|
In Reply to: Re: Even if kids were not supposed to be upset at the time posted by Tell Me on October 19, 2007 at 23:15:55:
I wasn't raised in a culture where it was clear these things were really bad. I was raised in one where everything and anything about sex was bad, even nudity, and no one talked about sex. Touching little children happened, everyone knew it, but no one made it extra wrong, or made a bigger deal of it than sex itself. We all knew about the sailor down the street and the 2 young tin boys he'd seduced and corrupted, who went to visit him regularly of their own accord, but no one rushed to call the police or form a lynch mob. Everyone looked the other way.
Barely pubescent Brooke shields was filmed in nude scenes and as long as you were old enough you could buy a ticket to go see her at the movies. Blow jobs were considered sodomy or taboo enough, yet Deep Throat was a sellout at the movies.
Sexual values were being challenged and redefined all around me. There were simply conservative types, and liberal types, and I wasn't fitting into the conservative main stream at all. Amidst the confusion at a societal level, I joined a cult which claimed to be a biblical authority on what was and wasn't kosher re. sex. So you can imagine how malleable I was.
On top of that I was already screwed up re. my own incestual sexual abuse as a child to begin with. A relative reacted very strongly to my abuser when she found out about it, but still kept him around. And she never told me what he did was wrong, any more wrong than sex itself.
Having said all that, I still had some kind of innate conscience that prevented me from sexually abusing children myself. I was confronted with a 13 or 14-year-old propositioning me on a sharing night, and it "broke my bottle" and I turned her down. It pissed me off when I heard some other brother bragging about the gtreat blow job he got from her. Even when an 18-year-old propositioned me and I was way into in my twenties, I turned her down instinctively.
But did it raise any red flags when I saw the (more censored version of the) Davidito book? No. Somehow it didn't strike me as very wrong at the time. Maybe because he was a boy and it was a heterosexual encounter, and I'd always fantacized about having sex with full-grown women myself as a young boy.
Still, did it make it alright enough so I'd let my own boys have that experience? No. I think I would have found it too wierd. Would I have been alright about my own daughter having a sexual experience with a 30-year old? Absolutely not. But I was never confronted with these, and my instinct told me to get out before it got any worse for them. I was mostly concerned about their education, and the lie we were living, telling systemites one thing and doing another behind closed doors. Even if I never witnessed anything very horrible it was enough to make me know something was wrong. But the longer you are in a cult, the more your conscience is supressed. So if it was that muddy for me, I can imagine that it wasn't so clear for a lot of culties other than myself. Clearer for some, less for others.
