It’s All About Sex

Incest, rape, and other inappropriate acts of physical contact were more commonplace in my early years than you could ever imagine. In my experience, in the so-called ‘Permissive Society’ of the ‘Swinging Sixties,’ sex was reduced to grubby groping and other whispered dirty secrets in the dark corners of cigarette-end-littered bikesheds.

As for sex education, one of my best friends told me that you could only get a girl pregnant if you kissed her whilst she was lying flat on her back on a hard plank!

Another thirteen-year-old boy I knew believed that by giving his girl a bath of milk and whisky he could get rid of an unwanted foetus!

At home, we fared no better. One day my younger brother asked my mother what pregnant meant. Mum came over all embarrassed and told my brother to ask our Dad.

Dad blustered a little and then told him that it was like when a dog was going to have pups.

My brother blurted out “I’m going to kill Johnny Jones. He said he couldn’t come out to play because his mum is pregnant and they haven’t even got a dog!” Ahhhh, such innocence. He was lucky.

At the age of ten, I was sexually abused by my teenage eldest sister. In later years, I discovered she had also abused a younger sister and another younger brother.

My co-abused brother once told me about his experience of being anally raped as a child by a bus driver and a mate of his. What shocked me to hear was that although such an act is abusive, period, my brother claimed to have enjoyed the experience. I never knew if that was simply a case of bravado, or actually true.

I don’t know if it was the same for girls, but from what I could gather, the boys of my generation were never given any sort of sex education, not at home or school.

As well as being abused by my sister, I was also abused by a much older male neighbour. It is perhaps for those reasons that I never had sex until I was twenty-one years old. I guess I just did not trust anybody enough to allow them to get anywhere near me.

Of course, at ten years old, I didn’t know that what was done to me was wrong. It wasn’t a painful experience, but that is not to say that it wasn’t hurtful, at least on an emotional level.

Years later my co-abused brother and sister wanted to take legal action against our abusive eldest sister and asked me to support them, which I agreed to. It may not be widely known that there isn’t any statute of limitation on those old cases. However, in the end, the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) in the UK declared that it was not in the public interest to prosecute. In other words, they were not prepared to spend money from the public purse for an ordinary nonentity. Perish thought that the reason why no action was taken was that the abuser was a female, and that does not go with the stereotypical narrative that all men are abusers and all women are the victims.

My brother and I were left with the impression that unless it was a case involving a famous person with a head to be scalped, just for the fame of it, it was a complete waste of time attempting to launch legal action against the perpetrator of any long past abuser.

I am sure that that is one of the reasons a great many old cases go unreported. People see it as a waste of time having to remember something they would rather forget only to see it declared as unworthy of any sort of justice.

In turn, that is no doubt why a lot of present-day cases go unreported. Why go to all that trouble for nothing? Perhaps that is also why present-day perpetrators continue to offend. They know that in all likelihood, nothing of ill consequences will come of it.

In terms of attitudes towards sex in the UK, that country, or at least in England, is that even to this day it is dominated by Victorian attitudes. 
In those days contraception, infidelity and incest were all frowned upon. In addition, Queen Victoria did not believe lesbianism existed. Which was why men got severely punished and women got away with it.

What all of this resulted in was the attitude that sex was a forbidden fruit. And we all know what happens when you forbid something. This simply makes it more desirable and therefore more rampant. European neighbours were not in any way affected by those attitudes and were therefore more open about such things, which in my opinion is a lot healthier.

One final telling curiosity of my childhood past; as a result of my big sister’s abuse, I did go on to develop big sister fantasies for a time.