Sam is in his mid thirties and lives in London with his fiancée.

My mum and dad were, shall we say, refugees from unhappy families, who both were from North London, and they left at the end of the 60’s to find a better life outside London away from their families. So they had a bit of a nomadic existence for about 3 or 4 years, by which time myself and my sister were born, and then came to Herefordshire in 1972/73, something like that, and my dad worked as an electrician and my mum looked after us. I would say that my dad was a very distant figure, so he just wasn’t there – he was into family life when we were small but not much after that and... problems between him and my mum which were never really resolved. Therefore he sought his entertainment elsewhere, if you know what I mean. And so in terms of all those things you want dads to do, like teach you this, teach you that – never happened. And so I felt like I grew up in some sort of paternal vacuum. All I felt was that whatever I did was never very interesting to him. And what he wanted me to be interested in, I wasn’t interested in. So I suppose giving you the background to this particular event, that probably explains quite a lot of why I felt so really under-confident.

I became aware of my dad’s infidelity when I was 12, maybe 10, 11 or 12. And in his sock drawer he kept a letter from his mistress, or from this woman he’d been having an affair with, which I found aged about 11 or 12. And that was kind of… I knew unconsciously that he, you know, that there were issues between him and my mum, but it really brought it home to me. I don’t know if she knew about the identity of that letter and where it was, but she certainly knew that he’d been playing away - yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, and he’d had maybe 4,5,6 affairs so...

They separated Christmas 1983 and then 4 months later my mum found out that he’d been having an affair with one of her best friends for two years. And what was supposed to be just a trial separation, it became obvious that it was forever. And, yeah, it was sort of a pretty horrible, horrible year. I was 13, turning 14. And so what I remember at that point was a lot of isolation, a lot of isolation, and, well, where we lived was right out in the sticks, and so I would come home from school and I’d be really left to my own devices a lot. There was a lot of time to be with myself, but I didn’t find that comfortable at all, so I always tried to kind of express it outwardly rather than sit and reflect – I didn’t ever want to reflect on things, didn’t ever want to feel sad. So I found as many things to possibly do as I could. And… so yeah, so I was kind of insular without being introverted, if you know what I mean.

I learned about sex from friends. There was one kind of classic 1980’s sex education lesson where a youngish biology teacher said ‘Alright guys, write all the questions you want and I’ll answer them one by one.’ And it was just excruciating, excruciating. Because it was the trendy vicar syndrome and, you know, I can’t remember but somebody basically gave him a really hard time with a question, you know, like - not to this extent, but sort of a milder version of - you know: ‘When you take it in the mouth, do you swallow Sir?’ Hah, hah. So it was lame. Just awful. I didn’t learn anything at all from it.

A lot of my friends, um, were enthusiastic readers of top shelf magazines, so they’d kind of get into that – that was your anatomy lesson. But I never really… that kind of visual porn never really did it for me, so I never wanted to look at those magazines that much. So I suppose I didn’t have that sort of biological awareness of where things were that my friends obviously got – thinking OK, well I’ve seen enough of them, so I know that that’s where your aiming for, you know, that’s where the mission’s heading. So just thinking about it, I don’t know. I don’t know where I found information from – I couldn’t tell you. Nothing from my family, no, nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Alright, I remember my friend Tim saying – we were on a football tour so we would have been about 12/13 - and I remember the phrase, ‘Here lads,’ and we were like ‘What?’ He says ‘Yeah, I’m gonna do it in my bed I reckon.’ And we all went ‘What?’ And he said 'I’m going to spunk up in my bed,’ and we were like ‘Hah, hah… What?’ And I remember thinking what’s he going to do? And him going into his hotel room and he was all very proud of himself and that kind of stuff, and there was this kind of - you know Swarfega? It’s got that kind of gritty substance - so I was sort of presented with this stuff that looked, that looked like it should be egg white, but it had this Swarfega quality looking at it, I mean, what the hell is that? Where did that come from? And this was Tim's spunk. Which he was very proud of. Good lad. And so I... I, so yeah, so that was that.

OK, so he produced this stuff that I was fairly freaked out about. And then about 4 months / 6 months later I had a wet dream and I was quite freaked about by that, and my main priority is that I didn’t want anybody to know. I didn’t want anybody to see the evidence of this. That was really embarrassing to me: the whole thing that like sheets were sticky and I didn’t wear pyjamas or anything like that. And I was thinking, if this is going to happen again… I think it did happen once or twice and I remember whipping the sheets off and trying to put them in the wash basket or put them in the washing machine so my mum didn’t even see them, so no evidence could be seen. And then about, yeah, around the same time, routing around the back of the airing cupboard, I put my hands on something plasticky and pull out a pair of plastic pants, the sort that babies and toddlers wear over nappies. And the fact was that they were really big. And I was thinking well, how come they’re so big? - and remembering that a friend of the family had come to visit and brought their son, who was probably 6 or 7 and wearing them at night. And I thought, if they fit, this would be a really good way of sorting it out. So I sort of spirited them back to my bedroom, shut the door, made sure no one else was about, and put them on. And they fitted actually quite fine. And so I thought all right, that’s good, I’m going to try wearing these tonight and see if that works. So I did it that night, and again, made sure no one else was around, made sure my light was off so no one’s going to come in, and put them on. And then thought that I would just fall asleep and that would be fine and it wouldn’t be a problem. But what happened was, putting them on, they felt really nice, so I got this fairly huge erection. And started, without knowing how to do it, started kind of masturbating. And without knowing really what I was doing, sort of just a sense memory that boys have, made myself ejaculate. And initially it felt amazing and at that point, I didn’t really understand, I just knew it felt good, and pretty much fell asleep. And then did it the next night, and then the next night. And the next night. And what I did was I started to get a bit worried that I was enjoying it, but how much were the plastic pants involved? So I took them off and tried doing it without them and it still felt good, but not anywhere near as good. So on they went again and I was sort of enthusiastically doing it for about 2 months and then they split, and I was really gutted. So I thought, OK, what do I need to do? However, I found out the solution, I went to the local chemist, and suddenly, and heart beating massively at this point, saw that there were all these plastic pants there and all in age groups, and the largest ones were 3-5. And I was thinking well, maybe that would work, so I bought them, got them home, and I was fairly skinny, I’m sort of 12/13/14? 12/13 at this point, but still skinny enough, and they fitted perfectly. And so there it was. So basically, you know, I’d wear them, masturbate in them as regularly as possible, until they’d split and then go and get a new pair.

And I was aware of girls and I knew there were certain girls I was really attracted to, but I was so scared of the whole process of getting involved, that I just couldn’t approach them. And I had this, this really tough dichotomy of being verbally incredibly articulate, and very confident, you know, as friends of mine subsequently told me, scarily so, intimidatingly so. So, the verbal ability, and yet feeling entirely the opposite physically. So, as much verbal confidence as I needed to be witty and blah, blah, blah, and put people down and assert myself, but absolutely nothing, nothing physically. And what I now realize, things that girls said to me which were kind of almost come-ons, saying, 'You know I’d be interested in having a go…' I either didn’t see it, or I didn’t acknowledge it, saying, no, they can’t possibly, they can’t possibly have felt that way. So there it is. I’ve got this kind of public persona as being, you know, kind of quite smart and quite prickly and, sort of verbally beyond my years, and then I’m going home and in my private life, feeling way younger and smaller that everyone else, and then kind of compounding it by kind of infantilising myself with these baby pants. And that’s pretty much the story of a lot of my early to mid teenage years.

The other thing that happened was that I was living this massive duality of a life. OK, that’s a really major thing and I mean real duality. And what I did was, unfortunately, I started to have these really intense relationships with girls, that never ever became sexual. There was a girl called Christine who, if you can imagine this, looked like a local 16 year old version of Daryl Hannah, and she floated my boat. So for me, it wasn’t like I had this completely all encompassing fetish that meant I didn’t care about anyone else, it’s what I did as a viable substitute, because I just didn’t feel like I was ever going to get off with anybody. But you know, I wanted Christine big time, and yet it just didn’t happen. And then I got into what Chris Rock brilliantly calls ‘The Friend Zone’ and just ruined it. And then, after Christine, I kind of realized that perhaps she wasn’t as Daryl Hannah-ish as I wanted her to be. I then suppose I started looking around for a new target, or a new object of my affections, and got very friendly with Maddie. And then the pattern was unfortunately really set. We just developed this ridiculously intense and you know, teenage relationship that was as powerful as it needed to be and ... very, very deep connection, but always, the bollocks at the centre was that there was no sex involved, So having this ridiculous emotional intimacy but none of the physical intimacy to go along with it. And I internalized this completely as she just wants to be my friend, but she thinks I’m really ugly, or thinks I’m really unattractive. And I was totally hung up on the physicality of it, that I’m too skinny, too this, and too under-developed muscularly and I now look at it and I now think that the one thing that girls cannot cope with are boys who are really physically unconfident. You can be the biggest munter in the world, and my friend Mark was a skinny little runt, but he got laid like a nutter! It pissed me off so badly...

