the only thing i knew about sex at the age of nine was that
1) it was for mommies and daddies who were married;
2) it made me, my five year old sister, and my baby brother.
i learned everything i knew about sex from the internet while secretly browsing grownup sites on my 4th generation ipod touch i earned for doing so well at a piano recital. because of the nature of, you know, men and their internet porn, i learned that my sexual role as a woman was to be slapped and pissed on and tied up. i didn’t know what healthy sex was. i didn’t know it should be mutually consensual, or that it was okay to want sex with girls. i didn’t know that sex should be good for both people. i learned that sex would hurt, and that sex was about men and men only, and that i would be forced into sex whether i liked it or not, and that it was normal to have sex with big, burly, grown men as a teenager. i learned it was normal to cry during sex. i was scared of sex for so many years because of that, and the way i was exposed to sex at a young age led to the inappropriate and traumatic sexual encounters i had (occasionally with older people) later on in my teen years.
the day i got my first period, i was ten-and-a-half. i was swimming in the river with my best friend, and when i got out to go to the bathroom, i noticed brown blood on the inside of my mint-green tankini bottom. i knew what a period was, but i hid it from my mother in shame. she found out, eventually, of course. she told me, you have a woman’s body now, and if you have sex, you could have a baby. all i heard was, you have a woman’s body.
i started shaving my vulva when i was eleven, because i saw memes on memegenerator about how disgusting “hairy pussy” was. i wanted to be sexy. i was eleven years old, and all i wanted was to be sexy. it hurt, and it itched, and it made me uncomfortable, and i’d sometimes nick my labia with the razor, but i did it anyway, because i didn’t want to have a nasty, “hairy pussy.”
eleven was the age i first started getting pinched on the EL. i was an early bloomer: i had B-cup breasts already, and my menstrual cycle was regular enough that i could keep a calendar. i started wearing a full face of makeup to school and buying shorts that rode all the way up my skinny twelve-year-old thighs. i remember the day i stopped jumping off the swings the summer after fifth grade. skinned knees weren’t sexy. smooth, flawless legs were sexy, and i was a sexy girl. i was probably the sexiest little girl in the whole world. my parents hated it. they told me i was too young, but i knew the truth. my body was older, maybe 17 or 18, so my brain must be, too.
when i was twelve, i had a secret kik account that my parents didn’t know about. i used it to message strangers. i made all sorts of friends. i wasn’t stupid. i used a fake name. never showed my face. one of my friends asked me for a bra picture. i was a cool girl, right, i was sexy, so i sent him a picture of me in front of my bedroom mirror in my little white training bra with the blue butterflies.
sexy, he said.
that was all i wanted.
i’m not typing out all this bullshit because i think it’s something special. i’m typing it out because it’s not. i’m typing it out because i see the same thing happening to my little sister. i’m typing it out because i see the same thing happening to that little millie bobbie brown, sexiest actress at thirteen. i’m typing it out because i’m sixteen years old now, a girl in the eyes of the law and a woman in the eyes of men.
mothers, talk to your daughters. tell them to jump off the swingset and skin their knees. tell them to get dirt on their dresses. tell them that they’re a woman on their 18th birthday, not at ten-and-a-half on the first day of their menstrual cycle. the world is confused. the world is sick. if your daughters don’t hear about how to treat their bodies from you, they’ll hear it from the sick, sick world, and they’ll do the things i did.
let girls be girls.
don’t force womanhood on little girls.
C.A. Jacobs
C.A. Jacobs 