That night, as I pondered this, a memory was triggered in my mind about my own sexual assault as an adolescent. I took notes!

One of the shittiest things to happen to me as a kid was the year I was lured into being beat up twice by fake love notes. They were both from a girl named “Kristen,” who was real, I think, and instructed me to report to a spot in the woods to hang out. I got beat up both times, why did I go back twice, but I remembered that night, while considering what a fucking asshole my coworker was, that the second time was one of the times a boy molested me. The details are pretty fuzzy, but I can remember the after effects very vividly.

I did keep coming back for more, and this led me to have severe trust issues that remain with me to today. Still, I have a very hard time trusting or spending a lot of time around others. My teen years were spent being super paranoid that everyone was out to screw me over, lie to me, steal from me, which happened a bunch, or otherwise try to ruin my life. I’m still very paranoid about this. Even when people have the best of intentions, I question it to the point of scratching at myself until I bleed.

I went on two different dates a few weeks ago. When the ladies in question asked me out, my first thought was “is this a joke?” 31 years old and I still think like that immediately.

My arms. That kid, who wrote the notes, I figured that out later in the year when I had to grade one of his exams in science class, used to make fun of my arms all the time. I had very skinny, still do, arms as a kid because I was heavily medicated and, thus had difficulty with eating, and, I’ve realized in recent years, an undiagnosed eating disorder, and he would constantly make fun of them. He would talk about my arms and ridicule me. Around this time, I took up burning myself. Little burns up and down my arms, especially where no one could see them in the winter.

I began wearing more and more layers as my teen years went on. I still do. I think this ties into a lot of sexuality issues as well. I think one of the reasons why I have such problems with anxiety and…performance…even when I really want it, the other night I was imagining how great it must be to just fuck someone like a normal person, is tied to trust issues.

I’ve been ridiculed in various parts of my life for not being the right body shape, for not getting the girl, for not thinking normal, for having deviant thoughts, for not wanting to fuck every girl that moves, for not adequately pleasuring a woman. It’s all bullshit, obviously, but once it is in your head it is very hard to get it out.

Serious trigger warning for frank discussion of sexual assault, self mutilation, and suicide.

This will be long.

There is no fucking way I would EVER discuss this stuff openly on the board (see the numerous previous others times any personal issues have come up with me or basically anyone else), so I am excited about something more private. I don’t exactly advertise this, but I have come to grips in the last few years with the fact that I was sexually assaulted by another boy (or boys, some of the details aren’t super clear anymore) when I was a teenager and a lot of the issues that have come with that.

Like _______, I have a lot of weird flashes of memories. We used to play manhunt in the woods when I was like 10-12, before we moved from north Jersey to south Jersey. I was already beat up all the time because I pissed myself in 6th grade the first week of school. When we got caught playing manhunt, the older boys would tie up (ugh, I just realized this specific detail–>) the younger boys like me. I always got tied up by my feet for some reason. One time, at night, another boy assaulted me. He then molested me the next time while my “guard.” After I pissed myself, I developed some kind of urinary problem + the psychological trauma made me think I had to go to the bathroom ALL THE TIME (I just got over this like two years ago…mostly). The other kids would make fun of me, block the bathroom, or depants me. The boy who assaulted me molested me a few times. I fought back once and smashed his head against a bathroom stall door. The story we told the principal was that we had fought. Mostly because I had no idea the brevity of what had really happened. This boy and many other boys began stalking me through school. I was beat up, spit on, and, one time, pissed on going to and coming home from school. Our house was vandalized and rocks were thrown through our windows on two separate occasions.

I found out a few years ago that part of why my grandmother committed suicide was grief over how awful my adolescence had become. Before all of this, I was already learning disabled, half blind, and generally not doing well academically or socially.

I’ve always been the type of person who dives into something. I want to make people happy and become devoted to an idea/person/concept with all my heart and energy. I kept trying to make friends with these boys. Another big moment around this time was a day we were playing street hockey. We used to play street hockey in front of our middle school after classes ended. Sometimes, if older boys were playing, this one girl would come along. We used to take breaks for an intermission every hour or so. During an intermission, I was taking off my goalie pads and then sat down on a curb to relax. A group of the boys had huddled around the girl. It turned out they were taking turns feeling her up, as the other boys cheered. Each boy would feel
the girl up and then a cheer would go up from the approving crowd. It came to my turn. I got a few pats on the back from older boys. I couldn’t do it. My excuse was that it didn’t feel right to touch a girl I wasn’t dating or some bullshit like that. The boys jeered.

