I really don't feel comfortable calling her my abuser. I don't know what else to call her, so I'm just going to go with "her".

Last night I couldn't sleep because my mind was thinking about her. I ended up getting up and looking on social media, finding every photo of her I could. I don't know why.

I'm just tired of thinking about it, and I think it might help to just put it out there. I don't really know how to talk about it without sounding like I am romanticizing it now. So if that will bother you, you probably shouldn't read more.

I saw a lot of naked people growing up. Our hot tub was always no-clothes. No one was ever really sexual, but it didn’t really matter. I was already aware of girls, and that I wanted to see them. The hot tub had lights. I remember looking through the rippling water from the edge trying to make out details of girl’s bodies under the water.

The initiating experience might have been a family friend, a girl a year and a half older than me, showing me her vagina when I was 2 and she was 3. She asked me if I wanted to “play the vagina game”. I wonder now if those are the worlds an abuser used on her. It wasn’t upsetting. I liked it. Too much. So I was 2 years old and already could not stop thinking about girl’s bodies.

I was a big daydreamer. I lived in fantasies in my head, and they always revolved around girls. I remember that I spent nap time in preschool imagining I had, for lack of a better word, a harem of miniature girls that I would pretend I had under the covers. It was an ever-growing assortment of pretty girls from my life, and movies/tv. I think Ariel from the little mermaid was first. Even now I still have lingering effects from that first obsession. Most of the fantasies revolved around me getting to touch them however I wanted. I started sleeping with a rolled up blanket, and “cuddling it”. In my head I thought of it as practicing for a girlfriend. I’d talk to it, kiss it, hump it. I spent a lot of time face down in my bed with an erection, just sort of moving my hips a bit, fantasizing about girls, from as young as I can remember.

My family lived next to a college rental, lots of 18-22 year olds rotating through, a few new ones each year, some staying. When I was 4, one was a hippy girl, in her first year of college. She was one of the prettiest people I had ever seen. I was an outgoing kid, and would talk to strangers, and I’d always get to know the people in that house. I remember playing out in the grass with them, blowing bubbles, and I ran under her long dress. She wasn’t wearing panties. I became obsessed. I’d come up with all sorts of excuses to be under there. I distinctly remember saying “I want to see if I can crawl between your legs.”. Once I was under the skirt, I turned over, and looked up for a while, then turned back over and crawled out. I thought I was a sneaky little genius. I remember her joking about how I turned over to look up, and I said “no I didn’t. If I did, why did I come out facing down?”. Master of deception. She just said “Oh, yeah, good point” in a playful “oh you little rascal” sort of voice. She ended up babysitting me often. We’d go between my house and hers since we were neighbors. I really, really loved her. I would cuddle with her on the couch and take naps on her, and I would just constantly touch her breasts. I just loved how they felt. I’d try and touch other adult women’s breasts but I was always scared of getting in trouble so I wouldn’t do it much, and would pull back at the first sign of them reacting. She didn’t react. She let me lay there and touch her until I fell asleep. We’d often use the hot tub when she was babysitting me, so we’d both be naked. I’d still hold onto her and touch her breasts. She never initiated anything, she never did anything sexual, but she let me. She never gave me even a hint of rejection or annoyance.

The most vivid memory I have from that age is from being in the hot tub with her. She was sitting on the edge with her legs in the water and I could see her pubic hair. I asked if I could touch it, and she said yes. I did, and I asked, “How far can I go in?” and she said “As far as you want.”. So I did. She didn’t make a big deal out of it, just sat and let me touch her. The memory is so vivid. This was one of my favorite memories for a long time. No part of any of this was traumatic or upsetting. I was doing exactly what I wanted with no encouragement. It took me a long time to realize how much this, and other things, set me up for hypersexuality. How doomed I was to let sex be the most important thing in my life when I had been obsessing over an adult woman’s vagina by the time I was 4.

She stayed in my life, for my entire childhood. She was a family friend. She’d come over for dinner. She’d babysit me occasionally even as I got older. Eventually the napping stopped just because I didn’t really nap anymore. It’s not like I had a neglectful mother, or a lack of nurturing adult women in my life. I didn’t cling to her because I desperately needed it, I did it because, on top of everything else, she would let me not feel ashamed of all these things I wanted.

I think, in the end, she thought it was important not to hinder a child’s curiosity. She was completely neutral when I did anything sexual, like she was trying to avoid stifling my curiosity. I can see now just how naive she was, and how compliant/agreeable. Or maybe she had her own bad experiences, and learned that you should just let men do whatever they wanted to you. I know, a 4 year old boy is not a man, but… still.

I’ve thought about trying to talk to her about it, but I think it would break her heart to know just how much it had affected me, and the thought of that makes me feel terrible. And I haven't seen her in probably 10 years.