jackson charges, some part of me just sighs and wonders why the hell this is on the news. I mean, I know why, it’s scary, it’s sex, and it deals with kids. I can’t imagine anything more engaging to the human hindbrain, particularly the American hindbrain. But I’m not horrified by it. <\/p>\n
I was sexually assaulted by strangers a few times as a kid. I was also accused of rape by a kid I’d spent months fooling around with. He was a couple years younger than me. He started it, but I verbally pushed him to keep doing it. There was never any penetration, never any orgasm, never even masturbation. All this before I entered high school, some of it well before.<\/p>\n
Am I just inured to the whole thing? I was pretty messed up by it; I’d like to think I’m much better now. I am scared to touch kids, particularly babies, just for fear of how it might look to someone. Anyone. And I want to adopt, or maybe bring someone bearing some of my genes, into the world. Heh. There’s a fucked up combination. Either way, I’d prefer a girl, just to make the sexual angle a nonissue for me. <\/p>\n
[Then again, a couple weeks ago at a swim team brunch, one of my hosts’ very young adopted daughters announced she was going to give me a backrub. This created a small panic response in me. I could feel the blood draining from my face, I immediately turned my chair back to the wall, mumbled something like “no thank you”, and I tried to think of something that would put this determined young lady off her intended course of action without me losing it and responding way more vehemently than the circumstances warranted. I didn’t come up with anything. (in retrospect “No, don’t!” followed up with a potential grabbing of hands away from me might well have been appropriate). Fortunately, one of her dads told her (with firm parental gentleness) to leave me alone, and she complied. On the plus side, I’ve confirmed for myself that I’m not a pedophile, on the minus side, I should have handled it more gracefully.]<\/p>\n
Maybe my indifference to it is the first stage of my involuntary icy-numb-shutting-down response. That may be the one time my brain stops its gyrations. I really don’t like it. It feels like some part of my brain gets trapped in a Liar<\/i>-esque loop: Can’t take action, that would hurt. Can’t refrain from action, that would hurt. <\/p>\n
Not a pretty situation. I guess I still have some work to do on that front.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Infanticide and child molestation. I remember listening to CNN in the airport yesterday, when they described the recent band instructor who’s been accused of molesting his charges. Much like the Michael Jackson charges, some part of me just sighs and wonders why the hell this is on the news. I mean, I know why, it’s … Continue reading “horrors that don’t horrify”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}