Well, the boy who assaulted me took it upon himself to spend the summer before we moved to south Jersey tormenting me. Fake love letters from the girl I liked, egging the house. A bunch of other violent screwed up shit I only sort of can place together. I’m glad we moved, because I probably would’ve snapped and killed the little shit the next year.

I smashed another boy who bullied me’s head against a radiator earlier that year too. Of course, the school suspended me and patted my bully on the head. That happened like once a week for about two years. I got spit on, pissed on, depantsed, and worse but it was my fault somehow.

I began having really bad body issues around sixth grade when all of this began. I’d always been really skinny and uncomfortable, but things got much worse after all of this. I began cutting myself and tried to kill myself one time. I also BURNED myself sometimes. We moved to south Jersey and I got heavily into hardcore/Straight Edge. I was already a vegetarian (another reason I was a “fag”) so it felt natural. I really related to the “don’t fuck” part because of my body issues and other concerns I had, and still have, serious intimacy problems. I have to go extremely slow in relationships and haven’t had the best time of it in that regard. More on that in a few paragraphs.

Hardcore of course didn’t help with the body issues. I got made fun of for my size and mannerisms by “friends.” A lot of the shit talk on the Internet about me turned out to be from a lot of the same people. Break down the walls!!!

For a number of years I kind of forgot about the stuff that happened to me as an adolescence. I went to college, spectacularly failed at that the first few years after falling into a really deep depression around 1999, got really into the hardcore scene, where as some of you may know I didn’t exactly fit in well or play well with others in either, and just blocked it all out for awhile. Around that time I went through a serious of relationships, a few of which you might know about because of INTERNET DRAMA, that really fucked me up because of my intimacy problems crossed with my need to make people happy. Sex was hard for me and I had trouble dealing appropriately with relationships.

At some point around this time I also thought I was maybe gay or at least very queer. Which you might know about because it got outed on ______ a few years ago.

My best friend, and occasional lover, committed suicide right before 9-11. While mourning her and dealing with a fucked up, xenophobic, rathole of the country we live in I began cutting again. A few times I tried to basically slice through my right leg very unsuccessfully. I have a couple gnarly scars. I never did really drink or do drugs besides a few months of boring experimentation with a trusted friend in 2004. I hate that shit so much. But when I touch the scars on my legs I’m reminded I’ve done stuff just as messed up. I’m no savior, therefore I am no judge.

Sex was and is still very problematic and led to a series of relationships from like 2002-2005 totally falling apart. I got heavily into D/s to try to deflect these issues, but that only worked briefly. And I am so sickened by how I couldn’t be there for a very mentally ill friend I was involved with because I was so buried in my own shit to even consider helping her. So I cut again all the time until about 2006.

I got involved with a wonderful young lady around then who was my intellectual and emotional match. We had a wonderful seven months together and then it all fell apart because I couldn’t have sex with her, despite being very much in love and, I thought, attracted to her body. We could make out, and be intimate, and have oral sex…eventually…but penetrative sex just didn’t happen or work.

(it’s funny come to think of it how I’ve never been a big fan of penetrative sex anyway. I had a long conversation once with someone a lot of us probably know about that in like 1998 long before I put together all of this. I just realized that. Huh.)

When we broke up, she suggested that I might be asexual. After doing some research, a lot of stuff suddenly came together and made sense. So yeah, I’m the asexual straight edge vegetarian. Uh, anyway…

I’ve only really told a few people about this stuff. When I went to grad school, I fell really, really, deeply in love with a friend (serious advice: don’t fall in love with your classmates in grad school) and confessed a lot of this to her. Things soured from there. That happened again about a year later. I am pretty content about being asexual, but still piecing together a lot of the bits and pieces of how I got to be who I am.

I think I might be missing some details that I am sure I’ll remember at some random time while driving or teaching or whatever.

