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Welcome to everyone who got here because of the TWO Perfect Post Awards I was given for this post. Many thanks to Shelli and Miss Britt for awarding these to me. I never expected such a response for this post, but I’m glad it stirred up a lot of people. It’s all about awareness as far as I’m concerned.
Thanks so much for coming by! - Karl
This is a post meant for the Grassroots Blogger Book Marketing Campaign 2008, to generate donations for The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN). You can visit the GBBMC page for all the information you need about RAINN and the campaign. More links available at the end of the post. Please donate!
I know I promised that my next RAINN story would be about the time I lost my virginity, but that’ll have to wait until next time. With little more than a week left in the GBBMC campaign, I wanted to talk seriously about RAINN and its importance.
That’s right, no jokes today. I’ll bring back the funny later.
Let’s start with some rather alarming statistics.
And by the way, though many of these statistics were gathered using America as the metric, that isn’t to minimize sexual assaults around the world. It’s just that RAINN is based in America.
Did you know that every two minutes another American is sexually assaulted? EVERY TWO MINUTES. Almost half of those people are under the age of 18. Over 80% of all sexual assault victims are under the age of 30.
One out of every six women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. For men, that’s 1 out of every 33.
60% of all sexual assaults are never reported to the police.
That hasn’t freaked you out yet? How about these stats regarding children?
15% of sexual assault and rape victims are under age 12.
- 29% are age 12-17.
- 44% are under age 18.
- 80% are under age 30.
- 12-34 are the highest risk years.
- Girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.
- 7% of girls in grades 5-8 and 12% of girls in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused.
- 3% of boys grades 5-8 and 5% of boys in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused.
In 1995, local child protection service agencies identified 126,000 children who were victims of either substantiated or indicated sexual abuse.
- Of these, 75% were girls.
- Nearly 30% of child victims were between the age of 4 and 7.
93% of juvenile sexual assault victims know their attacker.
- 34.2% of attackers were family members.
- 58.7% were acquaintances.
- Only 7% of the perpetrators were strangers to the victim.
You can find all of these and more troubling numbers at the RAINN site. It doesn’t take any digging, they’re all there for you to see.
I understand that the stats are overwhelming. So skip the numbers if you must, but read on.
When I saw Charlie Daniels the other night, one of the things he said that got huge applause (including from me) was that there is NEVER an excuse for sexual abuse on anyone, especially children. And while I personally do not believe in the death penalty (that’s a subject for a different day), I admit that hearing Charlie say abusers should hang from a short rope off a high branch sounded pretty fucking good.
Perhaps you’re fortunate enough to have never experienced sexual abuse or rape in your life. I guarantee, however, that you know someone who has been a victim. Trust me, even if you think you don’t, you do. Like depression, you can’t recognize a sexual assault victim by sight. Cannot be done.
And those victims you know (and honestly, I hate the word “victim” but I’ll use it here in this context because it applies) are very likely never to speak of the atrocities done to them. You’ll probably never hear them speak about it, even if you happen to be their closest friend. Why?
Because there is an unwritten law that says victims of sexual abuse do NOT TALK. Compare it to Fight Club if you will. It’s just not something you do, talking about abuse. It doesn’t even have to be explicitly stated by the abuser, either. It’s implied. And it’s FOLLOWED, no matter what age you are.
This is why organizations like RAINN are crucial to people everywhere. They have a 24-hour hotline and they’ve taken great pains to make sure every call, every visit to their site, remains anonymous. They don’t collect IP addresses, don’t trace any phone lines, don’t even have Caller ID. Because, believe me, if any of those measures were used, the calls would dry up in a heartbeat.
The phone number is 800-656-HOPE. If you have been raped or sexually assaulted in any capacity, I hope you’ll write that number down and use it. And if you know of a child being abused, God forbid, I hope you’ll call the authorities. Not tomorrow. NOW.
I happen to know quite a bit about this topic, though the statistics still shock me (and that’s not easy to do these days). And I know that many of you donate money to a number of charitable organizations and worthy individuals. Granted, I can’t always give. I’ve told you why…I’m on a very limited monthly income. But I still give $5 here and $20 there when I can, whether it’s to the Red Cross or friends of mine or RAINN.
I’m asking you personally if you have anything to give - anything - to please consider making a donation to this amazing organization. They are networked in with many abuse shelters around the country. And if you’re outside the States, that’s cool, too. I hope you’ll consider giving to a similar organization in your country or town.
