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Can we talk about something? Recently, I've been having some conversations
on my channel about a common but taboo reaction to sexual violence.
Hypersexuality. As a survivor, this conversation feels taboo
because a lot of people imagine that when somebody experiences sexual violence,
that the reaction is to become more modest and sexually repulsed.
But there are some people like myself who end up in situations where they engage
in sexual activity to empower themselves by something that disempowered them.
Now, I'll be honest,
having conversations on YouTube about this sort of stuff is really, really rough.
And one of the comments that I've gotten pretty repeatedly
on a lot of the videos that I've made about sexual violence is that I shouldn't
be dressing a certain way while discussing sexual violence.
Sometimes I filmed videos before I go out to the golf club,
and modesty is usually the last thing on my mind when I go dancing.
But instead of unpacking that victim blaming it narrative,
I wanted to have a conversation about hypersexuality and sex positivity.
Because the way that I dress is honestly a reflection of sex positivity
and sex positivity for me is a thing that helped me work through my hypersexuality.
Because, believe it or not, sex negativity was actually a huge part
of the hypersexuality that I was expressing during that phase of my life.
Let me explain.
Now, I barely remember having conversations with my parents about sex,
but sex was all around me
all the time, from billboards to television shows to movies.
Sex was firmly established to me early on from media
as something that men wanted and of course of women wanted it.
Well, there was something wrong with them.
I was raised very, very religious.
I went to Christian Private School up to the fourth grade,
and I spent a lot of time doing work in the church.
And those conversations were incredibly taboo.
No one really ever spoke about sex.
I didn't really understand it beyond being a thing that I was supposed
to give a man if I was interested in a romantic relationship with him.
But of course, if I caved and gave it to him before marriage,
well, that would be disappointing to Baby Jesus.
In fact, the only real sex talk I had was that if I had sex than any other context,
it would be disappointing to God and, of course, by proxy, my family.
But as a teenager, I often clashed with my very religious family
because I was starting to recognize that I wasn't cis.
And unfortunately, at that time in my life, the most supportive
and affirming people in my life were older men who wanted to have sex with me.
one such man would unfortunately groom me
and subject me to my first experience with sexual violence.
Now I was 15 years old, and I remember when I first started
speaking to this guy and I had an idea that he wanted to have sex with me.
But of course, I didn't really understand what that was at the time.
I only had these really abstract ideas about what sex was.
And again, the most I really understood about sex at that time was that
it was something that men expected of me, that I was immoral for giving them
without getting into the details of exactly what happened that night.
Despite the fact that I
was unconscious when he did what he did to me,
I had a really hard time not blaming myself.
This guy had taken me under his wing.
I was his art assistant.
He was doing a lot of things for me, especially things that I needed back
then as a teenager who wanted to get into the art industry
and had a really hard time processing
how someone could be so nice to me and do something like that.
If I'm being honest, I didn't want to acknowledge it.
And so I pretended that it didn't happen.
And slowly but surely, I started to take on the persona
of a person who eagerly sought out and wanted sex.
Back then, sex feeling like it was my idea was very empowering to me.
At least it felt that way.
But in truth, none of these situations were ever about my own sexual happiness.
Heck, I didn't even know what that meant.
I didn't even know what that looked like.
I was underage and again didn't really understand what sex was.
And frankly, I wasn't being safe at all.
I engaged in.
Incredibly dangerous activity.
I mean, I showed up at random locations, I got into strange cars,
I didn't tell anyone what was going on,
not my friends, not my family.
No one knew I would put myself in
incredibly dangerous situations,
all for that fleeting feeling of intimacy that I felt
when I would intuit that a man wanted to have sex with me
and I would bend and shape myself to make that happen, because back then
I conflated my worth with whether or not men wanted to have sex with me.
And when men desired me and made me feel as though I had value.
And every time they left, every time they.
Closed that door.
That feeling of worthlessness would rush right
back, and I would go right back to repeating the cycle again,
I put myself at risk and treat it my body so callously
all to feel more powerful
than I felt that night when that decision was taken away from me.
For the longest time, I felt like.
What happened to me
happened to me because there was something wrong with me.
And I had the hardest time
understanding that sexual violence is not something that happens.
Because you are a bad person or because.
You're an unwanted person.
I didn't understand that sexual violence is not something that happens to you
because you are unworthy of being treated any other way.
I didn't understand that he did what he did to me because he wanted power,
that he was very aware of the fact
that I was alienated from my family and that he relied on that.
He relied on creating a situation where the least I could do after
he did what he did to me was.
Not see it for what it actually was. When I was 21 years
old, I met a man and I fell madly in love with him.
And it was in this relationship where I started to understand
my aversion to deep intimacy.
