Articles from August 2015

Prevalence of porn leading to teenage girls forced into anal sex

Warning: Not for children. Though teenage girls should see it.

My heart weeps at the thought that many young girls are now being put through what I was 20 years ago by my ex-husband Phil:

Pornography has changed the landscape of adolescence beyond all recognition by Allison Pearson

Some quotes:

A GP, let’s call her Sue, said: “I’m afraid things are much worse than people suspect.”
In recent years, Sue had treated growing numbers of teenage girls with internal injuries caused by frequent anal sex; not, as Sue found out, because she wanted to, or because she enjoyed it – on the contrary – but because a boy expected her to.
“I’ll spare you the gruesome details,” said Sue, “but these girls are very young and slight and their bodies are simply not designed for that.”
Her patients were deeply ashamed at presenting with such injuries. They had lied to their mums about it and felt they couldn’t confide in anyone else, which only added to their distress.
When Sue questioned them further, they said they were humiliated by the experience, but they had simply not felt they could say no. Anal sex was standard among teenagers now, even though the girls knew that it hurt.

….[M]ore than four in 10 girls between the ages of 13 and 17 in England say they have been coerced into sex acts, according to one of the largest European polls on teenage sexual experience.
Recent research by the Universities of Bristol and Central Lancashire found that a fifth of girls had suffered violence or intimidation from their teenage boyfriends, a high proportion of whom regularly viewed pornography, with one in five boys harbouring “extremely negative attitudes towards women”.

Mature women can generally make up their own minds about what they are and aren’t prepared to do in bed. That is a private matter among consenting adults, although I don’t know a single woman who thinks that a man insisting on anal sex is anything other than a depersonalising act of aggression.
For inexperienced teenage girls it’s a different matter. Their whole sexting culture sends them one crude, insidious message: buggers must be choosers.

I went through this with Phil, only unlike these girls, I refused to let him do this, knowing that I did not have to.

In response, Phil accused me of always needing to have my own way. He tried punishing me through no sex at all for refusing anal. He even tried an elaborate hoax to try to influence me into doing what he wanted.

Phil sometimes forcefully tried to turn me over. Once in the middle of things, he pulled out and tried to get in the other way. It didn’t work well from the top, but his attempt still qualifies as “rape” according to modern legal definitions in Indiana, where this happened.

He said maybe in other countries, THIS is considered the “natural” way. He pointed to sex scenes in Clan of the Cave Bear, but didn’t seem to understand that the Neanderthals in that book were NOT having anal sex.

He told me one of his ex-girlfriends claimed it was the most pleasurable kind of sex for a woman.

And no, he never heard of lube. The pain was excruciating the one time I grudgingly allowed it, and the pain keeps on giving: Bowel movements are absolutely horrid afterwards.

Yet somehow, I was the “bad” one because I wasn’t properly submissive to my husband, who expected obedience.

He even told his best friend how badly I treated him; the friend then turned around and scolded me.

And yes, Phil was into porn, particularly Hustler.

This was 20 years ago. So this is not a new problem, but according to the above article, today’s Internet porn makes the problem far more prevalent–with girls who feel they HAVE to do these things.

A while back, I read a whole bunch of comments on some article online that claimed that lots of women love this kind of sex, and basically made detractors sound like prudes.

I’ve also read that the modern trend to be “clean-shaven” in unnatural places comes from the prevalence of porn. I was once sexually harassed on the Internet by a guy who said he likes his women clean-shaven. I never told him whether I was or wasn’t; he just attacked without provocation.

Yet my best friend Richard–friends with this guy–accused me of being “ridiculous” because, a year later, I still did not want to hear this guy’s name, and because “the Internet isn’t real [harassment].”

I’m teaching my son to NOT treat girls like this. I tell him Girls are People, NOT TOOLS for guys’ pleasure.

My stories are hardly isolated. So I keep them here on the Net to help other girls realize they don’t have to put up with this crap:

The story of Phil

Sexual harassment by Richard’s friend: Here and Here

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on August 30, 2015January 18, 2022

When the Peanut Brittle House tried to kill me

Candyland was more than a game for me: It was a mystical land.

