A Pre-pubescent Slut
Updated: Jun 1, 2020
At seven years old, I was still responding to grown-ups' questions of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with the starry-eyed answer: "A mermaid." At eight years old, when working on a writing assignment for school about what I think I'll be doing in five years, my thoughts remained on the cutting-edge of impracticality. In my young, neurotic head, in five years––at age thirteen––I would have already been publicly ridiculed as a perverted, dirty whore, shunned by my family, hunted down by the FBI via helicopter, and grown accustomed to the view through my steel bars in the state prison. Of course, that isn't what I wrote down for my school assignment; if I had, then my teacher would have known who I really was underneath the innocent, ordinary eight-year-old façade, and contacted the police to have me picked up from school that day instead of my mom.
Elementary school didn't feel as easy as it should have been when intolerable anxiety would grip my chest each time the school principal smiled at me as she passed by in the hallway––a gesture I imagined I saw right through––beneath that smile was undoubtedly an acute awareness of the horrible thoughts in my head, and she was simply waiting for the right moment to call me out and escort me to her office. Unlike my peers who were happy to have class disrupted, I hated those annual assemblies when a police officer came to talk to us about safety––I held and lost my breath in panic, just waiting for the officer to pull me aside afterwards and slip handcuffs around my tiny wrists. Contrary to Lionel Richie's beliefs, Sunday mornings weren't easy either: I dreaded the few times each mass when the priest cued us to kneel and pray--certainly the crowd of people surrounding me in pews knew the horrible images that were inevitably coming to my mind in moments of holy quiet, and were praying to God asking Him to send me to Hell. And, it never felt quite like a cake-walk circling our abstract-printed living room rug for an hour––meticulously stepping within each shape and avoiding any lines where the colors changed––every time the distant sound of a news-station helicopter or cop car sirens disrupted my solo Barbie karaoke performance. Everywhere I turned, there was something to be afraid of––a constant threat that my "bad" would be exposed to the world and the police would come after me.
The vast majority of my obsessions didn't add up in reality. I was a child. I was pre-pubescent and most definitely a virgin, with no trauma history to attempt blaming myself for. But did I believe I was a slut? Absolutely––no doubt about it. Did I know what a slut was? No, I didn't; I'd only been taught by my friend (who had significantly more laid-back and freely-intimate parents than my own) that it was a bad thing to be and had something to do with sex. Did I know what sex was? Hell no! I thought that having my Barbie and Ken dolls laying down, nipple-less chest to nipple-less chest with arms outstretched and elbows locked in a Voldemort-Malfoy-level uncomfortable hug meant that they were "getting it on." Likewise, I conceptualized that a single tap of one Beanie-Baby's hand against the seam of another's pelvis was some highly erotic endeavor. I'd like to avoid imagining how disappointing my sexual performance would have been at fifteen or sixteen when my peers may have been sexually active, as I'd learned little more at that point in life than where my vagina was actually located so I could put in a tampon.
Irrefutable facts aside, I knew deep down that I was a slut. I've been a slut since I was eight years old. I remember my rite of passage vividly...
I came home from school one day, eager to procrastinate doing homework by hopping on the swivel chair in my dad's home office and playing SuperSecret––one of my regularly rotating choices of dress-up and lifestyle games for adolescents––on the family computer. It had been a while since I'd played SuperSecret, and I struggled to recall the exact name. I knew it had the word "secret" in there, and when I thought I had it, I began the web address with: 'mysecretlife'. In a single, well-meaning left-click, my life changed.
As any adult may presume, the webpage I found my young eyes on was not intended for an eight-year old's viewing. Immediately, an internal voice shouted: No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Exit out. NOW. But I was a child, and I was naturally curious. I had never seen an adult completely nude before––male or female (aside from those times I showered with my mom as a toddler for her convenience's sake). Check the door and make sure it's shut. I took a quick glance, and the door was slightly ajar. My chest pounded. Seconds. I had seconds to choose between exiting the window or closing the door. The steps it would take to close the door meant that the people inside the computer knew what I was looking at for longer, and had more data to send to the police. They would already know I was here, but if I close out now they may believe it was just an accident...
But exiting out meant that I would miss the opportunity to explore this...stuff. Is anyone nearby? Do you hear footsteps? Can you hear anything? The sound of my pounding heart was all-consuming. I couldn't hear anyone. I listened closely and estimated that everyone was far enough away that I'd have time to exit out and pull up solitaire if I eventually did hear movement...But are you sure? I couldn't be absolutely sure...I would just scroll down the page quickly then exit out and immediately clear the search history...
I felt my brow muscles furrow until they ached fiercely. In a single swipe of the scroll wheel, my stomach dropped and all the air in my lungs suddenly vanished. Everything in my body had gone numb but my pounding heart, which continued to grow stronger as the rest of me faded. Something was pulling me away from the world.
There were several men in frightening black masks––sort of like the horror movies my older brother would watch at night with his friends that would scare me so much I'd have to change my route to the stairs in order to avoid seeing something that would show up in my nightmares––but for some reason the others (all seemingly women) in the pictures and videos weren't afraid. They wore all sorts of leather straps, but nothing covered their privates...in fact their privates did not seem so private at all. I couldn't understand the movements they were making, or the expressions on the women's faces. Was it pain? Were they being hurt? Was it fear? Was it joy? Was it disgust? What were they doing?
I closed the tab. I cleared the search history. I cleared the search history. I cleared the search history. I cleared the search history. I cleared the search history. I cleared the search history. I cleared the search history. I shut down the computer and ran across the hall to my room, where I abruptly closed the door––I did not dare slam it and risk drawing attention to myself––and hid in the corner of my closet.