For those of you that may still be wondering if you actually know anyone who is a victim of sexual abuse…
You’re looking at a survivor of sexual abuse right here.
I’m not admitting this for pity. And please don’t ask me any further questions about my own experiences. What I say here is all I’m willing to say.
I do this to prove a point. You really never know who is a survivor. That’s the word I prefer to use, by the way, survivor. I WAS a victim, as is any child who is violated so cruelly and irrevocably. Yeah, I’m one of those 15% mentioned above.
Now I’m a survivor.
This shit affects me every single day. And I guaranfuckingtee you it affects people that YOU know, too. If you’re not a survivor, then you know some. Really, one out of every six women. Millions and millions of women. 2.7 MILLION men (yes, this is not a gender-specific issue). Millions of children.
It’s weird. It boils my fucking blood when I think of someone else being abused. But when I think about my own stories? I barely feel a damn thing. I’m still working on that, it’s a lifelong struggle. It’s also rather common as a survivor to shut your emotions down so you don’t feel ANYTHING. It’s a safety mechanism.
I’ve heard the word “resilient” used by many therapists over the years, used to describe me. ME. I hate that fucking word, too. Resilient just means you can take a lot of shit and not die. I’ve often wished I were dead. Hell, I tried to do something about it 13 years ago. To just cease existing, to not feel any pain any more? It can be very alluring to survivors.
I won’t ever act on those impulses again.
I talk about this because of the much bigger picture. And because I know for a fact (just based on the numbers) that there are at least a handful of you reading this right now that are survivors. And if you’ve never asked anyone for help, if you’ve never raised your hand to admit these horrors out loud - not to ANYONE, EVER - I hope you’ll do so now.
There IS hope. There IS help.
Most importantly, you are NOT alone. You’re NOT the only one, as much as a freak you might feel like. That’s the abuse talking, trying to make you stay silent.
It doesn’t have to win.
DONATE TO RAINN HERE. When you donate, please make sure you reference “GBBMC2008,” and include my name (Karl Erikson) and blog name (SecondHand Tryptophan).
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Thanks to everybody who entered the t-shirt giveaway. I’ll be selecting the winners today and announcing them in tomorrow’s post. If you’re reading this, it’s too late to enter now. You had your shot. Hell, you had two freaking days to enter. And all you had to do was leave a comment! How much easier does it get than that?
This Sunday is another edition of SecondHand Radio on Blog Talk Radio. I hope you’ll tune in. My special guest this week is Jessica, otherwise known as Black Belt Mama. Surely you read her blog. And if you’ve only recently started reading 2HT, you’ll definitely want to check out her guest post here from last year’s “Summer of Love.” Ever since that video, I’ve had incessant crushy feelings toward Jessica, which sucks since she has a husband. What I’m really hoping for is a chance at Jessica’s sister. It is as close as I’ll get to Jessica at this point.
Show Time: 5pm Eastern Standard Time
Call-in Number: 646-716-9370
And there’s also a chat room available so you can jump in and participate while the show is live. If you need a reminder for the show, you can sign up at BTR and set a reminder on my show’s page. That way, it’ll e-mail you just before the show is set to begin. I always set my reminders to e-mail me an hour before my favorite shows.
By the way, if you want to be a guest on SecondHand Radio, just say the word. Here’s the lineup thus far, plenty of room.
April 27 - Vahid from Iron Fist
May 4 - No show due to TequilaCon
May 25 - Dave from Blogography
This is a post meant for the Grassroots Blogger Book Marketing Campaign 2008, to generate donations for The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN). You can visit the GBBMC page for all the information you need about RAINN and the campaign. More links available at the end of the post. Please donate!
I was (and perhaps still remain) an awkward, nerdy kid all throughout school. My sexual experiences in high school were pretty much nil, aside from the routine masturbatory marathons, where I’d lock myself in the bathroom and use shaving cream or baby oil to wax my Guggenheimer and fantasize about any number of girls in my class. But as far as sex with another person? Yeah, that didn’t happen until after I graduated high school.
I found myself, at 17, booked in some summer college courses “on the hill.” That’s what we called the branch of New Mexico State University, located at the base of the mountains in Alamogordo. Yes, after jumping right into college, I quickly burned out after a couple of semesters. Working full-time and going to school full-time? Craziness.
I really blossomed that first summer at NMSU-A. I got hit in the face with a volleyball, which knocked my glasses off and broke them. On the same day I went and got my hair cut and went with a totally different style, that spikey style that Kevin Bacon made so popular in “Footloose.” Yeah, baby, I was turning it loose.