For awhile I was blogging rather haphazardly about both issues:

dalenixonisasexual.wordpress.com

I still have a lot of body issues problems with my sexuality. As a male, I am also deeply concerned that I not overwhelm and burden the issues of survivors that are female-identified or GBLT, etc. As an asexual, I have no clue where I stand on any kind of “queer” scale either. I don’t really know how much I care anyway. My involvement with the asexuality community has left me the same place and feeling that hardcore did: slightly too far out of step to fit in and just not enough like anyone else to want to.

So, um, hello. I recognize a lot of names here. Some of which I used to be very tight with who I either fell out with or just lost track of in some way or another. Hello.

I’ve also obtained a very special asexual young lady in my life (who I have gently urged to guest blog here) as well, so often things I might have blurted out to my readers on this weblog have gone to her first lately. By the time I think to write a weblog post, I’ve moved on.

Did you notice the reference to Gone’s excellent first album in the title?

To be blunt: I’ve found in the past few months that masturbation means about as much as taking a shit does.

It’s just a bodily function really. Like shitting, it is something I do in the morning, or at night before bed. Both seem to be necessary for comfortable human living, but neither means much to me. Outside of the moment I cum, and even then that is debatable honestly, I feel nothing.

A big change that has happened lately as well has been my body’s lack of “hurry” to self pleasure. It used to be I “had” to do it when the urge came, but now if I say “fuck this,” snuggle up with my cat and plop down in bed nothing weird or bad happens. How great is that? I feel liberated by this revelation; that “need” to pleasure myself had becoming boring in the past few years and honestly annoying. I still do it, just did this morning, but once the moment ends it is over and done.

While considering all of this, I was reminded of the article about asexuality which ran in The Guardian last year. Near the end of it, Paul Cox writes about the relationship he and his wife have in regards to sex:

People always ask how our marriage is different from just being friends, but I think a lot of relationships are about that – being friends. We have built on our friendship, rather than scrapping it and moving on somewhere else. The obvious way we differ is that we don’t have sex, though we do kiss and cuddle. We like to joke that the longer we’re married the less unusual this is. By the time we’ve been married five years we’ll be just like everyone else.

Do I feel as if I’m missing out on something? Not really. We’ve decided that if either of us wants to try sex out in the future then we will see what we can do. We would both be willing to compromise because we’re in a relationship and that’s what you do.

Asexuality should always be something that is not written in stone. That was the primary factor which drove me away from the Straight Edge movement. Straight Edge was an end for most people, not just a means to move onto other higher ideals (animal rights, women’s rights, etc). All of this led me to asexuality. Who knows what is next for me; I have no idea how I will evolve and change next. Everything is to be determined.

Anyhow, one quote from near the beginning of the book has stayed with me since I finished my reading. This quote sums up how I feel about a few different things:

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no “erogenous zones” (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. (10)

In these ups and downs, there are two significant situations where I felt betrayed by others who I had opened up to or divulged privileged information about myself.  The first came in 2002 when I began my first, what we call today, weblog.  I wrote pseudonymously, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out who was writing each post if you knew me well.  This was a period in my life where I was dealing with crippling depression, body issues, self mutilation, and the disgusting racist, sexist, and homophobic “post 9-11″ world.  I was also mourning my best friend, who committed suicide a week before 9-11 and helping another friend, who attempted suicide a day later, deal with his mental and substance problems.

I began writing about what was going on in my mind, where I hid myself amongst a number of voices, real and imaginary, body issues, my devolving mental state, and frankly discussed what I thought should happen to the patriots on my campus.  About four months into this venture, I woke up one afternoon (did I mention at this point I was barely sleeping?  I would go days without sleep.  In the spring of 2003 this got really bad) to a number of emails from friends warning that my weblog (didn’t we still call them “journals” at this point?) had been posted, with my name attached, on a number of forums I read or posted on.  I was openly mocked, ranked on, and generally ridiculed.  From people who claim to be “punk” or “different” or defying society somehow.  Cowardly, I closed the Web Site down and pretty much distanced myself from that community for a few years.