And so what I was having was, I had this secret life where I was able to sort of gain sexual pleasure, but it wasn’t in the way I wanted. Or it wasn’t in the way I needed. Here’s the issue – not just this sense of feeling physically unconfident, but deeply sort of ashamed as well because, I don’t know, if you had a sort of, a fetish for boots or something like that, even, kind of, women’s underwear has got a sense of being adult about it – but sort of feeling like a baby? Or feeling like…there’s just no kind of like, there’s no strength in it – there’s no sense of like, “Here’s me in a rubber gimp mask.” Even that’s got something to it, but, you know: baby pants? Rubbish. So that just mirrored the sense of inadequacy inside. I don’t think it drove it; it was a symptom not the cause. But you know, what better metaphor for feeling less, and younger, and smaller, and more insignificant than everybody else?

By about 17/18 I don’t really remember having masturbated in plastic pants. I wasn’t having sex, but at least I was starting to get off with girls. And also, I sort of look back and this is the other ridiculous thing, how I could have such a negative self image, when actually I was getting off with quite attractive girls. I got off with Susie who went on to be a model – cha ching! Now you would think that that would give me enough confidence. It didn’t. And whether it was a fear of getting more intimate or whether it was a physical fear of body parts, or whether I just didn’t want to take off my clothes because I didn’t want them to see my body. It just never really got past what I suppose is second base, I don’t know – which is rubbish.

I went at 19 to University. It was a terrible year. I came back to Herefordshire. Had another terrible year. Had what I see as quite a depressed year: getting up really late, going to sleep at 5/6 o’clock in the morning- classic depression really. And I thought I really needed to sort myself out. And I went to see a counsellor for three months. And just talked about all the insecurities ... blah blah blah. Finished counselling in May, and lost my virginity two weeks later.

I was 21 – I don’t remember specifically, um, but, 21, 2 months, and 13 days. Anywhere between 19 and 16 hours depending on technically judge as the actual moment itself (laughs).

Ok so, I met a girl called Carol, and Carol was a folk singer, very, very good folk singer, and she wanted a guitarist partner... And so I played guitar with her and she sang and we had a little act and went to the folk clubs which were hilarious, but that’s another story. Part of this folk scene included a girl that we’ll call Sally, because it’s her real name*. She dumped me so she can fuck off (laughs). So, Sally was kind of cute and elfin, and quite kooky. And we used to go around the house, like a load of us, and she was particularly enamoured by the fact that I didn’t take the folk thing too seriously. A lot of them were really into it, and I used to do impressions of all of them, because I just.... they were so fucking ludicrous. You know, when the rest of it was all about acid house and that, they were stuck in this ludicrous time warp. Anyway, she had a lot going for her. She was small and cute and kooky, she was elfin, she had her own house, she thought I was hilarious and witty and intelligent and funny, and she had a very, very gorgeous black Labrador dog called Sid, who I just adored. However, I didn’t think of her as a possible sexual partner because by that time actually, to be quite honest, I was really quite enamoured of Carol. But she was married - very unhappily married - but she had a five-year-old daughter, so it wasn’t going to happen.

And anyway, after - this was about 6 months after being involved in this thing - we were at a night club and it had this folk club and we got talking about stupid things and the line that started it was - 'It really annoys me,' - she says, 'about how stupid people are when they want to have sex with each other, why do they have to go around this really absurd mating ritual?' And I was going, 'I couldn’t agree with you more…it’s so ridiculous.' Just not… being so unattuned to the female psyche that I didn’t get what she was saying in a million years. I didn’t have a clue. I thought she was just being sort of silly and flirty and just purely theoretical, abstract. Talking around it – no, didn’t understand the ways of the woman. At all. She said 'People should just come out and say "would you like to have sex?" And you know, then you could go, "Yes please."’ And I think something in me twigged, and I said, ‘Do you want to have sex?’ and she said ‘Yes please’. And I went, huh? (laughs) and then it hit me, fuck – you're serious aren’t you? And I hadn’t… I don’t know my modus operandi had been get to know somebody, get really obsessed with them and get really besotted with them and just talk and become really connected with them and, I’d had a laugh with this girl, and she was not unattractive, but it came from left field. Thinking OK…

First thing, because I was a good boy and I recognized all the AIDS messages: went to the toilets and got some condoms. I thought, ok, yeah, ok, I’m on it. And she said 'I’ve got to go do some stuff so I’ll see back at my house about 10 o’clock.' And I went 'Yeah, sure, fine, good, no problem, see you there, 10 o’clock it is, 10, o’clock, that’s the hour after 9, one before 11, 10 o’clock your house, yes, I’ll be there, you’ll be there...' And she went off, and I thought, OK, this is kind of abstract…she’s saying she wants to have sex with me – I’m going to have sex. I hadn’t planned to have sex with her… I’m going to have sex. OK.

And so then I went to her house, and it was all done in a kind of, imagine a sort of romantic comedy from the thirties. So it was like 2 actors knowing what they’re going to do, but sort of talking around it: 'Where shall we start to have sex? Oh, let’s start here, that will be fine.' So anyway, we started kissing, and that was fine, I’d done that enough times before to know I was alright with that, and so we kissed. And that was good. And I can’t remember what she said, but it was something like, 'Let’s take it upstairs...' So we went to the bedroom. And she sort of had a hippie, kooky bedroom, lots of candles… Now I can’t remember how I felt in terms of nakedness – I can’t remember, but it seems to me that I just did it. I just, yeah, took my clothes off as she took her clothes off, or we stripped down to underwear or something like that. And it was quite cool, you know, sort of, I don’t remember thinking I’m touching a naked body, I’m going further than I’ve ever gone before! It was just like, I’m on a mission and this is part of the mission, and, OK, now I’ve reached that stage, it’s complete and now I’m to the next stage...

What flipped me out was when it actually started to become real like: I’m actually going to have to put my penis in her vagina and do stuff. Now no sex education tells you… you can read Joy of Sex, but quite frankly once you looked at the beardy guy, you don’t want to look at any more – that’s not sexy – he’s got a beard! That’s wrong in so many ways. I didn’t remember any of it – it’s not like I revised it, it’s not like I went through and took the the bullet points saying summarize it, you get full marks if you actually remember you need to go around. Clitoris? Who? No – I personally I didn’t know any of this, and that’s when the nerves started to kick in and I was thinking what am I fucking doing here? What am I doing? What am I doing? Didn’t know. And then, of course, the major problem was I could not get an erection, and without feeling scared, then suddenly being aware - I am terrified, I cannot get an erection. And then thinking, after getting this far, if I say to this girl I’m really sorry, I can’t get an erection, it’s just going to be lame. I hadn’t told her I was a virgin, nothing was said. I’m thinking, I’ve got to keep her interested. You know, I’ve got to step up to the plate here.

So the one thing that really saved me is that I was a real avid reader of Cosmopolitan. That’s secret’s perhaps even more shameful than the plastic pants. I love women’s magazines! I used to read them avidly. And so things like 'What to tell your man when…' All this kind of stuff. And so I improvised. And so when I think back now, it was a great performance. I remember thinking (as if reading from Cosmo) ‘A little bit of inability to move is really exciting, try to get your lover to tie you up’ and all this kind of stuff. And because she was so petite, I was able to lie on my back, she was lying on top of me, and I basically had her arms down like that (demonstrates) and my legs were over her legs so she couldn’t move, and I was manipulating in a general area... Shall we say, she was loving it! And I did not know what I was doing, it was purely by chance. And so I kept on trying all these things that I remembered, thinking right... how about that? She must have thought she hit gold dust! And so you know, it was like the longest foreplay ever because I still couldn’t get an erection. Nothing I was doing… and I wouldn’t let her do anything to me because then she’d see no erection and think, what’s going on? Wow. It was all about me doing stuff for her. And I was thinking, I don’t know (as if reading from Cosmo) ‘a little bit of role play is really good; get your lover to smack you,’ and all this kind of stuff. So I figured, try that. So I was like, ‘Have you been bad, have you been naughty?' Thinking she’s going to just look at me and go, 'What? What are you talking about?' Instead she looks at me and goes, “Yes, I’ve been a very very bad girl!” And this kind of stuff. So I start spanking her, and that’s getting her really turned on, and so you know – it was like: keep going, keep improvising, keep going! And so I can’t believe she didn’t end up saying, 'I’m too tired now,' but she seemed to be enjoying it enough. And then finally, it was probably at least 4 in the morning, I managed to get this kind of workman-like erection and I cannot remember what it was actually like. It was more important to do it than to do it, if you know what I mean. It was more important to have it done than to do it. So that was probably the least exciting part of the whole thing. For me and for her probably, I don’t remember how long I lasted, probably not very long. But she’d been so foreplayed I suppose she wasn’t that bothered. And that was it. And then: woke up, and leaving the house it was really like: I have crossed the Rubicon; nothing will ever be the same; the world has changed. Which of course it hadn’t. For me, it had changed profoundly, because I then – I probably came on way too strong with her and it’s like ‘wow, we’ve had sex, you’re my girlfriend now right?' And that wasn’t her interest. She had an interest in basically having sex with boys younger than her, that was her thing. Because then she just totally withdrew and went off with somebody else who was even younger than me, that kind of thing. And I was sort of really pissed off about it...

