Mother's going to make all of your nightmares come true

When I was a child, I knew that I had no privacy.

Not in the sense of constant surveillance or diary-reading (had I kept a diary). But I had nowhere to retreat to. My bedroom would be charged into, sometimes without knocking, to check on me, to see if I was behaving, to inspect me; once we moved to a house where my room had a lock, if I actually used the lock I would get screamed at. So I locked my door regularly, but ... only when nobody was around to notice, or when I could listen to hear if someone was coming. Sometimes I toggled the lock but did not close the door. My space was in regular danger of disruption. Even the insides of my head were subject to rearrangement at her whim.

One of my deepest expectations about interactions with others is that I do not have a safe retreat space. This deeply tainted my adolescent sexuality, though at least I had pre-pubescent sexuality that nobody interfered with because it's a cultural taboo to imagine that kids that age have sexualities.

(As I've developed a sense of boundaries, I've gotten touchier and touchier about people who want to co-opt my experiences and ignore my self in order to feed their own desires and narratives, which is one of the reasons Nine Deuce and her crowd's monstrous behaviour towards kinksters annoyed me so spectacularly.)

But I only ... just ... realised that I was set up.

That the positioning I have as pawn, as tool, as palimpsest for an agenda, that I fight against so damn hard, the stuff that feeds into my massive damage around privilege feminism, the stuff that leads to me thinking a lot about mechanisms of social control and how they show up, my generalised outrage at being rewritten ... was all carefully taught to me.

That maybe treating rape as normal came about because that was the lesson I was supposed to have learned.