Reddit subjects

 The subjects of slut/kink shaming, sex workers, and the way older predators are manipulating the youth they are re-exploiting to speak in defense of these sexual predators, come up a lot on Reddit.   I am putting two of my responses here. These responses address how I view these important issues, and I have received a few emails from blog readers asking me about these issues:

-----When children are allowed to grow into their own sexuality free from adult sexual predator interference, or societal sexualization and objectification inappropriately being forced on them, whatever those children may grow up to consensually take part in will be, imo, a healthy expression of whatever they find fulfilling. Like anything else, there's a wide spectrum of activities they may discover they enjoy engaging in.

In our current patriarchal society that starts sexualizing afab children early and erroneously misplaces agency and wisdom onto them, and where CSA and trafficking happens at a horrendous rate, accepting the porn and sex worker industries without identifying the way so many members are survivors who are being re-exploited and harmed, is not conducive to a safe and healthy environment for those workers. My family has a long history of farm-working. This is a necessary and rewarding occupation. We don't ban farms because of the horrible exploitation that can happen, and has historically happened, in this industry. We find ways to keep exploitation from happening.-----

-----I experienced CSA from about 2, onward, and my stepmother was a sex-worker who trafficked me to clients and used myself and other children to create CP, starting when I was 5 until I was around 9. This had a profound influence on my whole life. Things I was involved in, and the ways I accepted re-exploitation and took on all of the blame for the first 2 decades of my life was not healthy at all. That is why it is important to me to never allow my childhood or teen years to be seen as a legit part of how people can safely grow up to develop self-agency and have a healthy or safe sex life.

For the past years, I have finally learned to set my own boundaries, to keep myself much safer, and to not feel shame for the ways I enjoy participating in intimate activities. Some of those activities are currently defined as kink. 

I am a consensual participant with other consensual, non-partnered peers, and I am quite content with my sex life as it is now. But I am absolutely averse to the path that brought me here. And I am averse to anyone saying that CSA and CP and trafficking made me what I am, and that it was my own self-agency to start participating in kink early, and that sexual re-exploitation of survivors is a form of "healing." This kind of narrative excuses sexual predators , and perpetuates the abuse and re-exploitation that continues to happen at alarming rates to children. When I was 13, I would have said I was fine with the 33 yr-old who was re-exploiting me then. I would have sworn it was, as my abuser told me, my choice (in other words, my fault) for what was happening. The 33 yr-old re-exploiting me was my sda school principal.  

It took until my 30's for me to fully understand how nothing happening in my first 2 decades of life was healthy at all, that all those older predators were purposely targeting me and re-exploiting me and grooming me to blame myself for all of it, and lying to me about everything they were really doing and really thinking, like the fact that they were fucking other children. I did not know then that any older adult re-exploiting sexually abused youths is a predator. They had me believing it was perfectly fine for old men to fuck me. I had no agency at all. I was as brainwashed as any young person being raised by religious fanatics or by racists or by families who teach their kids to cook and sell meth.   

My childhood influenced my whole sex life. I am fine with everything I choose to do now. But I will never know what my natural sexuality might have been, if it had been left for me to discover on my own with my peers. Maybe I would still enjoy activities defined as kink. Maybe not. And as a woman who finally has true self-agency, no one else has a right to try and shame me for what I consensually do with other consenting adults, now. But it is very important to me that I do my best to speak out against allowing predatory older adults (in this patriarchy that is more often men) to keep getting away with sexually re-exploiting youths who have experienced sexualization and/or CSA. This predatory behavior does not heal young abuse survivors. I will never tell teens it is great if they are being sexually exploited by older predators. Those children have no agency, any more than a 17 yr-old drinking a margarita has any agency. That margarita drinker will say they are making their own mature choices. They do not understand what they are doing, or what the consequences will actually be. They do not realize that any adults who gave them access to alcohol are not being helpful, law-abiding, kind, safe or decent adults. Such adults are endangering children.

A child being brainwashed by white supremacist parents is not going to be a mature and knowledgeable teenager. A sexualized child is not going to be mature and knowledgeable, either, as a teen who is going to be targeted by sexual predators. 

In the midst of women understanding agency, and not being shamed for enjoying experiences defined as kink, I strongly feel we must never glamorize or excuse predators who are harming children and youth. We can be fine with kink, while still speaking out against those much older predators who have conned some underage survivor into thinking they are not being harmed. Children will continue experiencing CSA if we don't call out these predatory adults each and every time. Any youth who is defending a sexual predator who is re-exploiting them, is not exercising self-agency. They are a youth being sexually abused by an older predator.-----