I didn’t look back. I went to university and sort of had sex with about three different girls in a term, which for students isn’t that much maybe, but for me it was. So it was almost like this straight jacket that had held me back had been taken off, and I suddenly thought no there’s nothing physically wrong with me so I can’t do this, so I just did it, and I just went on, and went from famine to feast really. But it all came from that one person saying ‘I want to have sex with you, you are an OK person to have sex with.’ And that broke all my physical insecurities. And to be honest, I mean, it’s a word that people shy away from so much because they just don’t want to deal with it, but inadequacy. Inadequate. I’m not adequate enough to do this. And I think that’s the secret that lies at the heart of so many men, thinking I’m not man enough. What is a man? Do you need power tools to confer that status, do you need a shed? What do you need? It’s an internal fear, isn’t it? And, that was it. It was like, I can do this now. And the other thing was I told her, a couple of months later, Sally. She said, you came on so strong, blah blah blah, and I said, ' 'Cause I was a virgin.' She said, 'No you weren’t.' I said, 'Yes I was.' She said, 'No you weren’t.' And I think she said something like, 'You were too good to be a virgin.' Or, 'You knew too much to be a virgin.' And I was like 'Nope, virgin.' And then she went, 'Ok, that explains it.' So there you go…

Do I wish I could change me at that age? Yeah. Profoundly. If I’d had more physical confidence it would have happened a lot earlier and that would have been better. I think the optimum age is about 16 really. If I’d had more physical confidence you know, I might not have retained friendships, but actually I don’t think that would have bothered me so much. I think I’d have cared more about saying I was able to go to bed with that person, than I was a good friend to that person. Yeah, fuck friendship. That’s terrible, isn’t it? Fuck friendship man, I don’t need the friend zone. And you know what, I know this sounds awful but it would have helped if I was more of a bastard. If I had a son, I’d say, be nice, but don’t be too nice. Don’t be too nice, keep a bit back. Definitely. Because actually my experience was teenage girls do not respect boys who are totally respectful of them. They do not. They just didn’t. Maybe they would now, maybe things have changed now sufficiently that that would be very different, but then, uh uh, they just didn’t. So if you want to get some action, you don’t want to be in the friend zone, then - you know - don’t be so nice.

* Sally's name, has been changed along with other names and identifying details.

Lavender’s Story

(Answers phone) Hello, hi mum – listen can I call you back later because I’ve got someone here? Are you ok? You sound a bit huffy - are you a bit puffed out? All right – yeah, I’ll phone you in a little while. Ok, bye.

Ok then – um, ok, so I’m 45, I think, and I have two children and two grandchildren. Yeah my son is 14 and my daughter is 27, my grandson is nearly 4 and my granddaughter is nearly 2. And I’m - wait for it – an Artist! And before that I was a homeopath; well obviously, you know, it hasn’t disappeared that side of me, but I decided to stop practicing and focus on my painting, focus on my creativity and so that’s what I’m doing at the moment – being poor and painting. Uh, what else do you want to know? Well you know, you could describe yourself for hours couldn’t you?

Ok, my family background is a serious mess- there was a lot of disfunctionality in my family. My mother was the daughter of a guy who was in the navy and a woman that had a lot of mental health problems. And when my mother was born her mother kind of got seriously mentally ill and put in a hospital and her father was away in the war and so she was in an orphanage, she spent most of her childhood in an orphanage. And came out of the orphanage round about the age of 13 to discover that her father had a new partner and 7 sons that she didn’t know about, and so her relationship with her mother was always very difficult – her mother didn’t really want her. And um, and her dad was kind of never around.

So um, my father’s family – he was brought up by his uncle and aunt thinking that they were his mother and father. When he was 12 his father – his adopted father who he thought was his father – went into hospital for a minor operation and died on the operating table, which was really hard for him I think. And when he was 15 he found out that he wasn’t who he thought he was, his parents weren’t his parents, they were his aunt and uncle, and his real parents were: the black sheep of the family, who was a prostitute, and one of her clients. So that kind of did his head in.

So then my parents, my mother uh, they married when she was 19, she had my brother when she was 21, and then she got milk fever after he was born and had mental problems from then on. I mean they didn’t really know how to treat milk fever in those days; it’s what they call post-partum psychosis now. She just turned into someone else and my dad couldn’t deal with it. So she was in and out of mental hospitals and it was, you know, my brother was born in 52, I was born in 62, so it was a time when they were experimenting with a lot of things. So she had lots of different drugs, she had lots of electro-convulsive therapy she had…culminating in her having a lobotomy when I was one and a half. She was sterilized when I was 6 months old against her will, and - they didn’t want her to have any more children. So all through my early childhood she was in and out of hospitals and on and off various different types of psychoactive drugs. My father divorced her when I was 3. So from 0-3 I was passed around a lot of people, when my mother was in hospital and my father was working – so I was kind of looked after by neighbours, and then my father had a relationship with another woman so I guess she would have looked after me some of the time, and my mum some of the time – and then there was the divorce. And then um, so, after the divorce, I think, to begin with my brother: I have a brother who’s ten years older and a sister who’s 7 years older and me, and we were all living with my mum, but she was too ill to cope and my brother was kind of nicking things and getting in trouble with the police and so then my dad had all of us, and then my mum came to collect me for a weekend and just never took me back. So then I stayed with her, and my brother and sister stayed with my dad. So I was with my mum and she was in and out of mental hospitals and I was in and out of children’s homes for that early bit.

Then when I was 5 my stepfather came along and I think they met through a single’s agency, and he was a paedophile and I think the fact that she had me was one of the main reasons he was there. And he started grooming me from before the point where he got – I mean before he married her, before he was seriously kind of involved with her, he was already on my case. And he was around, so from then on until I was 11 and um (sighs) …so the next bits much more difficult to talk about really, because there was a lot of sex in my early childhood and it was all very weird, but he didn’t fuck me. So he didn’t take, he tried to take my virginity one time and he couldn’t because I was too small, but he did a lot of weird things and um, because of how my mother was, I mean I think I was quite a neglected child, and here was an adult who was prepared to give me love and attention and there was a price to pay but I think when you’re a neglected child you pay whatever price is going because you just need that love and attention. And of course at the age of 5 you don’t really have the kind of judgment of you know, this is ok and that isn’t ok. So um, a lot of things happened that I still feel really, you know, horrified about, and um, I think for a lot of people – there’s all sorts of different kinds of sexual abuse – he never hurt me, I mean he never…I mean there were times when it hurt, but he never hurt me on purpose, he wasn’t trying to hurt me, he was just trying to get me hooked in to sex.
Um, so he kind of seduced me into it, so if at any point I was to say no I don’t want to do that, I – then it would stop. So everything that happened…so you’re left with this sense of why didn’t I say no? That kind of stays in there – that actually, that in some way I was…what’s the word? Um, and you can see how even talking about it makes me (anxious noise) mong out. Um – yeah – complicit…and you know, yeah… well complicit’s a good word.

And at the point when I discovered, at about the age of tenish, when I realized, recognised, that I didn’t want to do it and said, that’s it, I’m not doing this anymore, of course then it stopped. And then his relationship with my mother fell to pieces and he left.

But there were a lot – I mean you know, there’s lots of awfulness in there and I don’t want to go on about if for too long, um. I don’t think my mother consciously knew, I think she kept it unconscious because she couldn’t deal with it. And I think there were certain clues that you’d have to be wearing bl…I mean, for example, I knew that he’d had a vasectomy about two years before she did. To me, if my 9/10 year old daughter knew that my husband had had a vasectomy, and she’s know for a couple of years and I’ve just found out, that’s a little weird. And we used to spend hours, we used to spend, you know, we used to disappear off into the Nissan hut – what did she think we were doing? You know in the war they used to build these air raid shelters out of corrugated iron – into the banks – well there was one of those next to the house, you know we lived in a house that had a field either side and it had a Nissan hut and we used to go and disappear in there which is where, you know, things… What did she think we were doing? What did she think was going on, I wonder? So I don’t know that she didn’t know on any level, I feel that she may have known on some level and really really did not want to know. And just shut it out. But she was very ill, you know, she wasn’t truly compos mentis at any point. He got her off the, she was on a lot of drugs when he first came on the scene – he got her off the drugs and she stayed off drugs and out of hospital for the rest of, well no, she didn’t stay off drugs, but she stayed out of hospital for the rest of my childhood. But she was still very very manic-depressive, so she was still swinging from one extreme to the other. But there was a short period of time when they first got together that she was kind of a bit more stable, so maybe a year or two.

