Mar 26, 2026
How old were you when you were first sexualized by a man (or a woman, for that matter)? Turned into an object of desire by the male gaze, by a teacher, preacher, neighbors, family member or parent? By your culture at large suddenly making you aware of what your body meant – not to you, but to them, whoever the overarching they were?
The sexualization of women starts early, so much so that being shocked by child sexual abuse or incest is actually kinda shocking – it’s that commonplace. On social media, I have seen another thread initiating that conversation, when were you sexualized, and by whom. It seemed worth sharing.
N.B. this is not a series of posts for the faint of heart, so pls take care of you and skip this blog if you can’t right now. I totally get that.
When was the first time for you, being sexualized – that you remember, that is? Here are a few answers from a variety of anonymous women on line:
I was about 5. Went to a school friends house to play. She allowed her older teenage brother to join us and he abused me and showed me his penis. Freaked me out.
She said he does that stuff to her all the time!
Too many and too gross to tell.
I was 4. My step brothers and my dad. My step-grandfather when I was 6. It didn’t stop until I ran away from home at 17. Then I married at 18 and he beat the shit outta me and my kids for 12 years until I left there in the middle of the night with my kids. No man’s ever gonna touch me or mine again.
12-14 was the time I was harrassed the most.
My neighbor who has passed
Was about 84
She told me a family friend touched her – fondled her genital area – when she was a little girl.
She was 80+ , and had lived with it her whole life, and said she had never told anyone. Ever. Just telling someone about it at 80. Lived with it her whole life.
I was molested while I was in diapers, then raped at age 4. It continued until I was nine and he was removed from our home. Our family physician said I’d never have children due to so much scarring. My OB/GYN found a way; I have 2 daughters & 2 sons…
10 or 11, I was walking home with my mum and sisters from school, we were messing around when I instinctively slapped a guy’s hand away from my arse thinking it was one of my sisters about to tickle me. If it wasn’t for the guy cleaning his car calling it out, I’d have kept thinking I accidentally bumped into him. Later that week, I missed everyone at the primary school and I was walking home alone. Same guy kept asking me for a date at a particularly secluded part of my walk. Just told him my age and he said he was like 18? (He looked at least 25). When I realised I wasn’t getting anywhere, I ran to the high street, caught the bus for like 2 stops home and told my mum. Next day I skipped school and went with her to a police station. They said nothing could be done because technically he didn’t do anything wrong!? I was fuming the rest of that year.
My doctor molested me when I was 5. He put his fingers inside me. Told my mother to take me in the bathroom and wash me with soap and water down there. He wanted to see if I was allergic to soap. My vagina swelled. My poor mother had no clue. He wanted her to wash away the evidence. Now he has died and is in Hell. Where he and other deviants belong.
11 until I left the house at 21. Too painful to say any more.
My mother’s boyfriend molested me when I was 13, my sister was in the room and my mother was in the bathroom vomiting because she was drunk. I punched him in the gut. Told my mother, who said I was lying and not to screw it up. She married him and I paid for that punch for the next 5 years by him pushing me down stairs and into walls (while my mother watched and told me I deserved it). He would grab my butt every time I passed him. When I asked my mother to tell him to stop, her response:”Don’t be a prude”. I was kicked out at 18. Women need to support their own and other women over men.
Ten years old and an old fat bast@ rubbed up against my backside standing in line for a game.
When I was 6 years old someone my mother knew was babysitting me. I was supposed to be napping in my grandmother’s back bedroom. He came into the bedroom and made me perform oral sex on him. After which he performed oral sex on me. That was my first sexual experience.
First time for me (with an adult man) was when I was 13 and some guy was driving around the neighborhood totally naked and exposing himself. I was so innocent and naive and just walked right up to his car when he said “Can I ask you a question?” I was so startled I ended up laughing at him.
And that, ladies and gents, is about as good a place to end as any, although to be clear, it ain’t no laughing matter. And as for me – I cannot recall I time when I wasn’t sexualized by the people around me. #TrueStory
Mar 25, 2026
He was my 6th grade boyfriend, which basically means very little other than for a time we were ‘going’ together. He was in my brother’s class, one up from mine, and – crucially, he had the same last name as me, which, I’ll admit, is the primary reason I was interested in him. Sorry, Tommy but there it is.
Archie – a font of all things wise and unwise – had shared with me in 3rd grade that when I married I would have to give up my name. Oh hell no, I won’t – especially given I’d been alerted to this impending crisis early enough by Archie and, hey, there are a whole lot of eligible Muellers around. What can I say? I was 8, 9, 10, and 11! And, as now, quite hard-headed, stubborn, determined.
Give up my name?! Balderdash! Why that is a thing – ever and still – astonishes me. It really does. As to having such a common and dull last name – no deterrent at all. Hard-headed. Stubborn. Committed.
Tommy was a sweet kid. He was a good bowler, too. He and I were on two championship mixed teams two years in a row, kid bowlers mixed in with adults, the Pro-Am or some nonsense like that; our names are together forever engraved on a plaque in the local bowling alley (still there, you know I looked). I don’t think we even ever held hands while we were ‘going together’ and I don’t know what ended this great, ridiculous and practical (on my side) romance, … something or someone did. Probably me. Who knows?
