My sexual history: The many reasons why I'm hesitant to be intimate: Part I

The title of this post was an alternate to my more accurate long-winded one: 

My sexual history: Why I have commitment issues with partners and opening up to the idea of an intimate relationship with partners: Part I
There will be a Part II posted later, where I pick up my life from 14 years old and onward.

I have spent many hours I could have been sleeping wondering why I don't have a partner. While in my sexological practice week intensive course, during a vignette role play, a lot of the questions that need to be asked of clients in an initial sexual history intake form had a lot of my intimacy (for lack of a better word) issues resurfacing. As in previous blog posts, my life is an open book. I am extremely transparent and, well, this post is no different. It will hopefully answer questions my friends have had as to why I am so picky, and why I sometimes tend to flirt with a man at the bar, and even though I do want to sleep with them, alarm bells start going off as the night comes to a close, and I take flight and end up home alone. Here is Part I to a very lengthy, but complete look into my sexual history. Buckle up folks! It is going to be a wild ride with many highs and lows.

Let's take this back to my formative years. As a prepubescent child, I always had an interest in reproduction, this probably started after I saw the movie, Look Who's Talking...or not. I say this because as a child the one bedtime story I wanted to hear nearly every night from my mom was my birth story. Not sure how many children enjoy hearing their story, but I loved hearing mine. Whether it started there or with the film, I enjoyed learning about it and even got in trouble with my Fifth Grade teacher for reading a fictional book about a woman who was having a baby. The irony in this curiosity about sexual reproduction is that this was the same year we had our puberty talk in the classroom with a sexual health presenter. Along with my obsession with pregnancy, reproductive health, and babies, I was also a Barbie obsessed child. I had the Barbie three-story dream house, the Barbie camper van, and all types of Barbies, Kens, Skippers, Stacies, etc. I would make my Barbies (I'm using this term for all the Mattel dolls, whether male or female) have sex with each other, and by sex, I mean oral, vaginal, and anal, Barbies would be breastfeeding the baby twins they had, and there were even just voyeurs off in the corner watching because I had no purpose for them in this orgy filled Barbie dream house as a rising middle schooler. Nothing was off limits with my imagination. In fact, I actually took pictures of this and have photo evidence, but they were taken back when we still processed film in stores, so the proof is back home in the States. Once I'm home, I will unearth them.
Update: They are now posted below! Enjoy, haha!

Unfortunately, there was a dark spot in my formative years and I honestly can't remember the exact year or how old I was, but I was somewhere between 5th grade and 7th grade and at least old enough to understand what was happening to me. I was on the bus ride home from school and sitting towards the back. I sat anywhere on the bus, wherever there was an open seat. There were a few guys around me and before I knew it, one guy was aggressively forcing himself on top of me and grabbing at my vagina. The thing I remember that has always stuck with me is the lack of help coming from other kids on the bus when I called out for it...nor help from the bus driver. The kid got off of me and off at his stop when it came and then mine came after that. I remember feeling so violated. I was hoping this would be the only experience I ever had to have where I lost control of myself and my body, but it wasn't and I will come back to that in Part II. 

Along with my Barbie role play, I also by middle school was watching Queer As Folk, any and all parody porn, such as The Lord of the G-Strings, SpiderBabe, etc. that could be found on late night Cinemax, Showtime, Starz or HBO. By middle school (years 6-8), I was beginning to sexually explore myself and porn on the internet. This even led me to asking my mother via email at the age of 13 for my first vibrator, which I named Ross (after the actor Ross Thomas from the tv series Beyond the Break, not Ross from Friends...I was not remotely sexually attracted to him). 

In the winter leading up to my freshman year of high school, I really explored my sexuality with others...and weed for the first time. I had this one girlfriend who I strongly remember going to her house often. She helped me create my AIM sn thngbaby1990 and enter into that whole online chat world. When we were together we would always end up making out and dry humping each other. We got high one night at her place and watched "Gangs of New York". It was a fantastic night, haha! I even explored threesome foreplay with one of my guy friends at that time and the girl already mentioned. That was hot to me, but never led to sex because I was still quite hesitant about that...and the guy was one of my best friend's ex-boyfriends. So a big no-no/off-limits guy, which is probably why I was more comfortable when he just watched while me and the girl had our usual make out and dry hump in our bikinis before going into the hot tub at her house. She went to my rival high school, so our paths only crossed when we were at youth group on Sunday nights, haha! So that relationship didn't last very long. 

After my eighth grade year ended, I became friends with another girl and spent a lot of time with her. We watched the movie Fear together for the first time and this was back when I had a list of things to do before I die, which I started in middle school. I added get fingered on a rollercoaster to my list thanks to that movie, ahaha! I digress...this new girl and I had a lot of fun together as well, we drank alcohol, smoked weed, and went to parties as you do (or at least I did) as a rising high schooler. However, there was one pivotal moment where our friendship fractured and was never truly fixed. It introduced me to one aspect of becoming a bit guarded. I went to a high school party with her and remember thinking, Yes! My first real high school party, where I planned on not coming home that night/told my parents I was sleeping over at a friend's house. Everything was going great, I was chatting it up with new acquaintances, I watched as some drunk idiot gave their dog beer, I shared a blunt with some guys and just generally had a good time...That was until the girl came up to me and said, "I'm going to have sex with this guy and, you see his friend, well you can have sex with him. He's got a big dick." I immediately went into fight mode and argued as a 14 year-old, I had not even had my period yet, this would be rape, and I was not ready for this to be sprung on me. I also, was not sexually attracted or interested in this guy at all. I said no repeatedly and thankfully the guy seemed okay with that. However, I had to sleep in the same room with this girl and the guy she ended up sleeping with and my buzz just turned into complete anxiety and a want to be home in my own bed. The next day a whole shit storm erupted when her mom asked me where we had been all night because she had lied to her mom about her whereabouts and her mom was quite the helicopter parent. I am a terrible liar, so I told her the truth about where we were that night, and that's when I basically destroyed what friendship had been in bloom all summer and at the start of my fall semester of freshman year (year 9) of high school.

I was a late bloomer and finally did have my first period when I was 14 years old in my freshman year of high school, but it was after that night at the party. 
I often consider my freshman year of high school my 'Slut' year, every year I had a phase. I considered it that because of that party experience, my experiences with my friend mentioned in the previous paragraph, and the fact that I took topless photos of myself and brought them to school to share with a guy who was on the baseball team. Looking back, I am lucky that he only took those photos to the bathroom for a few minutes to most likely jerk off, and then promptly brought them back to me. The problem was I didn't just let him see them. In my last class of the day, while in small groups, I let another guy look at them, and my English teacher did not like the distraction and took the photos away from me and said I could get them back at the end of class. I told her not to look at them, which usually prompts people's interest in looking at something. She did and I didn't get them back at the end of the class. In hindsight, this also could have been a moment for her to sit me down and have a chat with me one-on-one about why I took these photos and why I was sharing them with classmates. Instead, she took them straight to the principal, who then called in my dad, who was a teacher and coach at the time at my high school, asking if he knew about the photos and threatened firing him. When I came home that night my parents had the photos and were crying and asking me why I would do such a thing...There was a lot of shame resonating in this whole experience and honestly looking back, had my English teacher, who I still resent to this day after that experience, would have just sat me down and tried to make this a teaching moment for me and explain why this may not have been the best way to express my sexual intimacy, an establishment of trust and rapport could have been built. Instead, I look back on this experience, which I did learn from, and all I see and feel is resentment, shame and regret.

Stay tuned for...
My sexual history: Why I have commitment issues with partners and opening up to the idea of an intimate relationship with partners: Part II