I guess I must have had exposure to all the same things as all my contemporaries but to give you the degree of my sexual education, when I finally lost my virginity to someone I wanted to lose it to when I was 16, my mother found out because she overheard me talking to some girls – she had this little conversation with me, you know like ‘Oh, you naughty girl, are you being careful?’ you know. To which I replied gaily – ‘Oh it’s ok, I can’t get pregnant because I never come.’ So that’s how educated I was sexually (laughs) you know, you can’t get pregnant if you don’t come. She must have taught me about periods, because I don’t remember any trauma involved in all of that, um, and…but actually my step father was not the first person to sexually abuse me, there were other people before that, and after that. Ok, so the first person was a girl who my mum had to baby-sit who used to just get a kick out of making me cry. I was very small then, I must have been three or four. And um, she would poke things up me and just enjoy making me cry and her particular thing was to make me cry and then to try and make me tell my mum that it was somebody else who made me cry when my mum came home. And eventually somehow my mum saw through this and stopped employing this girl, and very shortly after that, this girl was taken into care because she locked two small children in a shed overnight. And then they realized that she was kind of like scarily off the rails and um…her name was Monica. And um, so she was probably the first person, then there was a boyfriend of my sister’s, who…my sister lived with my dad in Jersey, and nothing really awful happened, but there was inappropriate behaviour, to the degree of – well, I must have been 4/5 and we ended up sharing a bed. He’d come… he was taking me on the airplane to visit my dad and brother and sister, I don’t know why, but anyway, he was the adult that was going to accompany me from England to Jersey and we ended up in my mother’s house in a bed together and I remember him showing me his penis and being completely overwhelmed by the enormity of it, like, my God, how can anyone walk around with something so huge and red and hard and enormous knocking around between their legs. I’d never seen one before and I was really quite… concerned (laughs). Almost horrified. And then during the period of time when my stepfather was around we lived near the sea and there were holiday camps and there was more that one occasion when some dirty old man would… I don’t know, I think when you’re an abused child somehow there’s a beacon, there’s a light flashing on your forehead that says, you know, ‘Try me because you’ll probably get away with it here.’ And so I would just be spotted by people. I think maybe if you’re just hanging around a lot and you’re a kid and obviously nobody’s there looking after you, I don’t know. But there was more than one occasion when some dirty old bloke would manage to get me behind some shed somewhere and fiddle about with me. And somehow I managed to, uh, managed to stay alive.

And, you know, but with my stepfather, it was very weird – I mean he did weird things. He showed me for example, a piece of newspaper…He told me he was part of a Satan Circle and he was trying to teach me to be able to use my will to manipulate other people. And he told me that there was a ghost that lived in the house that was with me always, always, all the time –heard everything I said, saw everything I did, knew everything I thought – and was my guardian angel and had been killed by her mother because she had fallen in love with her stepfather and had a relationship with her stepfather, so her mother had poisoned her – this ghost that was my guardian angel. And he showed me a newspaper cutting about a child – a boy, a little boy – who had been crucified and burnt to death by a Satan Circle and he said ‘This is my lot, but don’t worry they won’t do this to you because I’m looking after you,’ you know…His idea was that one day I was going to be introduced to this circle of people and I would be the princess and I would be, you know. So it was all really deeply sick. He lived through the war, he was out in Burma. He was one of, ah, 14 children, his mother had 14 children in Nottingham in sort of a mining family. Um, his mother was supposedly a medium, um…I think there was a lot a lot a lot of weirdness in his life. And I suspect that he was probably abused as a child and I suspect that he sussed me out as one of those children who is interested in magic and the mysterious, and used that completely and utterly to manipulate me. So he didn’t have to frighten me by using physical force. He hemmed me in by saying… ‘Obviously you can’t tell anybody about the things we do together because if you do then my magic circle will know about it and then you might not be safe, but don’t worry, I’ll protect you, but you know, just don’t tell anyone because…’ So it was very dark and yucky. And he would get me to do kind of ritualistic things and… so I was quite a disturbed kid. And I think the signs were there if anybody had bothered to notice. And it’s kind of weird to me now to look back and think how come nobody noticed? I was a child who came from a broken family where my mother was in and out of mental hospitals all through my early childhood, where were Social Services? How come nobody ever kind of checked up on me?

At school? I have no idea what was known and what wasn’t known. You don’t get told that kind of stuff when you’re a kid and it’s all a long time ago and a long way away and I have no idea. When I was, when I finally left home, I couldn’t bear to live with my mother any more by the time I got to 15, um, and I didn’t want to change schools and they had a little boarding – they had a girl’s boarding house and a boy’s boarding house -that ran along with school and they put me in there temporarily while they checked out my dad’s finances, so I was kind of there for a term and then when they did finally send my dad the form to fill in he was like: ‘(makes shocked noise) You can’t stay there! You have to come live with us.” And so I went to live in Hounslow. And um, I don’t know – but nobody ever talked to me, is the point, nobody ever said ‘Hi, I’m your social worker, just wanted to check in to see how you’re doing, how things are happening at home, you know’. You know, I missed a lot of school in the later years. I was a really good girl at school, worked very hard, was really into it, until about the third year when it all went (raspberry) which is funny because he’d left, he’d left by then but I just, yeah, I lost it. And I got into, a bit later on I got into smoking dope, but there was, around the 3rd/4th year (of secondary school), well especially the 4th year, I lost interest in school and so the reports that I was getting altered significantly and you’d think somebody would go, ‘Ok what’s going on with this kid, she’s top of the class for three years and now she’s off the rails, what’s going…’ Nobody, nobody ever. And you know, I told, when I was about ten, I told two of my best friends a bit about what had happened between me and my stepfather and they both said I was lying. They both told me I was lying and that I was probably a lesbian. So I never told anyone for a loooong time after that (laughs). So you know, it was never…

I don’t remember exactly when I finally told somebody, but there came a point in my very late teens/early twenties when I would kind of take delight in announcing rather shocking things at dinner parties where everyone else was all talking about this that and the other. You know, I would kind of say, yeah, hmm…just, as it came up, you know, tell us about your mother, ‘Ah well my mother had a lobotomy when I was one and a half,’ you know, ‘ya middle class shit pile, stick that in your fucking pipe and smoke it!’ (Laughs). It became a, not really in terms of being angry, just in terms of there’s a bit of me that feels as though I’ve come through a lot, really a lot, and done very well in terms of how my kids are, in terms of… I mean of course, I’m completely fucked up, I’m really fully aware of that, but I’ve had a lot of help and I’m a lot less of a mess than I could be. You know, I’m kind of somehow managing to be all right, considering. And so I think there was a time when I realized that actually there’s a few medals across my chest and that you know, people…um, it was ok, how ever shockingly I did it, it was ok to let people know that I hadn’t always had a comfortable existence (laughs).

Well, I guess around the time my stepdad left I was kind of looking at my spiritual orientation. So I’d gone to uh, Sunday school when I was very small, and ended up having a big row with the woman that ran Sunday school who tried to convince me that Jesus and God were the same person, and failed to explain it in such a way that I could understand what she meant. I got very angry with her and left. Then when I was very little I used to sneak into church when nobody was there because I liked being in church but…I didn’t really like all the blah blah. And then because I was doing all this supposedly black magic with my stepfather, and just uh, actually on my own terms really enjoying nature and enjoying being connected with the universe. We lived by the sea and the sea kind of saved my life really, and I wanted to be St Francis of Assisi and I wanted to speak the language of the birds and the animals and… not really compatible with black magic somehow (laughs). And I kind of ended up with the conclusion that really I didn’t want to do black magic; I wanted to do white magic. And I was doing a lot of reading, you know, CS Lewis and all that kind of stuff. So there was a kind of a… and then I guess I kind of had to put any overlay of kind of romanticism as a way of trying to reconnect with the innocent me. So I was very determined; I wasn’t going to lose my virginity until I’d seen a unicorn. You know, I believed in fairies, I believed in dragons…the whole thing of this world was just nonsense; the other imaginal world is where I spent my time because that was a kind of safe place. So it became known amongst my school friends: I was kind of the laughing stock at school really, that I refused to loose my virginity until I’d seen a unicorn. Um, and um (laughs), and then, I don’t know, what did happen? I slowly began to discover boys and the true feelings that go with real conscious sex, you know, real attraction between two equals rather than it being really about the pleasures of the flesh. It being about a kind of communion between two beings, I suppose, as I began to discover that stuff with boys… but I was still desperate for love, you know, desperate. And would still have, kind of I guess, paid whatever price… I did, you know, later on I went through quite a promiscuous period where I just thought if somebody wanted me I didn’t really know how to say no to them, you know. So yeah, there’s been phases and you know, spirals of it.

I um, I just got together with this lad who was really lovely, gentle, musician – just a lovely person and um, and I guess at 16 I was old enough to know that a unicorn was a… well I’d always been old enough, but I was able to make peace with the idea that you know, that seeing a unicorn was something that could happen on another level, and that it’s kind of symbolic of something rather than ah, needing to wait until I actually saw an actual unicorn, you know. And he was somebody who was kind of lived enough in the magical realm, and he was just gentle and lovely and so we agreed that he would take my virginity on my 16th birthday. And um, we… the school that I went to shared a swimming pool, an outdoor swimming pool, with the primary school that I had gone to. And we went to the swimming pool and had a swim and we lay in the sunshine…and he tried to take my virginity, and it kind of like, it didn’t really work and after a while we both kind of said, this isn’t really working is it, yes, well, never mind. And he got up and he set off a firework, and he said to me ‘Every year on your birthday, for the rest of my life, as long as I live, I’m going to set off a blue firework like this - I’m going to make a blue star for you’. How romantic is that! And then a few days later he took my virginity in my bed, in my house, which is a great way for things to happen. Um, so yeah, that was really nice.

