I was on FetLife one afternoon and came across a post that was particularly powerful to me. As I scrolled through the comments, one in particular caught my attention. It was written by a man who acknowledged his privilege as a white man from a relatively good home. Something about both his acknowledgment of his privilege, his words of support to the OP, and the fact that I'd seen his name a few times in the community pages led me to look up his profile.
It was actually quite well done. This is a rare thing. I sent a friendly message and our friendship began.
Initially he was quite forward. There was an intense sexual pursuit. I turned him down, politely but clearly. I explained that while I enjoy the flirting and banter and our particular friendship culture that was developing, I need the explicit sexual requests to stop and I needed him to stop telling me I was a "good girl" when my actions happened to coincide with any requests he happened to make.
The reasons for this were because he and I hadn't negotiated a D/s exhange, I didn't know him well enough yet to offer him that intimacy; I was in a D/s relationship that was closed; in that relationship, as we were seeking to sort out whether or not we had long-term potential, the sexual aspect of the relationship was closed.
He responded that he undestood and respected my boundaries and thanked me for clarifying things.
This was kind of amazing, frankly, as about six weeks prior I had asked a man to stop speaking to me in sexually explicit ways and that man responded by getting angry, defensive and then acting in aggressive and punitive ways.
That my new friend was so respectful in the face of very clear rejection was just dumbfounding and really wonderful. I knew our friendship would be one that we would both enjoy.
Two days later, after we'd been chatting for a few weeks, I was struggling. It was a terrible day. I asked my friend if he had a minute, and when he said he did, I explained to him the situation with my partner, what happened when we were face-to-face, what happened when my partner expressed his desire to have me tell him what I wanted, how my partner rejected me when I told him exactly what I wanted, how it had cost me more than I'd imagined when my partner rejected me, and howi'd been in a funk for two and a half weeks as a result and I just couldn't get past it.
My friend called and I told him about my body insecurities.
He said, "It sounds to me that you don't really have insecurities about your body, but actually about your genitals specifically." Astute.
My friend is the first person I'd ever told about this portion of my history of abuse. He is the first person I'd ever told the particular details of the abuse; he was the first person I'd ever told about the effect that abuse had on my relationship to my genitals. He's still the only person who knows. I haven't even told my best friend, and she knows practically everything about me.
If there is anyone in the world who has a right to know about this history and how it affects my bodily experience, it would be my partner. If there's anyone in the world who has a need to know about that history and how it effected me, it would be my partner and my therapist.
I hadn't told either of them. I told my friend.
That was the beginning of the end.
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