In 2005 this happened again, but with an Online acquaintance.  This was a person who was a friend of a friend that I had gotten to know over the years.  Sometime during that time period we had a number of conversations Online about sexuality that I assumed were confidential.  Of course, this line of discussion ended up, again, pasted into the public discourse.  This time, I didn’t even bother to reply.  I was so busy with school and actually dealing with these issues that I gave up giving a shit.  Since then, I place no confidence in alternative communities doing anything but giving assholes another place to feel awesome about themselves.

So that is why I borrowed the Dale Nixon pseudonym to create this weblog.  From a childhood of fights, ridicule, and trust violations I already had serious trust problems.  My last girlfriend was the first person I think I ever let into my life without assuming they’d eventually steal from me or fuck me over.  It’s fucking pathetic that this is how things have to be, but it is how it is and let’s move on.

For reasons I still can’t explain, that changed when I was eighteen. I began taking time out of the day to pleasure myself. Some evenings I would hurry home from work to browse the Internet and explore all that was sexuality, BDSM, D/s, etc. Around this time I began a serious of Online/phone relationships with people in various communities I participated in.

The summer I was eighteen I also dated a young woman who was great in bed. She could give and direct me how give her pleasure like no other woman I have been with in my life. My self pleasure was not about a woman’s breasts (she had great breasts) or fucking someone, but more like scenarios. Not quite role playing, which I think is beyond corny, but scenarios where I live out dreams and desires I have had since a child.

That excited and titillated me a lot more than the actual sexual act. Which was probably a sign I was asexual, huh? This is also why BDSM does nothing for me; whips and cuffs are boring. But that’s for another post.

Nowadays, masturbation is a means of relaxation and anxiety relief. This aspect began about five years ago a fall semester when I was intimate with a serious series of women. I had this weird luck with women for about three months straight. One particular young lady and I found a place on campus (and, I admit, a few times my car) to mess around. Right before the Thanksgiving holiday break we had a week where papers and research was due in all three of the classes we had together that semester. After long evenings working together on her papers we ended it in my car with either, normally, oral sex from her.

Intimacy with her was a stress reliever. Thus I began to use masturbation as a way to relieve stress and relax in the evening before bed. It continues to be that way to do this day. One of the problems I had with the girlfriend who told me I was probably asexual was that I could never make that anxiety or stress go away when we were intimate, which made it impossible to get off no matter what wonderful things she did to me. Which is obviously not her fault.

Does any of that make sense?

I mention Woolf today because I came across an EBook of Three Guineas. If you’ve never read Woolf before, this is a great place to begin engaging with her. The shaping of many of my ideas about war, gender, and other things have come through this book.

During graduate school I came to grips with my asexuality. The former girlfriend who suggested to me that I might be asexual and I had broken up about four months before I began taking classes. About a month into my first semester, I met a young lady who would become my partner in crime for the next year and a half. Quickly we realized that the other was just as smart, just as engaged with literature and theory, and just as antisocial. We spent time together before and, soon enough, after class. We began emailing during the week.

By the time I was walking her to her car before spring break, I was crushing on her so hard it made me cry.

But it never went in that direction. I confessed, rather easily, about my potential asexuality and even admitted to her that I had been molested as a teenager. That summer we kind of danced around a romantic relationship, writing a series of very long emails to her other that was clothed in hypotheticals and stories about our past relationships.

I made it pretty clear in my own way how attracted I was to her. She is beautiful, somewhat tomboyish but able to perform femme when socially needed. Her mind and interests made her both an ally and a very unique intellectual match. I was in love with her mind and had a hard time not showing it.

But our ideas about relationships do clash. I often tell people my idea of a romantic evening is two people, a pile of books, some coffee, and a good conversation between page turns. That isn’t exactly what most people desire in a relationship.

Eventually she met a nice boy who she is now engaged to. They are mushy and sexually romantic and honestly very adorable. I know we weren’t right for each other because I cannot do those things. I was able to come to terms with this in the past year since she graduated and I was left to take my final few courses without her.

I accepted it fully and now embrace asexuality. I think it is a fluid label that could change with the right person. But I refuse to try to change someone or influence them to fit my world view. She is very happy, and all I want for other people is to be happy with or without me.