HIs sister, Terry, was one year behind me in school; we played volleyball on another championship team for three years, but we weren’t friends. That Mueller family lived in Fleischmanns, and my mother – the most reliable sharer of gossip in my life (in fact, the only one when I was a kid) – didn’t say anything about Tommy or Terry or their parents. Generally, usually, this was a good sign, but of late, with Tommy’s death at 66, and his sister’s a decade or more ago after a long stay in our local nursing home, I have begun to wonder what really went on, pondering lives and complications I will never in fact know anything about.
As an adult, returning to my rural hometown, I used to greet Tommy with a ‘Hey cuz’, which always made him laugh. He was to be found at the bowling alley, where he worked nights to make extra bucks, and (I suspect) to bowl for free. During the day, he delivered mail; with his innate decency and huge smile, his reliability and doggedness (honestly, you have to be dogged to be a bowler) what a perfect job for a truly nice human. I saw on line comments from residents on his route that he was known for going the extra mile for folks, shoveling snow, returning down the route a second time with a needed package, etc. Yes, that tracks.
I know like I know like I know that we’re all mortal, that we will all die – yet for a few days after the news of Tommy’s death, I have to admit I was a bit shook. Too soon, too soon! Surrounded by family, the notices said, which lightened my heart. Rest in peace, Tommy. You were one of my favorite boyfriends.
Mar 24, 2026
*From Rebecca Solnit – who, as per usual, hits the nail – several in fact – on the head...reframing our narratives of the lone hero, taking a new road – because change is done by many individuals working together over time, reading opportunities for wide-spread movements that positively impact all our lives. There is, in other words, no such thing or person as ‘Superman’…
Re: heroes and the exposure of Cesar Chavez’s crimes against women and girls: that kind of thing (though I didn’t know about him until this past week) is why I said in this interview (NYT 3/7/2026): “One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war.”
I think of how often awards, from the Nobel Peace Prize to the Goldman Awards are given to individuals when it’s the collective who achieved whatever was achieved, even if one person was charismatic or a high-profile spokesperson or founder. No one ever did it alone. It’s when someone’s words or actions or ideas resonate with the many that it becomes a movement, that it succeeds in changing the world. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t even launch the Montgomery Boycott of 1955; Rosa Parks and Black women’s organizing did; in some ways he made it capture the public’s imagination with his soaring rhetoric but it in return made him the high profile figure he became. Had thousands and then millions not shared his vision he would’ve just been a charismatic speaker, not a movement leader. The movement makes the leader, but the movement is the engine driving history forward; the leader is often just a hood ornament.
*& more from Solnit in the wake of the Chavez news, very slightly edited by yours truly:
Dolores Huerta: “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.” That’s from Huerta’s statement today about being raped by Cesar Chavez, timed to coincide with the NY Times expose on how he abused her and some minors in the 1960s, at the height of his fame and impact.
When you think you’re a liberator of your people and you’re also sexually abusing women and girls from among those people you’re demonstrating that you have trouble recognizing them as people. (And that is way too common.) As Huerta says, this happened because he saw her as property, as his to use, and because he knew he could get away with it because he had more power, including social power, than her, including the power of who gets believed versus who gets blamed (and she didn’t want to impact the movement, which would’ve been undermined by this).
Basically feminism for the past 250 years has been a struggle to establish that women are people endowed with certain inalienable rights, and among those rights are life, liberty, and bodily autonomy. Denial of reproductive rights in the name of the personhood of the embryo/fetus is denial of the personhood of the person who’s pregnant. It’s frustrating that feminism is so often treated as done deal to dismiss when it’s just getting started with so much yet to do.
Also frustrating that when I posted on BlueSky, people commented about how this is about “powerful” men, but in a society that listens to men over women and girls, that treats the former as competent and credible, the latter as not, the former as having rights that matter, the latter as not, every man is empowered to abuse, and it happens at all levels and in all sectors of society.
Feminism especially since 2012 or 2013 has worked to dismantle the stories that protected rapists and abusers, notably the stories that somehow men are reliable witnesses and women are unreliable ones, that women lie about rape all the time (it’s rapists who lie about rape all the time). The reason why these old stories are surfacing now is because through the valiant voices of survivors and the efforts of feminists there is space for them to be heard as there was not before.
Each of these stories is treated like an isolated incident, but it’s Cesar Chavez and Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump and the junior high school coach and the Boy Scout leader (there was a huge class action suit in scouting a few years ago, and yeah boys and men get abused too). While we hear about the famous guys it’s also the non-famous guys with ordinary jobs, the family member, the neighbor….
From the Guardian last Sunday we have three separate stories about men and rape: a story about Cesar Chavez’s rape and abuse; a story about the Crown Prince of Norway’s conviction on multiple rape charges; and another Epstein story. …that means that there are three stories about rapists on the front pages of a major paper, which should be shocking but it’s been normal for decades to have that many or more stories treated as isolated incidents all over the news.
