Survival Sex.

[I'm still working on a Cosmocking but urrrgh it's terrible trying to make something interesting out of Cosmo.  In the meantime, here's a not-at-all-disturbing story from my richly wayward teenage years.  TRIGGER WARNING for emotional abuse and survival sex.]

When I was 16, I ran away from home. My mother was abusive, I'd just brought home bad grades (I'd started college at 15 and that was a mistake) and she'd exploded and kept exploding.  It was mostly emotional abuse, with only occasional and mild hitting, but as bad as emotional abuse can get, it got.

She'd wake me up in the middle of the night to scream at me.  She'd scream at me for literally (as in, I checked the clock) hours on end and I would say nothing but "yes, you're right" and "I'm sorry" the whole time, just standing there quivering and waiting for it to be over.  She'd scream at me for doing anything I wanted--you don't deserve to sit around reading a book!--and scream at me for doing anything she wanted--you think just because you cooked some shitty dinner that makes it okay?  I wasn't allowed to close my door and I wasn't allowed to leave the house. I didn't know when it was going to end, I had long since resorted to self-mutilation to deal with the stress, and I was afraid my life would be a living hell for months or years if I didn't get out.

So I got out.  I was, despite being a Child Prodigy™, a very young 16 and I didn't have a plan, or any realistic idea of what it would be like to be a runaway.  I just stuffed some clothes in a backpack and (after waiting for my mother to leave the house) walked out the front door.  I didn't know where I was going.  I just wanted to get far enough away she couldn't find me.

The first night, I slept in a park.  Or tried to sleep.  I think I got about two hours, curled up in the little concrete alcove outside a locked-up park bathroom, trying to hide.  I was painfully aware of how much I had to hide from--the weather, criminals, cops, even animals.  I didn't eat anything the next day.  I was not good at being homeless.

The next night, I met up with a guy I knew.  He was a lot older than me, sort of a friend, sort of a weirdo, still lived with his parents, but he had a private entrance to his basement.  He used to screen porn films for me and some other underage girls.  Never did anything to us, just watched them with us, and we thought he was so cool for being over 18 and allowed to buy porn.

Let's be fair here; he didn't offer me food and lodging for sex, not in so many words.  I "seduced" him.    I got food and lodging out of it. He didn't hurt me but he did make it clear that I'd have to leave if I stopped sleeping with him. For banging him every night and most mornings, I got about four days of a safe bed to sleep in and the food in his fridge.

It was vanilla sex, with condoms, not painful or demanding, and frankly it was even kind of enjoyable on a surface level--I had orgasms and everything.  But it was also... detached.  I had no illusion that I was doing it because I was horny.  I was doing it because it was the only way I could think of to stay alive without my mother.  The guy knew this, but I think he also thought of himself as my rescuer, and me the grateful damsel happy to give herself to her rescuer.

My parents knew this guy, so before long the cops came by his place and dragged me home.  (He didn't get in any legal trouble for any of this.  Although I did find out much later that my dad threatened to kill him.  High five, Dad.)  Shit with my mom got even worse after that and I ended up leaving home for several months, but that's another story and one that fortunately doesn't involve survival sex.



This is the kind of thing that I'm reluctant to talk about, because I worry that it hurts my credibility as a sex-positive person and especially as a BDSM-positive person.  It fits too neatly into a narrative of "she's fucked up and that's why she does freaky shit." I don't think that's true--I was freaky before this, I know freaky people who weren't abused and abused people who aren't freaky--and I also don't think I should care so long as my freakiness isn't hurting me now.

But I'm wary of the "damaged goods" pity-smear, of being reduced to my traumas, and sometimes it silences me.  I don't want to make this blog into a narrative of "ex-child-prostitute/emotional abuse survivor/sexual assault survivor has promiscuous and painful sex!"  Every part of that is technically true but it's not my story.  It's ridiculous just how little it's my story.



I want to share it, though, because it's a complicated story.  I wasn't quite the stereotypical "runaway forced into prostitution"--I knew the guy, it was only one guy, I wasn't forced into anything, I was free to leave, and most importantly, I would have (in fact did) fought tooth and nail against someone "rescuing" me in any way that either put me back with my mother or dumped me out on the street.  But I certainly wasn't the happy hooker making a free choice to do sex work as a career.  (I don't mean to deny their existence, just to say that obviously I wasn't one.)  It wasn't forced sex nor was it chosen sex--it was survival sex.



Sometimes I feel like I haven't grown up; I feel like I've finally run away and gotten away with it.  I may have a job and an apartment and be back in school, but it doesn't make me feel like an adult. It makes me feel like a runaway who finally made it away.