I don’t think he was a virgin, but not far off it (laughs), yeah. I don’t think I told him anything about my history, but it’s a long time ago now, I may have done but I don’t think I did. I think I was still not telling anybody at that point. Just the shame, you know? You just felt forever tainted. And yeah, and particularly telling lovers is the very difficult thing to do – kind of choosing, when is it that you tell somebody who’s attracted to you or interested, at what point do you say and by the way, here’s this crock of shit that I’ve lived through. Do you wait until you’ve had wonderful sex a few times in a row (laughs)? Do you wait until you’ve already known them for a year or three? Or do you tell them straight away and frighten them off and watch them run for the hills? It’s kind of a weird one.

So I think I was, obviously, I was quite a damaged individual and I went through a few years of being just, it’s like, um, because I was lead into sex by my stepfather before I was anywhere near being of an age to lead myself into sex, there was a lot of kind of sexual awareness on one level, and no sexual awareness at all on another level. So often if a man, a boy, a man, was attracted to me, wanted me, was lusting after me, I would experience the lust without being able to locate the source of it. It was like I let people have me because they wanted me without having the realization that it was up to me too. I could decide. I could say ‘You might fancy me but actually, I don’t fancy you so I’m not going to.’ Or I could stay with that feeling of being lusted after and just wait and see what happened. And, or I could explore it a little bit and then I could say ‘Ok that’s enough now, stop, back off – come see me tomorrow and I’ll see whether I want to let you kiss me and feel me up a bit more.’ It was just like there is no boundary and obviously if someone wants me, well help yourself. There were all these kind of experiences of people – men – finding me the most fascinating person they’d ever met, hanging on my every word and being completely devoted, and then shagging you, and then handing you your coat. And I didn’t get it – I just didn’t get it. So it happened a number of times in a row, and I was so confused. I couldn’t understand why you’d want to have sex with somebody unless you really liked them; why, if you really liked them, you would suddenly stop liking them just ‘cause you’d had sex with them? What was going on? It was like some secret that… and also, because they were all so clumsy, so I wasn’t really enjoying the sex I was having. Maybe that was it (laughs). You know… I’d had – my stepfather was in his 60’s, ok, when I was – when he came on the scene. So, and he’d kind of trained me up in oral and manual sex. So all the trimmings, I knew all about. And all these young men that I was having sex with, didn’t know anything at all about the trimmings, they only knew about meat and two veg. So I was kind of left with kind of like, you know – yes I enjoyed what happened, but it was… it never really hit the spot and – but mostly kind of emotionally really confused. I just didn’t get the thing that men just want to fuck someone. That they want to have as many conquests as they can. They didn’t want to have seriously good sex – you know this is how it seems, they don’t want to actually find out how to really have good sex with a person, they just want to kind of get another notch on their belt, and then move on. And I didn’t get it, I just so didn’t get it, and yet at the same time I was completely vulnerable to it every time. So I was kind of a bit mashed by that.

And also the other thing that would happen would be that if… I’d be in a relationship for… I mean let’s face it, when you’re 17 a relationship of 3 months is quite a long one; well it was for me. But it would get to a point where if I think I was kind of emotionally asleep, as a lot of teenagers are, and I think I would, rather than face the challenges within a relationship, when something difficult arose – rather than face that I would just run out of the relationship. I would just like, ‘This isn’t working, bye’. So I was doing it too, but not on the same level. So if things got a bit tricky or started to feel a bit awkward I’d leg it. And there were always more and more volunteers, you know, when you’re kind of 17 and kind of gorgeous, they’re always lined up – ready and waiting so there weren’t any long gaps in between. Those came later (laughs).

But I would say that here I am at 45 with a whole host of failed relationships behind me and I still don’t know how to relate and I still don’t know how to be properly in charge of my sexuality. Um, so it’s you know, it’s kind of life long.

Yeah, ok, so my daughter was born when I was nearly 19, uh and, I’d been together with her dad for a couple of months maximum when I got pregnant with her. But I so wanted a baby anyway – I wouldn’t have cared if I’d have had her on my own. But anyway, we had her together and lots about it was great; her birth was fantastic, he and I kind of had some difficulties right from the start but I hung on in there because I didn’t really want to be a single parent. Um…hung on in there. We moved out to France together, we moved from Brixton, you know, slap bang middle of the city, to right out in the middle of the countryside in France. We didn’t marry – he would have liked to have married me but we didn’t marry, and by the time she was two I had fallen in love with somebody else, and then I left him. Um and uh – I first fell in love when I was about four with Peter O’Toole, and then it was Yul Brenner, and then it was the boy in the next class up, and, you know, I fall in love at the drop of a hat, and it’s deep and meaningful, and can unravel me quite easily. And I didn’t face the challenges in that relationship either. Because there were things I found quite difficult with him – he was a person who lost his temper easily and rather than being able to meet that challenge and say this kind of behaviour is, well whatever, you know, work through whatever the issues were. I just slowly withdrew from him emotionally and then fell in love with someone else and then left him.

Um, and then that was my daughter’s father, and by the time Jack came along I’d been with his father four years already and had miscarried one child already and I thought I was home and dry. Because obviously there was my daughter from a previous relationship and we’d been together and we had this really nice home and I thought, you know, ok great. Then we got pregnant the first time and he was a bit kind of like –‘I feel trapped’ and then I ended up miscarrying anyway. So we’d been through that kind of, ‘cause it was his first child, we’d been through that. But when Jack came along I thought that the practice run had kind of been sorted and that actually he’d obviously got his head round it. But when I was 8 months pregnant he slept with my best friend and uh it all really seriously fell to pieces and I was really mashed to bits. Um and it was quite a difficult birth in some ways, very long. He was a very easy baby but he did wake me up every two hours for 8 months. But he was easy in the sense that he was delightful to be around, but he did wake me up every 2 hours for 8 months, and so I got kind of (makes crazy noise). And um so that relationship ended in a big mess. In fact it ended in a big mess twice because I tried to resurrect that family – foolish idea – and it happened all over again, in the same sort of style. Anyway.

Well – I guess my relationship with my kids is very open. Uh, and, I mean yeah, they’re my teachers and they’re both amazing and Jasmine’s whole experience has been so different from mine. I mean she’s had some difficult things to deal with in the sense that I split up with her dad and then he had a relationship with someone else and that – you know, there was kind of horrible things that happened that she witnessed when she was visiting their home, you know…she’s had difficult stuff to deal with but in terms of her relationship with sex, she’s a hell of a lot more uh, grounded in her sexuality, and empowered, you know. I mean she, you know, we did a whole thing when she had her first period. I mean she knew about it but it was like, her attitude and my attitude as well, was like ‘Wow’, you know, ‘You’ve become a woman - let’s celebrate!’ and when she did occasionally come across people… I mean when she had her first period she went around telling all these women that she knew ‘I’ve got my first period – I’m a woman now!’ and some women were like ‘Yeah – fantastic wow!’ and others were like ‘You poor thing’. And when she hit that she didn’t understand what their problem was – she didn’t get it. You know when people were commiserating with her that she was being subjected to ‘The Curse’ it wasn’t, you know, because that wasn’t the relationship that she had learnt – she didn’t feel like that about it. And when she was ready to…I have this wonderful memory of – she had a boyfriend, the boy who took her virginity was – I mean it also has a tragic ending sadly; it’s not an entirely happy story but still lovely. It was someone that she’d known from when she was very small – we’d lived near them in London, and then we met up again ‘cause they lived in Bath and we lived there and anyway… they began this relationship and it was very sweet, they were both 15 going on 16 and one evening – well, he came to stay at my house and he - he was just such a lovely lad – and he came and sat down, we all three were sat down at the table like this, and he said um, ‘Lavender,’ he said, ‘Jasmine and I have been thinking about having sex and I thought I would talk to you about it and see how you felt about it.’ And so I kind of said, ‘Well, that’s great and if you both feel that you’re definitely ready and that you’re kind of old enough and you feel you can handle it and be really gentle and caring with each other and that’s what you want to do and you’re sure that’s what you want to do, then that’s fantastic, you know, work away. And do you know everything that you need to know, kind of like have you thought about everything you need to think about?’ And they were both like ‘Yeah, no, we have and we’ve decided that’s what we want to do.’ ‘So well great, have a good time!’ Except that then his parents found out and decided that he and Jasmine should never be allowed to be alone together for more than 10 minutes ever again. I don’t know how it happened or why, I don’t know what it was that they didn’t like about my daughter or the situation but they then just really wouldn’t allow them to spend any time alone together. They weren’t even allowed to, you know, sit in a room for 10 minutes. And then, this went on for a couple of weeks and then my daughter and her boyfriend both decided that under the strain of this the relationship wasn’t kind of going to work and so they decided that they wouldn’t be together any more – it was kind of mutual decision. Then a very short time after that he got himself another girlfriend and a few days after he’d asked this other girl out, he got hit by a car and went into a coma and when he came round from the coma he didn’t remember that he’d split up with my daughter and he… anyway – it was a big mash up – I mean he nearly died and he did have to live again. He had to learn how to eat, how to walk, how to do everything. So, yeah, so my daughter’s had a lot to cope with and negotiate too. Yeah – and she’s very sexually empowered I would say. She’s, yeah…

My son? Oh I would answer any… I think if a kid is ready to ask a question they’re ready to hear the answer provided you pitch the answer at where they’re able to hear it. So, you know, obviously we’ve had lots and lots and lots of talks about sex – not as in ‘Right, now sit down boy because I think it’s time’, you know, just a natural kind of, when it comes up it gets talked about, and laughed about. You know, like most small boys, he went through various different periods of time when he thought sex was absolutely hilarious and needed to be joked about every given possible minute and there was nothing funnier than… he had this see saw thing with a man with a big shlong and a woman with enormous tits and when you moved it up and down they appeared to be having sex, you know, (sarcastically) such fun!

