I suppose that I should just start from the beginning.
“Why go backwards, Delilah?” You may ask. There’s something that I should probably talk about that I haven’t told anyone. Except Sir. I’ve gone through two therapists and I’ve never divulged this to either one of them. And I mean, I told my second therapist EVERYTHING. I told him about my BDSM, about Sir, about all my craigslist hookups and practically everything else.
This is hard to write, partially because I feel a little guilty. I guess this is sort of weird territory for me. I have a hard time even telling Sir about this. I start waving my hands around, a nervous tic.
Remember how I wrote that I was an avid pornography watcher when I was younger? Even younger than that, I hung out in cybersex chatrooms. So I was essentially a cyber Lolita. Once upon a time, a certain big ISP had unmoderated ‘romance’ chatrooms. This was before To Catch A Predator. This was before myspace and Facebook. This was before the big whole push to ‘protect kids from cyberpredators’. I was little red riding hood, fifteen or sixteen, dangling myself in front of wolves.
I’ll admit it. I was a lonely, confused, extremely sexual teenager. So I didn’t hide how old I was, but I’d never show my face. Just by signing into a sex chatroom with a female sounding name gets you bombed with IMs. Bombed with IMs from men old enough to be my teacher. My father. My grandfather. Oh, I knew damn well what I was doing was wrong. I knew about age of consent, and about pornography laws. I was on Model United Nations, and we had debated over obscenity laws.
In the chatrooms, I knew what to say to get them to talk to me, what they wanted to hear. It was like I was visible again, instead of the invisible, too smart, nerdy, awkward girl in the back of the classroom every day. I’d go home, lock my door, sit at my computer and talk to these people. They would ask me questions about anything and everything. It makes me a little sick to my stomach to think about it now. I can’t watch To Catch A Predator without feeling a little ill. You know those excerpts of chat conversations they post, that are supposed to make you feel disgusted with ‘those perverts’ right before they catch the guy coming to the house?
They’re aren’t too much different from what I heard on a daily basis.
Why would I do something like that? I don’t know. I could blame lots of things. Lack of a paternal figure, my burgeoning sexuality, my precociousness (I was put into Honors classes when I was 8, classified gifted at 12) or the fact that I was just a lonely girl. After a while, it wasn’t even about sex anymore. I saw it like a game. I didn’t feel disgusted, or aroused, or ANYTHING. It was just something I did. It was pretend. It all happened and didn’t mean anything at all. I could sit there and paint glitter on my toenails and play with these perverts like I wasn’t completely fucking psychotic.
I talked to a lot of men that probably did have some sort of compulsion. Or mental illness. Or little girl fetishes. Some men did block me on their accounts when they found out I was underaged. Some men just became more motivated to play with me when they found out I was underaged. I heard a lot of dark, twisted, morbid things from those men. Ageplay isn’t ‘play’ anymore when the girl is 15 and the man is three times her age.
I don’t feel a compulsion, sitting here wearing an ECU shirt and drinking Starbucks, safe in my dorm room at 20 years old, to make it seem any better than it was. Most of it was chat roleplay, some guys just wanted to talk to me because of my age.
I did have standards. I wouldn’t send pictures, talk on the phone, look at webcams or talk to fathers who wanted to screw their daughters. Especially when I was their daughter’s age. Or older. Was I ‘victimized’? Was I just some poor girl that was being manipulated by older men so they could jerk off imagining they were fucking a schoolgirl? I can’t answer that. I can’t tell.
I was just desperate for attention. I’d rarely talk to the same guy twice. Until I encountered someone shortly before I turned 16. Let’s call him “R”.
This is the part I have the hardest time writing.
I met him in some user created room for “smart girls”. I know, it sounds ridiculous now, but a user had made a room specifically for younger “shy and intelligent girls for older men”. I don’t remember what my user handle was at that point. I ‘met’ this guy in the chatroom. We did a non-consensual roleplay, a physics teacher blackmailing an Honor student into letting him train her as a submissive. Ugh, GOD is that hard to admit. I almost always responded to more intricate roleplay, even at that age I didn’t want some stupid, lame roleplay. I’d close the IM windows with lame roleplay scenes. I didn’t close his. I played with him, and he added me to his ‘friends’ list. And to be honest, I actually got aroused during that roleplay.
We kept talking. Slowly, so slowly, not only did he gain my trust and slowly learn about me, but he found out about my desires and fantasies. He found out I was submissive.
Then he explained everything.
Stop. Stop assuming that this was what got me into BDSM. Stop thinking that this experience is what shaped my sexuality. Despite the fact that yes, R did teach me about BDSM, why pain can be pleasure, why some people want to obey and some want to control, I do not think that it had a huge impact on why my sexuality developed the way it did. R taught me a lot of things, and internet BDSM can mindfuck you as much as real mindfucking can, but I don’t assume that he did too much to influence me. A lot of things that he talked to me about, such as watersports and puppy play, I don’t do today.
I was some sixteen or seventeen year old girl talking to a man twenty years older than her. I wasn’t a complete fool, though. No naked pictures. I sent him some vanilla ones. Me in full symphonic orchestra dress, with my trumpet. Me in my prom dress.
Things around me were falling apart. This was happening at the same time as my other origins post, I just kept this all secret. R would tell me I was so beautiful, so smart, so sweet, so unique and perfect.
He didn’t want to meet me until I was legal. He admitted he didn’t trust himself around me and that he’d probably try to fuck me if we met in person. The online roleplaying we did got darker and darker the more we knew about each other. Lots of forced sex. Just dark as hell. Creepy to think about. What really unsettles me a lot is that we did daddy/little girl play, and he had a little girl. I was breaking my rules for him. I even had phone sex with him multiple times. He’d tell me what he’d do to me, call me names, while I hid in my bed, cellphone pressed to my ear. He was breaking the law, technically.
We emailed and IMed and talked obsessively. I would email him long, sad, depressing emails full of details about my teenage life. The problem was that I was so desperate for attention, I told him everything. My shitty boyfriend. The bulimia I developed to deal with my shitty boyfriend. My boyfriend, C, was a fucking psychopath. Worse than the awkward sex; emotional abuse. I couldn’t deal. I couldn’t leave. I ran to someone who I thought would help. R.
He was the one who said he loved me.
I became suicidal around two years ago. Family issues, boyfriend issues, college issues, all compounded. He would write to me and tell me not to hurt myself, to get help. He even admitted he harbored fantasies about divorcing his wife and coming to find me.
My 18th birthday present was his real name and his location.
The summer after I graduated high school, he sent me a terse email saying he enrolled in Sex Addicts Anonymous.
He said he was sorry, he loved me, but he had to face his addiction. To porn, cybersex and come to terms with the fact that he had seriously considered divorcing his wife for an eighteen year old. He was so addicted to porn, he was rubbing himself raw and never touching his wife.
He deleted the only email account I had for him.
Later that year I’d post my first craigslist ad.
