Thoughts on Prostitution and Pornography

Trigger Warning: Graphic description of child abuse and rape.

This is going to be bit rambly. I can't help that. I have a lot of thoughts, conflicting thoughts, and I'm going to try and get them out as best I can.

I have no personal experience with prostitution, or with what most people think of when they talk about pornography.I have been molested and raped: both times, pictures were taken. When I was nine, I was molested over the course of a year by a seventeen year old boy who was living in our house as he finished up High School.  I was easy prey; I was homeschooled, extremely sheltered (I didn’t even know what sex was), a chubby, socially isolated outcast with few friends, and though my parents loved me, they both worked all the time  On several occasions, he took pictures of me, partially undressed, in what I now realize were sexual poses. At the time, I didn't fully understand what was going on. I knew enough to be ashamed, I knew that I couldn't tell anyone. But J. told me I was beautiful and had me pose like the pictures on the magazine covers and movie posters, like a real woman.

Years later, when I was an adult, I was brutally raped just a couple blocks from my home, when I took a stupid shortcut through the park. The pictures were almost an afterthought; after he had bruised me, burned me, raped me, he pulled out a camera phone and snapped a couple pictures. The most I ever saw of him was through the glow of that phone, his bulbous nose and crooked teeth, not enough for a good description for the cops. Oh, the wondrous progression of technology.

I have lived in fear for years that those photos of me are on the internet, graphic snapshots of my humiliation and pain. I have no reason to think that they aren't. Sometimes I can't help thinking about the men who have, over the years, masturbated to those images of a scared, humiliated little girl trying so hard to be pretty, to be loved, to be a woman. I wonder if that rapist was able to get my face in the shot, or if I exist only as a headless battered vagina, if he could even get the pictures to come out when they were taken on a pitch-black night. I try not to think about it, which is really all that I can do about it.

People would be quick to point out that what happened to me wasn't really pornography, it was rape, and they would be mostly right. I didn't chose what happened, and I certainly wasn't paid for it. But I have heard too many stories from girls and boys and women who were forced to take pictures, like I was, so that men could continue to rape them in their minds over and over and over again. I can't entirely dismiss the comparison.  I also can’t dismiss the similarities between what I went through and common images in movies and magazines.  Would I still have been raped and molested without the multi-billion dollar porn industry, much of it saturated with images of raped and abused women? Maybe. But the boy who molested me wasn't an adult, wasn't any older than my baby brother is now (who seems impossibly young to me).  Would he have known what to do without porn? Would he have even thought to take pictures? Again, maybe. There's no way to know something like that. Thinking of a society without porn seems even more fantastical than thinking of a society without religion.

Back in Black

Sorry I've been gone for so long.  My health has been not-so-good (understatement); sometime I may talk about that more.  Scratch that: I know I'll talk about it in detail at some point, as going through health problems through the last year and a half as dramatically altered my outlook on life in several significant ways.  But for right now, suffice to say that I've been in the hospital off and on for the last couple weeks while being in bed and rather drugged even when home.  So, not a lot of chance to write.

I have caught up on some reading, however, and, again, will be talking more about some of what I've been reading over the next few days/weeks/whatever.  One book that I just finished is "Sybil Exposed" by Debbie Nathan, an absolutely amazing book book about the Sybil case and the larger MPD phenomenon.  Ms. Nathan doesn't pull any punches and documents the multitude of problems with how the situation was handled and the mass hysteria it caused, but she does it with deep empathy.  There are no bad guys or good guys, just flawed people and even more flawed system that failed everyone involved.  Brilliant book; I also want to talk more about some of the issues it raised, later. 

One thing, though: the more I read about the history of psychiatry and even current practices, the more I feel that as a skeptic and a person with mental illness, I'm trapped between a rock and a hard place.  I know that I need help, but I also feel that when it comes to the understanding and treatment of mental illness, there is a lot of bullshit and comparatively little hard evidence.  Personally, I've been screwed by professionals who used unscientific treatment methods (the ex-gay therapist comes to mind, and the therapist who tried to convince me that I had repressed memories and needed to be hypnotized).  I've been drugged to the gills by one doctor and told I was fine and didn't need anything at all by another doctor (both times leading to serious issues, including a suicide attempt).  Right now I'm coasting on a bare minimum of medication--just one anti-depressant, given by my primary care doctor--and the support of friends and family when I become seriously depressed or anxious. 

But that's not enough.  This is not a lasting solution.  It's not fair to rely so totally on my family to take care of me when I'm too depressed to get out of bed or shower, or too scared to leave my house.  And it's not doing me any good, either.  But I'm honestly terrified to find help.  I don't want to go back to being so drugged I can't think, drooling and stumbling through life.  I don't want to be mind-fucked by another well-meaning therapist.  The two attempts I've made in the past couple months have been dead ends: a frankly weird-ass therapist who was overly invasive and straight-up lied to me on one occasion that I know for sure, and a doctor who diagnosed me as bipolar and obviously in need of hardcore mood stabilizers within five minutes of meeting me, without knowing my (very) complicated psychiatric and medical history.  So, I do know I need to work to find someone.  I'm just scared.

And reading books like "Sybil Exposed" doesn't do much to boost my confidence, you know?