And occasionally we get into ‘Right, now I’m going to pontificate’ mode, you know? ‘There’s something you need to hear young man,’ you know – not quite like that, but sometimes I’ve got a bee in my bonnet and so I will get on my little soap box and talk about something or other – whatever it might be. It’s usually got that slight feminist undertone (laughs), or humanist perhaps I should say? But yeah, he’s quite happy to tell me how skilled he is at undoing girls’ bras with one hand. He’s 14. This morning he said, I can’t remember how it came up, but I made the comment of ‘you’ll do anything for money.’ I don’t remember what it was, no it was last night, and he wanted to play on his X box and somebody rang up and said could he baby-sit? I knew I wasn’t going to be able to persuade him to spend an hour away from his X box, but the fact that they were going to pay him to baby-sit meant that he was quite keen to do it, and I said to him, ‘Oh, you’d do anything for money,’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t do anything for money’. So we made a list of all the things he would rule out – that he wouldn’t do for money and he wouldn’t loose his virginity with an animal, was one of them he came up with (laughs). Yeah.

I hope it’s a hell of a lot healthier than the situation I inherited, yeah I hope so - I really hope so. You know, I’ve put a fair amount of effort into making sure that that was the case. Yeah.

No I’m not in a relationship right now… (Little girl voice) ‘I want my prince charming to take me to the castle and make all my dreams come true and live happily ever after.’ And I do, you know. I would like to be in a really whole, healthy, long lasting relationship that uh, that fed me and that fed the other person. And I’m not prepared to accept an unhealthy relationship that doesn’t do that and I haven’t met the person – I haven’t managed to manifest that with any of the people I have had relationships with. And so I’m just being in relationship with myself and, you know, there have been long periods of time when I’ve not been in relationship and there have been short periods of time where I’ve been, you know, since… the longest relationship that I’ve had was with my son’s father and when that fell to bits in the way that it did, since then I haven’t, I haven’t had a long term relationship, I haven’t really lived with anyone. There’ve been short-lived relationships that haven’t come to any, you know. So yeah, I’m lonely and I miss all of that lovely intimacy and sharing, but I love the autonomy of it – I love being in charge of my life and what happens and you know, it’s kind of like, I think the older you get the more difficult… the better you know yourself and so the less likely you are to want to compromise yourself to someone else. And so I would imagine that if you’ve grown up in a relationship with someone else – if you’ve met them in your youth and then you’ve matured together and you get to my age now, you know, 45, you would know somebody pretty well. And you kind of would have a good idea of what the easy bits that worked and what the difficult bits that needed to be worked on, and you know, the spaces and the full bits within the relationship and what you needed to find outside in your other relationships with friends, you know, and work and all the other things, and like I am aware that there are things missing in my life because I’m not in relationship. There’s a bit of me that… there is a bit of me that only finds fulfillment in that kind of deeply intimate relationship, and it’s a bit of me that’s starving hungry. Um, but there are lots of other bits of me and there are compensations to being (funny voice) a ‘spinster’. There are fantastic, you know, any mess that you see around you is mine or my son’s and it’s there because I’ve decided to let it be there, uh, you know. There’s lots that’s great about being alone, and lots that isn’t great. But then there’s lots that isn’t great about being in a relationship – even if it’s a great relationship, there’s still difficult things about it I guess so, yeah.

I just want to say, like you were saying before, sexual abuse is so prevalent, I mean there are such high numbers in our society and our culture and it’s so unlooked at, so undiscussed, and because it’s unlooked at and undiscussed, children continue to be vulnerable to it and will continue to be vulnerable to it until it’s a matter of general discussion. You know, it’s one of the ways in which human beings weird out, you know, people weird out in all sorts of, people wig out in all kinds of different ways and sex is one of the ways that they wig out because it’s such a big thing. Sex is huge. You know, there’s really really really really bad sex and there’s really really really really amazing sex and there’s everything in between and it’s huge, it’s huge, it’s huge on an animal level, it’s huge on a spiritual level, it’s even huge on an intellectual level. It’s a big subject. And until we get to the point of being able to educate ourselves, and free ourselves up with it enough to be able to be able to properly educate our kids… I think people mistake ignorance for innocence. I think there’s a real difference between ignorance and innocence – it’s possible to know a lot of things and yet be innocent. It’s possible to know all about sex – to know the mechanics of it and to know what it’s for – know all sorts of things about it without ever having done any of it. And it’s ok, and it’s ok for girls to know something about what may happen to them when they decide they’re ready for it, we don’t have to protect them from… protecting them from the knowledge and the understanding about it does not protect them from the reality of it. And it’s really really really important that people, you know, that parents, that teachers, anyone in a pedagogical role, understands that ignorance and innocence are not the same and that ignorance does not protect anyone. It’s really important that we talk about these things with our kids and that they get to understand that as wonderful as sex can be, it can also be about power and as an element of personal power, your sexuality is yours. And it isn’t yours unless you make it yours, unless you say ‘It’s mine’ – a kind of consciousness. You know, if you have a really wonderful, amazing, beautiful, inherited treasure that’s come down from your great great great great great great great great grandmother given to you, and it’s yours but you don’t know what it is and you flog it for tuppence ha’penny at a car boot sale, you’ve missed something. And if none of your grannies or your auntie or your mother ever tells you what a great treasure it is, you aint gonna know what it’s worth. We’ve got to tell our kids what they’re worth and what their sexuality is worth and how to protect it. That’s me off the soapbox.

Ben’s story

I thought that my childhood was idyllic, when I was a kid, and then, it wasn't until I grew up and started understanding some of my own difficulties in life, that I realized, and I uncovered, quite a lot that wasn't great at all about my family. And I suppose that the biggest thing that shed most light on it - when I was sort of involved in this sort of digging around process - was an amazingly frank discussion with my dad when we were working together on a job in London. I was really honest with him, it started with me being really honest with him, just saying that I was sort of suffering from depression, and I was just telling him what that was like, about the symptoms of it, and I said, “Look, I just want to be honest with you.” And he said, “Look, I want to be honest with you. When you were four, I came home from a meeting early and discovered your mum in bed with another man. It had been going on for a year.” And my dad told me that he beat them both up, he beat my mum up, and this bloke up, and actually physically kicked him out of the house. And from that moment on he stopped loving my mum and only stayed together for the sake of me and my sister.

Soon after that I discovered sort of healing and just was digging around, not digging around, but just remembering, started remembering lots, and one of the main things was that we lived, we basically lived, in a pretty loveless house. There was no love between my mum and dad because my dad stopped loving my mum and my mum was feeling really hurt, and really guilty, and so we grew up in a pretty loveless house. And because, you know, because of my mum and dad's upbringing, where their parents were not expressing emotion, I was never told that I was loved. And it's really funny, actually, because yesterday my mum said to me, because my mum stayed at the weekend, and when she left she said "I love you". No she didn't, she didn't, she just said - that's right we were talking on the phone - the last thing she said was "love ya". And it was so weird, it was so weird to hear my mum say it, it was beautiful, but I couldn't really receive it because it's like, you know, yeah, yeah it's nice, but it comes on top of a lot of none of that.

So that's the context really. My mum felt really guilty, so she was depressed for a lot of my childhood, so she was seeing a psychiatrist, although with huge shame because - in those days or certainly in my mum's eyes - there was sort of a stigma attached to that. So she was seeing a psychiatrist to try and deal with her depression and my dad was totally unsupportive, and just wanted her to sort herself out, and obviously carrying a lot of anger that he wasn't able to express properly because he hasn't got any friends. And the idea of emotional expression to him is just, you know - he's so frozen, my dad's so frozen. So he basically has, and still does, cart around with him a huge amount of unexpressed anger, which he keeps down with - he's got high blood pressure and he keeps it all down with beta blockers. Basically he's whacked out all day on beta blockers, they keep upping his dose and that sort of thing - so my dad, you know, people who meet him go, ‘Oh, he's quite cool.’ But you know, he's quite good at putting on a cool front, but you hang out with him, and especially around my mum, and just the anger's bubbling out of him all the time.

So that was the sort of, that was how it was. And Mum wasn't conscious of her, and didn't take responsibility for her, depression. And me and my sister - because we did things that upset her - we copped it, and we were constantly on the end of it. She used to take sessions on us basically - by screaming at us and hitting us and all that sort of thing. And so yes, and so I grew up in an environment where the love that I felt was got when I was doing what I was expected to do. Yeah? So if I was just doing what my parents expected me to do, I could pick up what scraps of love there were around to be had. And that was withdrawn as soon as I did something that didn't agree with what she wanted, and more than withdrawn. I quite often remember being chased around my house and being caught up and, you know… so I grew up being scared of my mum. That was the overriding feeling.

