Please be aware that the following piece contains descriptions of childhood and adult sexual abuse. Please proceed with discretion.
I have come to believe that little girls do not exist. I believe that when babies are born they are not born boys and girls, but boys and women, for very few women are given the chance to be innocent and free little girls.
I got to be a girl for the first three years of my life. I got to live carelessly, without having to worry about men staring at my ass or trying to look up my skirt. I got to wear whatever I wanted and show as much skin as I liked. I got to be a kid for a little while, until I was made into a woman too young.
Men are the ones who turn little girls into women. They do it with their thoughts, with their words, and most importantly, with their dicks.
I will never understand what causes men to want little girls like me. I will never figure out why they feel they are entitled to my body, whether it is the body I had as a child or the one I have now, fully grown and developed. Perhaps it is because they know they shouldn’t touch me, and similarly to how when we see a sign in a museum that says, “Do not touch,” next to a fragile and beautiful thing, and we suddenly feel we must reach out and touch it, they get a compulsion to do the same with beautiful and fragile me.
Or perhaps it because they know little girls don’t have the strength to fight back.
I think a lot about how most people consider a woman’s first blood to be her entrance into adulthood. That once you can get pregnant, you are officially a woman, even if you are freshly thirteen; Whereas, a boy is still a boy even after he turns eighteen.
I often compare the times I was abused as a child to the times I have been abused as an adult. In many ways, they are the same story. It usually happens on a bed, or a couch, once on the floor. Always with someone I believe I can trust. It begins slowly, with a hand reaching down the back of my pants or another moving towards my breast.
You think that if a woman doesn’t want to do something, she won’t do it. But that is rarely the case. For when a man has decided he wants a woman, he will have her. There is no reciprocation needed.
When I replay those memories in my head, the ones from childhood, and the ones that happened recently, they are always on mute. I thought it was because the memories are traumatic and so my brain chooses not to remember his grunts or my objections. But I know now that it is because when this happens to a woman, she becomes mute and he becomes deaf. And because of this, no matter how loud she screams or how many times she says no, he will not hear it.
This author chose to remain anonymous.