I'd never really been in love before,
and being in this situation really taught me a lot.
And I kind of started to recognize that
with a lot of the men that I had been involved with.
It was a lot easier for me
to have sex with them than it was for me to have deep intimacy with them.
When I met him, I was deeply entrenched in respectability politics.
I didn't want to acknowledge what had happened to me.
I didn't want to acknowledge the things that I had done.
I didn't want to talk about my past.
I was terrified of talking to him about my past
and having him judge me for being a rape survivor
or all of the things that came after that during our relationship.
There was always this nagging voice in the back of my head that told me
that I didn't deserve a man who loved me, that I didn't deserve to be with somebody
who actually cared about me.
And it was really hard
for me to see it any other way.
And so in so many ways,
because I wasn't acknowledging my trauma.
I sabotaged that relationship.
I was in a relationship with him for five years, and
it took me all of those five years for me to have the conversations
that I'm having right now with you guys publicly with him.
So I tearfully ended that relationship when I started to recognize that
I hadn't really worked on this and that because I hadn't worked on this,
it was going to be incredibly hard for me to have an honest relationship with him
when I wasn't even having an honest relationship with myself.
I recognized towards the end
of our relationship that I hadn't really sat and processed this.
You know, I I didn't I didn't really understand that sex for me
was established in such a toxic way, so young that
I had never really been able to have real, honest conversations
with myself about how sex was supposed to factor into my life.
So in this new phase of freedom, I started to ask myself some questions.
I started to really ask myself how I wanted sex to factor into my life.
And I started to recognize that the thing
that I was reaching for was autonomy.
I felt for the longest time
that my only value in life
was whether or not I could sexually satisfy a man.
I'm 31 turning 32 this year, and it took me getting older
and accomplishing some of my goals to recognize that I had worth beyond that.
Now, of course, sex factors into everyone's life differently
and doesn't always need to be about whether you do or don't value yourself.
But what I recognized for myself is that because I was raised
with that cultural understanding of sex being so closely tied to your worth
when a man took away my decision
and ability to enthusiastically consent
. I felt completely worthless.
I wanted sex to be something that I was actively and passionately
participating in if I wanted to,
but I'd never really asked myself
honestly what I liked and what I didn't like.
It was during this phase of my life where I started to investigate BDSM,
and for me, BDSM was great because it really helped me
understand that I could set parameters for myself.
I could say yes. I could say no.
I could have a list of things that I'm interested in.
And even if my partners aren't interested in them, there's nothing wrong with that.
I started to understand that I could define my own boundaries
that while not everyone's going to be into all the things that I'm into,
that there's nothing wrong or shameful
about having a personal standard for who I share my body with.
It's really hard to explain,
but when you're experiencing this hypersexual reaction to trauma,
you sometimes feel like you can't say no.
And sometimes you also want to seem like you're
so willing to say yes that it's impossible to abuse you.
So while a lot of people might understand that, they can say no
because of where I was mentally back then saying
no and learning to say no was a really, really big deal.
And honestly, for me, saying
no was more in line with what I actually wanted out of sex.
Looking back to a time before I ever had sex,
I remember wanting it to be something
special that I shared with a person who cared for me.
A person that I also cared for.
And that shifted when I had that experience
where I felt that I no longer deserved to feel that way.
So today, it's incredibly important for me to remind myself
that I deserve to be in relationships that are in line with what I desire.
That there's nothing wrong with me wanting to have relationships
that are sexually satisfying to me, that I shouldn't have to settle
for less than what I know I want out of a relationship.
And removing the shame that I felt from sex and investing in my own
sexual happiness has led to me having happier, more gratifying
and healthier, so much more healthy romantic relationships.
You know, the funny thing about being sex positive today is that
I have far less sex than when I was so sex
negative and believe that sex was this shameful and disgusting thing.
But the sex I have today is great sex.
It's sex with people who again care and value me, whom I care and value,
who will not shame me for the few things that they're not into that I'm into.
Now to be clear, I don't think that sets positivity is about you wanting sex
or personally enjoying sex if it's something that you're not interested in.
For me, it's about acknowledging that sex is a normal
and natural part of our lives, and it's also about unpacking the sex
negative notions that we were socialized with that have made it so that many of us
have such a toxic relationship with something that should be so joyous.
When I posted my first video about hypersexuality after sexual violence,
there were, unfortunately a lot of people in the comment section
who commented saying that they had a similar reaction.
And if I'm being honest, it breaks my heart that so many people
have experienced this in my own personal experience.
Acknowledging trauma is a really important step to unpacking it,
and I hope that this video has helped other people
on their own journey of unpacking their own trauma.
On that note, I will see you guys next time. Bye.