But also, from the NYT story that broke the news, a victim says: “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” Ms. Lopez said. “The movement — that’s the hero.”
Mar 23, 2026
“Lacking a power for good, she sought power through manipulating her children. The mind that once was engaged in reading every major writer of the day now settled for cheap romances, murder mysteries, and a comfortable fuzz of tranquilizers and brandy at the end of the day. No one had directly willed her decline. It was the outcome of many impersonal forces, which had combined to emphasize her vulnerabilities. The medical fashion of the day decreed that troubled middle-aged women be given tranquilizers and sedatives. She, once a rebel, had acquiesced in settling down to live the life of an affluent woman.” – Jill Ker Conway, ‘The Road from Coorain‘
A decent look into mid-century modern women’s lives, middle class women, women of comfort and affluence – although my mother, one of them, wasn’t ever a rebel. If she had been, maybe she would have been happier, and less resentful, less a narcissist, less desperate for approval, desperate for meaning, for affirmation, for her children to reflect her best (and in my case, her worst) qualities and unrealized dreams.
All her darkness, all her light; she had so many wonderful qualities that were twisted by her culture, her religion, her family, and the times in which she was born as well as her adherence to a set of values and beliefs that, in the end and the beginning, harmed her. Good God what a waste of a first class brain.
Twisted by her own temperament, which sought, ultimately, comfort, familiarity, friends who looked up to her yet rarely – if ever – challenged her, losing herself in the tired old tropes of what constituted success: husband, children, womanliness, family, a good life, happiness, societal approval – all rather than grounding her acts and beliefs in lived, compassionately viewed, human experience. All rather than grounding her choices in what she actually wanted and needed for herself.
Dorothy means beloved of God. My mother had a good life in many, many ways, and was blessed, fortunate, lucky and thus, one could say beloved of her God. I loved her very much, I respected her intelligence, even while that intellect was wasted, was misused, was used by her to punish me for my many (to her) transgressions.
Worse, I began to believe her, despite my own intellectual gifts. You see, if my mother, who knew me better than anyone else, because ‘mother’, and who was also the smartest woman in town because people said so to me (your mom is super intimidating), if that woman, my mother, thought I was a., b., and c., if mother said I was insane, a liar, was going to be an alcoholic, a pregnant teen – then she had to know something, see something, and maybe, just maybe – she was right? She had to know, to see something in and about me, something essential and true, right?
I loved her very much, yet to save myself I learned to both hate and disrespect her, closing my heart to her and others. I went to war with her, and myself, because I was, in part, of her, her child. Still, her lies and hypocrisies, her rationalizations, her abuses of all those around her because ‘we owed her’ and she ‘owned us’ by virtue (what a misuse of that word) of her suffering at having given birth to us. To me. Just me.
My siblings? They were good; they were satisfactory; they were much more compliant, in line with her view of what a proper child should be. She didn’t tell them she never wanted children; she said this only to me. My defiance, my refusal to be what she wanted me to be (silent, always agreeable, pallid, frail, ladylike, endlessly polite to my elders if I did speak, weak, and afraid – mostly of her) was her cross to bear, as she said many times throughout my childhood.
I know her childhood was filled with hurts, loss, sorrow, poverty, shame and other deprivations I can only begin to guess at. I believe but don’t know for sure that there were all types of abuse going on in the house of her childhood. Dorothy, beloved of God, I know you suffered, I know you were in the grip of emotions and un-excavated hurts you had no capacity to heal, so great was your fear, your compliance. I know you did the best you could.
*Today is – or would be – my mother’s 98th birthday. Diego the wonder dog turns 4 today as well (what was I thinking!). Jill Ker Conway was an Australian-American writer, academic, and the first woman president of Smith College, a role she assumed in 1975, a ‘mere’ 104 years after it was founded as a college for women. Her memoir ‘The Road from Coorain’ is a fascinating read, if you enjoy memoir, or are interested in Australia, and sheep station life in the 1930s and ’40s – and what happened after that (road from, not to). Coorain is aboriginal for ‘windy place’. More on Conway here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Ker_Conway
Mar 22, 2026
On winter’s margin, see the small birds now
With half-forged memories come flocking home
To gardens famous for their charity.
The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins
Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.
With half a loaf, I am the prince of crumbs;
By snow’s down, the birds amassed will sing
Like children for their sire to walk abroad!
But what I love, is the gray stubborn hawk
Who floats alone beyond the frozen vines;
And what I dream of are the patient deer
Who stand on legs like reeds and drink that wind; –
They are what saves the world: who choose to grow
Thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.
*Mary Oliver, who captures nature and the natural world so beautifully. My garden is trying to be the place to which birds return year after year. I have planted many flowering bushes and plants around and about, with annual intent to add more. I have been saying for twenty years that an interest in bird watching is a sign of old age. So be it. I am old. Oldish. And, I know that bird populations are in distress, through loss of habitat, climate change, pollution, and domestic and feral cats let loose to literally kill millions of birds annually. Please, please, please if you are a feline lover, keep your cats indoors! Fewer birds = more bugs, y’know! More bugs = more bites and, potentially, more and more easily spread disease. Just say no, Kitty.
