I endured ever-escalating physical and emotional abuse from Reginald Sleeth for over four years. I remember being literally afraid to move sometimes, whether he was watching me or not. I was hobbled by the knowledge that I could do something unexpectedly wrong at any time, and earn a harsh and ugly punishment. It wasn’t like walking on eggshells; it was like the air itself purred with the promise of invisible razor wire, hidden anywhere and everywhere.
I wanted to fade away, be smaller, tiny, unnoticeable. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to somehow become insignificant and non-threatening enough that he wouldn’t need to hurt me anymore. This was living in a kind of poverty of self. Nothing about me seemed to have substance in those years. Everything was transient and flimsy as his ever-changing moods.
When I finally left him, do you think it was because I’d dug down deep and found strength from a vital, indomitable place? Do you think I finally howled “ENOUGH!” to the universe, myself, and that floppy-haired sadist, showed him my back, and slammed the door on the terror that consumed me for so much of my youth? I wish. Want to know why I finally left him? Want to know what the real final straw was? I wasn’t getting enough sex.
Kind of.
I love sex. My sex drive is nigh maniacal. It was the one part of me that I couldn’t shut off, even when everything else was floating. Reginald, on the other hand, didn’t seem too interested in it beyond his ability to control me with it, which was considerable. He was my first everything: my first kiss, my first non-masturbatory orgasm, my first attempt at anal. Until I was well into my twenties, he meant sex to me, and that’s a powerful thing to a horndog like me.
Abusive relationships often function like an addiction, really. The euphoria of the love fable is followed by the punishment phase, which is like a withdrawal or a crash, like coming down off a high. It’s an ugly cycle that hooks you with the highs then slams you against the bottom. While you stay in your broken relationship, you try to get back to the high of feeling loved. I was a fragile, naive and sensitive teenage girl with the hormones of a teenage boy when I met Reginald, and to me the euphoric crest of our wave was always, from the very beginning, wrapped up in sex.
Before we had penis-in-vagina intercourse, he was an enthusiastic partner and lots of orgasms were had. But when we finally “did it”, it seemed like something shifted. I don’t know if he resented me for deflowering him or if by then he’d realized my will was broken down enough that he could control me in non-sexual ways, but little by little the sex dried up.
That’s when I started feeling like my sex drive was disgusting. That I, as a sexual being, was disgusting. Reginald told me as much, and in those days I believed what he told me. When I masturbated he accused me of “raping [my]self” and threw tantrums. I was base, mammalian, and greedy, and I was no longer worth touching.
The guilt was overpowering. I still shyly asked him for sex, but never pressured him into it. I didn’t want him to do something he didn’t want to. But even just wanting sex, I was suddenly repugnant. I even tried going on Prozac, chiefly to dampen my libido, but also because I sort of wanted to die and thought maybe I should do something about that besides, well, dying. But eventually I woke up one day and realized my high was gone. That was how I started gathering the strength to get away.
Despite therapy and personal reflection and triumph of the human spirit and being a basically happy and functional person (I like to think) I still have a few hangups. Maybe, possibly more than a few. I’ve mentioned before that I can’t flirt, don’t ask for things in bed, have trouble admitting that I’m attracted to someone, and am basically a great big chicken. I’m realizing that I’ve never really gotten over the feeling that my sex drive is disgusting and that I, as a sexual being, am disgusting. It’s so deeply internalized I don’t know how to shake it. Maybe I’ll always try to hide my sexual interest from people until they unmistakably initiate. Maybe I’ll always feel like I’m getting away with something when someone appears to be attracted to me. Maybe I’ll never really believe I’m worth touching. Maybe it’ll never be okay to want things.
And lately I’m getting really fucking sick of it.
I remember a time when I was mortified to buy tampons. This was before self-checkout was widespread, and there were no real ways to work around that slow, petrified slog up to the register to hand the cashier unassailable evidence that I had a vagina, and that stuff came out of it.