Within a couple of weeks of this big transformation, my best bud’s ex-girlfriend (let’s call her Skank) called me up one night at work at the radio station. Now, this is the girl who totally screwed over my best friend by cheating on him. They’d been dating for a couple of years, I think. So she calls me at the radio station and said that she couldn’t BELIEVE how hot I was when she saw me at the mall arcade. I’d walked by her in the arcade - her staring at me and following me with her eyes as I walked - and said, “Hey, Skank.”
So here she is on the phone with me, saying how hot I am now. She was in shock once she realized it was me, saying hi to her in the mall. “I was wondering,” she said, “if you’d like to go out with me?”
I spent the next few moments with a whole slew of dichotomous thoughts bouncing around in between my ears. I mean, Skank was a good-looking girl, so it was flattering. Then there was the thought of getting laid because Skank was pretty much a sure thing. This isn’t a rare thing for me; I often think about sleeping with various women, even today. It’s just one of those things. I meet a woman and I immediately start thinking about whether or not she’s a good kisser, what she looks like naked, etc. All in the flash of a microsecond.
So, sure, I was thinking about going out with Skank in those few seconds. But then the anger returned and I said, “No, I don’t think so.”
She was surprised. “Why not?”
“Because I would never do that to my best friend. You fucked him over.”
“So, what? I’m not supposed to date anyone now?”
“Date whoever you want, Skank.”
“But I can’t date anyone who knows Bob (not his real name)!”
“Yeah, that’s a bitch,” I said in a sarcastic tone. She was right, though. When you live in a town of 34,000 people, everyone pretty much knows everyone else. So the dating pool was semi-limited.
“So you won’t go out with me because of Bob?”
“That’s right.” My virgin dick was punching me in the groin, yelling, “You fucking moron! Go out with her, fuck her brains out!” I mean, I’d heard she was really wild in bed. To me, that meant she was doing juggling and fire breathing or something. For sure she was putting one a hell of a show. Hell, I had no idea what “wild in bed” meant. At any rate, I was very proud that my BIG head was making the decisions (for once). Seriously? You don’t screw over your friends like that.
My first girlfriend came (so to speak) a few weeks later. She was gorgeous, and really smart, graduated from high school (a Baptist school, for what it’s worth) at 16 and she, too, was attending the summer session at NMSU-A. She wasn’t the first girl I ever kissed, but she was definitely the best kisser I’d had up to that point.
Not only that, but she was definitely #1 on the Blue Balls Leaderboard. Many a night would we make out and grind, my penis so hard it could carve a bust of George Washington out of diamonds. And my balls, oh Lord, my balls! They were inflated to the size of soccer balls, filled with my manly seed, just waiting to flood the plains of my woman’s love canal.
Yeah, never happened. I had opportunities, to be sure, but I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And whaddya know? After we broke up she totally gave it up to a buddy of mine.
Story of my life.
Next time I do a RAINN post, it’ll be time to talk about my official deflowering.
DONATE TO RAINN HERE. When you donate, please make sure you reference “GBBMC2008,” and include my name (Karl Erikson) and blog name (duh, SecondHand Tryptophan).
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Don’t forget, SecondHand Radio is on today at 5pm Eastern time. Then it’s the Big Honkin’ Duets Show II on Pointless Drivel Live, and yes, I will be performing a song with Mr. Fabulous. Be there or be a rhomboid.
This is a post meant for the Grassroots Blogger Book Marketing Campaign 2008, to generate donations for The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN). You can visit the GBBMC page for all the information you need about RAINN and the campaign. More links available at the end of the post.
Another childhood story. This time I’d like to talk about my early days with pornography. Still living on Kay Road, I was probably six or seven years old. And we had this neighborhood kid that was a bit older than me…probably 10 or 11. Sometimes we’d just go traipsing around in The Woods, a huge area of land filled with trees. We’d wander around for hours at a time, sometimes coming out on the other side of The Woods at the Motel down the road.
Well, Johnny (the older kid) somehow got a hold of some girly magazines and hid them out in The Woods. He told us kids that he had something to show us. So we all walk around this meandering path, scuffling up the bed of leaves on the forest floor, until we came to The Tree that marked The Spot.
Johnny pushed a bunch of leaves aside next to the tree and there we saw the magazines. Three of them, all with beautiful women on the covers, one of them totally topless. My hand immediately went to cover my open mouth. “Ohhhhh my Gooooooood!” I said.