I wanted to say some things, and I told my mum that my overriding feeling towards her when I was, that I remember, was fear - and my sister is still scared of her, and somewhere you know I still carry that, and it’s not, it’s not totally healed, you know, it’s an ongoing process, my stuff round my mum - and she ... her reaction was, she said “Come to think of it," she said, "I was always scared of my mum."

So you know it's not... it's just how it is, it's a family thing that's passed on. I don't ... I have felt a huge amount of anger towards my parents, you know, I understand that they are only able to deal with the material that they've been given themselves. I know that it takes someone to go ‘I'm not passing this on,’ or, ‘I'm passing as little of this on as I can.’ But they weren't around, you know, they hadn't been in that environment, or they hadn't put themselves in that environment, where that sort of thing was going on. It's a generational thing, isn't it. In their generation it wasn't really happening, you know, there was the explosion in the sixties with love and all that thing. It wasn't very grounded - it was mainly drugs - and now we're at a time when we can challenge all this stuff, but yeah, that was their environment. And pertinent or relevant to all this was that I never saw my mum and dad naked in all my life. And they weren't making love hardly because there was no love between them - so there wasn't much physical, there wasn't much intimacy going on, and... it was more that it was sort of a shameful thing, you know: sex was a shameful thing.

There was the bare sort of basics of sex education in Biology, which was, you know, giggly, laughy, you know, but that's the sort of mechanics of it. I got right into pornography when I was fourteen and became the sort of school pornography dealer having come across stashes where people had obviously just chucked them out. And so I basically became sort of like a librarian, I'd just deal it out and make sure that people gave it back a few days later. And I got caught by the teacher and he confiscated them all. Pornography was actually like - I suppose basically because there's lots of stories in pornographic magazines and they're talking about people having sex with each other and exactly what happens - so yeah, that was sex education. And yeah, and there's a connection in that with my parents, in that where I kept them at home was across my bedroom floor and underneath this sort of compartment of a cupboard which creaked slightly as I pulled it up, and I used to hide them under there as a kid. I used to get home, get them out and have a look at them, but put them back, and one day, when I went to get them, they'd gone and I knew that my mum had taken them. She hadn't said anything to me, and I didn't want to say anything to her because it was too embarrassing.

When I was 17 I went on a lad's holiday - just finished A levels and we all went to Mallorca and my mum said to me, she said, “Now, be good and if you can't be good, be careful." That said it all for me, you know, the being good thing, being good means not having sex, you know.

For me the overriding energy of it all, again, was fear - it was fear driven - I was utterly consumed with fear and the fear came from a number of places. Because of my sexual education I had a sort of insecurity complex about physically not being big enough. All those blokes in the magazines and videos that I saw, all their penises were loads bigger than mine and I thought - ‘Shit! I'm deformed!’ and I'm this or that and it's like - how am I going to ‘you know‘? That was the first thing. The second thing was just I was one of the last to develop at school. A lot of my friends developed before me and had sex before me - either that or they lied. There was this sort of pressure, this real pressure, to lose my virginity. I was desperate to as well, you know. Even though I was one of the last to develop, you know.

I can't remember, I can’t remember how old I was when I first started masturbating, but 13 or 14 probably. But I was, you know, I had a huge amount of sexual energy, but I didn’t have a clue because of there not being much love in my home, certainly, between my mum and my dad, and I suppose it’s my mum and dad who are going to show me how a man and a woman relate, and that’s going to be through the love and tenderness and doing things for each other and caring for each other - well, they fucking hated each other and they were always digging at each other, so there was no example shown. And I suppose what example I got shown was, was the window cleaner that went round. These are in the stories in magazines where the window cleaner goes round, sees a woman who answers the door in a negligee and he says “Alright Darlin’ I’ve come round to clean your windows.” And she noticed that he was looking at her in a kind of a way, and so, and she said “Hey and when you’ve finished cleaning my windows why don’t you come in and give me some attention?” Do you know what I mean? So I had this… I didn’t have a clue. I laugh at it, I can laugh at it, you know, it’s funny, but I used to stand around places sort of trying to look cool because I didn’t know what to do - I really didn’t know what to do.

So there was the pressure from school, you know. My school was a pretty typical boys’ school, I suppose - a grammar school. It was all about scrabbling around for a place in the pecking order, and people would put each other down just to make themselves higher up in the pecking order, and one really quick way to put someone down was to go like that (makes V for Victory sign) which means ‘you’re a virgin.’ Yeah, so if one of your mates had had sex, and you hadn’t, then that was a way to... the argument’s finished basically, the battle’s done and dusted. So, I was desperate to lose my virginity to get up the pecking order. It was hard enough as it was because, you know, another way they’d do it was to take the piss out of my high voice, because my voice hadn’t broken. Do you know what I mean? It was - there was so much ammunition that people can throw. I really wanted to, for that reason, and I really wanted to just because I was, you know, I was a sexual animal and I was clueless.

I’m building up to it, I’m building up to it, because these are really important these fears, and you know... And another place of fear was a sort of a physical thing again. When I was a kid, my mum came at me, when I was about five or six, came at me, said “Hang on a minute, dear, we’ve just got to do this.” She grabbed my foreskin and she pulled it back. She said, “We’ve got to make sure that you can do this because…” - for hygiene reasons or whatever. But she never ever showed me how to wash myself. My dad never showed me how to wash myself and so that was it, basically. She just had to check for herself, maybe she’d heard something. And then, when I was about 11, I can remember getting out of the bath and putting my school trousers on, but not putting any pants on, and as I did the zip up, caught my willy in it - and I don’t know whether that was a contributory factor. I didn’t tell my mum and dad anything because there was never any tenderness when I did, so it wasn’t worth it. I’d never tell them anything where I was going to feel pain because they just, you know, turn… I remember saying “I’m finding this really difficult” and because of their inability to deal with their own emotion they couldn’t deal with mine and they told me not to be silly. And so I just, you know, well, I’m not going to bother then: I’ll be independent and self sufficient. But anyway, I don’t know whether it was that, or whether I’d just never done it, but actually in my memory I’d never pulled the foreskin back over the head of my penis. So, and I knew that that was what had to happen, but I, yeah, I think actually I wouldn’t, couldn’t, do it, and so a big fear - and it’s only really only in the last year that I’ve remembered this and had to deal with it - I was scared of hurting myself. So there was a combination of having not a clue what to do to attract a woman - I knew what to do, I knew the mechanics of it because I’d read endless... but I didn’t know what to do to attract a woman, make that first step, physically I was scared of getting hurt - I was also thinking I wouldn’t be good enough.

Now, being good enough was my bottom line, because that’s where love was rationed and not being good enough that was my bottom line, so performance was really important. I knew that I had to be good, and how could I be good when I was… when the tools that I had were half the size of the tools that, you know, that you needed? And so that was what led me into it - total fear. And I mean, I met various girls and had sort of relationships and I’d get off with girls at parties and, you know, I didn’t know, I just didn’t know how to relate to women really so it never lasted very long. And the girl, eventually, that I first had sex with - and I won’t say that I made love with her because it wasn’t like that - was someone who I didn’t respect, who I didn’t really like that much, but I knew that she dished it out, you know, and I knew that she liked me as well. And so I was quite a dapper dresser when I was that age, you know, growing up, and I used to have long hair and I suppose I was quite pretty and I never had - there never was a shortage of admirers - I just didn’t know what to do with them.

With her, Linda her name was - I’d really like to get in touch with her actually, just to say, look, this is what was going on for me at the time - I didn’t tell her, I didn’t tell her anything at all. I knew that she fancied me. I was 17. I can’t remember whether I’d gone to the pub with her or not. She was part of a group of friends of mine. We’d go to the pub. But I went round to her house and I remember the exact spot - I was on her sofa in her front room. And it was a fumbling, you know, sort of … oohh … it really makes me cringe to think about it. And we were, you know, we basically, you know… I can’t remember how many of our clothes we took off but I was just so desperate, I was just so desperate to put my penis inside her and then that was it: I wasn’t a virgin any more; basically was the story. (Laughs) And so we, you know, through all that fear I think I probably got half an erection, I can’t really… but enough to get it in there and then, as sexually frustrated as I was, it didn’t last for very long. And then there certainly wasn’t any, you know, much, connection. Her eyes, and I remember being quite scared of her eyes, because she was in her heart and she really looked at me, she really liked me, and she looked at me through these beautiful eyes, you know. Part of her story was wanting to feel loved herself, which is why she had sex quite freely with lots of boys, ‘cos she wanted to get that kind of reflection, and she was really looking for a loving reflection from me and I couldn’t give it because I was so scared.

And so it didn’t last for very long and I remember straight afterwards looking down to see if I was going to be mutilated or not, and what I saw really shocked me, and I felt so embarrassed, but luckily I could sort of hide myself, you know: from not, from years, I suppose, some years, of never, ever pulling my foreskin back, you can imagine it was pretty gunky. And so I was just so completely shocked and, you know, ashamed of my body and of what, and all of that, but also blimey - you know - I just realized that I’d neglected myself for… you know. So it was all pretty shocking and I was sort of… can remember putting my clothes back on, and her saying “Please will you stay for a bit?” and me saying, “I got to get back, I got to get back.”