Naturally, that wasn’t enough. I had to see more. I opened up one of the magazines. Holy crap! That woman is totally NAKED. Like, all the way naked. She even had hair down THERE. It was short, closely cropped blonde hair. Down THERE.
I looked through all the magazines, feeling as if I’d come across some treasure. A dirty, dirty, secret treasure. Holy shit, how the hell does she get her legs over her head like that? And is that her kidney I can see through there?
The four of us ooh’d and ahh’d for at least half an hour. There were even some shots of women and men going at it, not that I understood what the hell they were doing. There the guy is, his enormous and stiff winky, pointing right at the woman’s dirty bits. Then he was actually putting it IN her dirty bit! Whoa! She looked like she was in agony, her face all contorted and writhing. Why was the guy so set on hurting her? She must have really been mean to him for a punishment like that.
We giggled and laughed and were simply mesmerized by the whole thing. Why the hell would people DO these things to each other? I didn’t get it, and I especially didn’t get why my own proud little winky was starting to feel all funny and hard.
We reburied the magazines when we were sufficiently confused and awed and left The Woods to go home. It was getting to be dinner time. I spent the next months revisiting those magazines in The Woods, wondering just what the poor woman had done to be tortured in that manner. And the guy looked so intense, like he was preparing for an assault with his G.I. Joe with Kung Fu Grip and Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man (with built-in bionic eye!). I mean, he was really thinking hard about something!
Months later, when Mom and Dad were both at work, and we had a babysitter who wasn’t paying attention to me AT ALL, I had Johnny and some of my other neighborhood friends over. I’d discovered my own little secret and had to show them.
See, Daddy had a HUGE collection of porn magazines. Enormous. I’m talking like 4 stacks of 30 magazines each, at least. He kept them on the top shelf in his closet. And you bet your sweet ass I was looking at them every single second I could.
We all go into my parents’ bedroom (I told you, babysitter not. paying. attention.) and close the door. They’re all like “What? What are we going to see? What’s so big about your parents’ room?”
So I turn around to face them, standing in front of my dad’s closet, and put my hands proudly on my hips, boldly declaring, “Gentlemen, we’ve HIT the motherload!” OK, no I didn’t. What I said was, “Wait until you see…THIS!” And with that, I slid open the closet door and pointed to the top shelf that I couldn’t reach unless I stood on a chair.
The magazines glowed with a golden light, illuminated by sunbeams coming through the parting clouds. The heavens parted, angels sang, devils weeped. Someone random somewhere in the world dropped dead instantly.
All five boys stood there with their mouths open and Johnny uttered a forbidden, “Holy shit!”
Damn right “Holy shit!”
One of the other boys said, “There must be 5,000 magazines in there!”
Johnny slapped him on the shoulder. “Idiot. There’s only 2,000 magazines.”
We all nodded in agreement. If anyone knew about porn magazine numbers, it was certainly Johnny.
Johnny grabbed a bunch of the mags and we all got on my parents’ bed to read through them. Yeah, right. Read. heh. The room was filled with gasps and sighs as pages flipped by. There were pictures of women naked. Pictures of women naked with other women, licking each other down THERE (which also looked very painful), pictures of men torturing women (sometimes multiple women). It was really a lot of very bad women, to be sure.
There was that familiar stirring in my pants when, suddenly, a car pulled up in the driveway!
My chest tightened and my balls got sucked up into my body cavity. “Holy smokes! It’s my Dad!”
We all shot up like lightning, each grabbing all the magazines. Johnny took them all and put them back onto the shelf, back onto the stacks. And then…my life flashed before my eyes as I watched all four stacks of porn magazines come crashing down onto the floor of the closet.
“Holy shit!” said Johnny, “We gotta go!”
Holy shit indeed! What the fuck was I to do? I saw Midnight, our black cat, right at my parents’ door. I reached down, grabbed her, threw her into the closet on top of the magazines, and slammed the closet door. Ran out to the hallway, closing the door behind me, and jetted my ass to the living room.
It wasn’t until 1995, at my sister’s wedding, that I told him it was me. Everyone cracked up over that.
“That really was brilliant of you,” said Dad. He was proud of me. Proud of me for looking at porn, I suppose.
Hey man, I don’t just sit around with my 178 I.Q. - I utilize that shit!
DONATE TO RAINN HERE. When you donate, please make sure you reference “GBBMC2008,” and include my name (Karl Erikson) and blog name (duh, SecondHand Tryptophan).
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