So I went home and as I walked home, it was about half a mile to home, I sort of walked out and it was like having succeeded in an army mission or something and I ran down the road and, I remember, I ran down the road and I punched the air like I scored the winning goal in the cup final - (laughs) - to celebrate just having got over this ordeal. And having lost my virginity. Going back to school the next day, you know I was at sixth form, everybody: ah! ah! - you know.

And after that I saw her again and I felt a lot more relaxed obviously but… and I think for a week after that we had a really beautiful time together - and I felt a lot towards her, you know, just for having been part of, you know, my journey. I couldn’t put it into words then but I remember feeling that I felt a lot closer to her after that and she asked me if that was my first time and I said “No, no, no, no!” Even in all that I still couldn’t be honest and truthful with her and I just want to go and own myself with her and just, you know, I’d given her - I’d been with her in a way that isn’t truthful - and I want to do that in all my old relationships and say - “Hey this is what was going on for me at…” I mean - it might help them grow - and so I would like to do that, but obviously not enough to have done it, because I probably could find out where she lives.

So that’s the story really. And about a week after that I stopped seeing her and then very soon after that I met somebody else who I really liked and felt… yeah, it all changed after that… er, er ,yeah… I met somebody who I was with for a year and a half, I think, before we even had sex because she was 15 and I was 17 and she was quite scared. It was interesting being the other way round being with her, and she was a virgin and so I was experienced and so it felt different and so… There was someone before her because while she was away I had a bit of a time with her best mate - so that was the second time that I ever had sex - so it was just so different, and so I realized to some extent that some of the fear that I’d had was unfounded: the fear of not being big enough and all that sort of… just realizing that that it was all alright, even though that is stuff that I did carry on.

The more conscious I’ve got, I’ve realized that when I first - if I get a new girlfriend and the first time I make love with her - I’m really scared. And it’s only a year ago, I connected it. It was only then that I connected it to this first sexual experience. It was only a year ago that I realized the extent of the connection and of the extent of the fear that I had around hurting myself and around, yeah, particularly around hurting myself. But all the other fears are there as well - about not being good enough, about not being big enough, all of that, yeah. And it’s only, it’s because, I suppose, for quite… I don’t know, I think, if I look back, it’s probably been like that with every partner that I’ve had… but I’ve been able to - that first time - I’ve been able to get over it with - either just getting pissed, you know, or using drugs or whatever, or just to not fully understanding it, you know, ‘that’s just how it is the first time you make love to somebody, you’re bound to be nervous’ - you know what I mean, but I haven’t really understood the extent of the fear that’s been there. And it’s only since I started forming more conscious relationships that I’ve - where people have been actually able to understand - what am I trying to say? - in conscious relationships, where it’s not just about having sex, it’s about having connection, so in the moment of having sex and saying - ‘hang on a minute, I just need to stop here, because I’m really feeling this and I want to share it with you.’ That hasn’t been possible until the last seven years, six or seven years, when I’ve been having a more conscious relationship where actually that’s more important than anything else - is the healing and providing space for each other, you know - heal all our old stuff, so. And that doesn’t stop because you keep uncovering more and more, and going deeper and deeper, and I don’t want it to stop. It’s like, well, part of me wants it to stop, but that’s what’s beautiful about connecting with people now is sharing those spaces and being able to help each other heal.

Savannah lives in a large city in the Mid West in America.  She is 37 and married with a young daughter. 

I feel like my cultural background is kind of mixed, because on my father’s side I have, like, a really, really Mexican American family.  I was never really that close with them, but I do think that certain elements of it entered into my life. And then on my mother’s side - she’s not very close with her family.  I lived with a step-father and they were kind of little 1970s California hippies - counter culture.  Do you want me to describe what that meant?  Well, when I was like really little, we lived on a commune and lots of, I don’t know, it was lots of art and music and organic foods and my parents were always scheming up ways to make money without having to go out and get 9-5 jobs, and we moved a lot around the country – trying to find places where my parents could make that happen for us. 

 My parents had come out of San Francisco and Berkeley in the 1960’s and early 70’s. They were… It was kind of like sex was no big deal, in fact it was such not a big deal that you didn’t need to talk about it with your kids. It was a natural thing and it would happen and I kind of felt that my Mom figured I would figure it out. I do remember growing up seeing adults being kind of overtly sexual with each other in the presence of kids and it was not ever a big deal. Like it just was, and it wasn’t something that we even talked about, but it was absolutely there, but not supposed to be a big deal. 

At school, we didn't have sex education, it was like the biology of sex, do you know what I mean?   My real knowledge about sex came from my friends, absolutely, from my peers. But that was hard because I was a year younger than every body.  I had started school early, so a lot of my friends were, like, starting their periods before I did and becoming more interested in boys and stuff and so I still felt quite… I was physically very mature for my age but I felt emotionally quite immature. My friends were a bit advanced so they were all experimenting with sex before I was.

 I was 13 when I lost my virginity.  I had gone out with a girlfriend of mine who was the same age and her boyfriend who was older - he drove us, so he was like 16, 17 maybe. We went to a party at the beach and I… We had been there maybe an hour or so and - there was always lots of alcohol and drugs where I grew up - so I had forgotten my purse in his car.  I had left it in there and I asked him for his keys and I was walking by myself going back to get it and, uh, he... We were like in the back of this little cove on the beach and he said ‘Oh, I’ll walk with you - I’m going to get more beer,’ or I don’t even remember what he said…'something out of the truck'… Um, so we were walking and he started kind of goofing around with me like, um, tickling me and stuff, and at first I just kind of like laughed it off, but it made me very uncomfortable.  And, um, and I asked him to stop, and he didn’t, and he pushed me down in the sand and put his arm across my throat, um, and I didn’t know what was going on.  I knew that it was… that it had sort of gone from a little bit silly and flirtatious very quickly to uncomfortable, and then it was just scary. But I also didn’t know that I was in the process of being raped because I knew him, and I thought - my idea of rape was - I don’t know, you were in Central Park and somebody jumped out from behind a bush with a knife, that was rape - it was something much more dark and sinister, and that you didn’t know the person. So he was kind of choking me, I don’t remember struggling that much.  I remember just being paralysed, terrified, and I didn’t know what to do – that I had done something to make him think that I wanted this, or… and then I thought, well, you know, I was a little concerned that my friend was going to find out and be mad at me. Um, and he pulled my pants down just to around my ankles so I was hobbled, I couldn’t move my legs.  He was big, I was never a small girl, but he was really a big teenaged boy.  And he raped me.

 He… you know that’s weird, I don’t even remember. I don’t remember the next thing.  I remember after, that is that I was with my friends – different friends.  I got my purse out of his car and there were some different friends and we left the party and I remember walking and walking and I was bleeding. That’s all I remember is that we walked to... like a coffee shop or something.

 It’s weird because there’s a part of me that kind of... I was under the impression that this act had something to do with sexuality or desirability and I thought that meant that I was desirable, and that he, you know… I didn’t realize that it was just a complete act of anger. But I… So there was a part of me that thought, a part of me that thought, that I had lost my virginity and that that should be a big deal, but I couldn’t tell anybody because it was my friend's boyfriend. 

But I did tell a couple of friends and it was like not a big deal, but you know I had friends who… so if I was 13, I had friends who were like 14 and I knew people who had been having sex since they were 10 years old, or at least they said that. So you know when I was a kid the worst thing that could happen to you was that you could get pregnant, so the fear of AIDS and that kind of stuff didn’t register yet, it was 1985, so AIDS was not, you know, on the scene, and other things could be treated, and people didn’t really talk about sexually transmitted infections. So I know how lucky I am. With all that stupid shit I did in my 20’s, that I’m not dead now. All the sex, and alcohol and drugs – with the possibility of AIDS… 

 I think after that - I know after that - I became very promiscuous, sexually promiscuous, and I continued with that sexual promiscuity until my mid 20s.  I didn’t, I never really thought that sex was anything special, you know, I was never taught that, and then that experience... but I really still, I did hold on to the idea that I could be a sexual person and thereby have some kind of power over people: over men. So that stayed with me for a long time, that I still somehow thought that this act of rape meant that I was sexually desirable, that I was attractive and that this gave me something that men wanted from me. And that I could use that. I found that I was really good at having either purely sexual relationships or, like, one-night-stands with people, but I was not good at having relationships with people because I became…
 
I found that it was hard for me to become… I wasn’t interested in sex unless I had been drinking, and that once I was in a relationship with somebody, then it was hard for me to sort of open up and explore the sexual relationship with somebody.  I think that it was because it wasn’t about the power of it anymore, it was about sharing or about… intimacy, yeah, and I didn’t know about that part and I was kind of terrified of that part of it.
 
 But I think you should probably note that I was molested when I was seven by a family friend  - there was no penetration, but he fondled me and made me touch him and told me that, told me things like if I told my mom she would know that I was a bad girl and would send me away. Um, so I think that that influenced that as well. It all influences my ability for intimacy, to be intimate, not just to be sexual. 

It took a long time.  I was married before, and we never achieved that level of trust. And now with Johnny… It was time, and just the knowledge that he was not, he wasn’t going to leave me, that he could be trusted.  I was virtually incapable of actually having a relationship until I was about 30. 

 I would just say that, I don’t even know if this fits here or is appropriate, but maybe it is so…now that I’m (begins to cry) now that I’m the mother of a young girl, it terrifies me that anything like that