I imagined myself actually walking through it as I played the game, and I saw myself going into the houses.

The newer games, which came out after I outgrew Candyland, had different pictures, too cartoon-like and not as fun and mystical as the old pictures the game had in the 70s.

I made little people-shapes with my hands, probably not the traditional kind but my own “tiger-kangaroos.”

(The index finger was the head, the thumb and middle finger were arms, and the remaining fingers were legs. I invented these figures in Kindergarten–another story for another time.)

They walked along the spaces, sat on the ice cream floats (floating pieces of Neapolitan ice cream), and went into the various candy houses.

The Peanut Brittle House–oh, what a weird, sinister feeling that place had! I dreamed about it once, that I was inside it with my sister. I had at least one sister and no brothers in this dream, just the opposite of my real life.

She was working at the stove in an upstairs room by the window, making something in a saucepan.

It boiled up with lava and began to spill out of the saucepan.

We had to run away, because if it touched us, we would die.

We tried to run out of the house, but it wasn’t easy.

Ever since, I think of this dream whenever I see the old Peanut Brittle House.

I don’t feel that way with the new picture of it, though, because it just is not the same at all.

The old Peanut Brittle House which inspired this dream is below:

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on August 26, 2015May 22, 2021

Huge Site Restructuring: Recent story of abuse moved

After moving my old HTML website here to WordPress in September of 2013, I had to fix the formatting issues that caused.

Then I upgraded to the 2015 WordPress theme last December, which caused new formatting issues with the quotes: Bolded text no longer showed up as bold, and quotes were often rammed together.

I also tended, as a baby blogger, to write HUMONGOUS paragraphs because I just kept adding and tweaking over time. That had to be fixed.

The older pages also needed updated links and major revisions. Some were ten years old and hadn’t been touched in years.

Because my site has about 1000 posts and pages (!!!), and because I actually have a life outside of the computer to run, it has taken me TWO YEARS to fix all of this.

But it’s finally finished.

YAY!

Now, while doing this, I recently realized that this series of posts–The Darkness Engulfs Me–needs to be moved. It’s so huge that it clutters up the first several months of 2014, shoved in there with a bunch of College Memoir posts as well.

Also, it was actually written between 2010 and 2012, only revised in 2014. It reflects all sorts of anger, anxiety and pain which filled me between 2010 and 2012, but which no longer spend much time in my heart or head.

This series took my webbook, The Darkness Engulfs Me, and broke it into blog-post-sized chunks, just as I did with my College Memoirs, which are also their own webbook here.

Basically–

–to better show a sense of flow through time, from anger and pain to healing, and

–to reflect the time period in which these things were actually written,

I wish to change the publication dates to 2010 and 2011. This will take 109 posts and spread them out over a period of time when I posted very little on my blog, but during which I wrote thousands of words on my HTML website. You could say it WAS a blog, a diary of my pain, so it fits well in that part of my blog.

This post is to explain this to newcomers who may get confused, because sometimes I refer to the Darkness Engulfs Me posts in 2014 as being written. Yet now they will show as having been written already, in 2010/2011. Because, well, they were.

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on August 21, 2015February 26, 2021

Graduation: Trapped at school–College Memoirs: Life At Roanoke–May 1995, Part 3

I decided to help Cugan move, which would be right after graduation. This made him happy, because–except for one day when Bob and another guy helped–he had no one else to help him move the mountains of stuff he somehow fit into his claustrophobic apartment.

My plan was to stay with him until the W– shire had an event in June, then move back home. There, I’d find a job, save money for a used car and computer, then move back to S–.

On one of our last days at school, probably Saturday, May 20, my non-graduating roommates and friends held a graduation party for us graduating seniors. (Pearl and Sharon decided to add majors and take one more year.)

There was an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen, with layers of vanilla and chocolate, and chocolate fudge. The top was decorated in honor of the graduates. It was delicious.

They gave us presents and cards. Mine included a note paper cube depicting college students each year, and a purple warm fuzzy with a black graduation cap and gold tassel.

The cube depicted the same two students throughout their college years, one per side. As freshmen, they were cleancut, bright, shining, happy students, the guy with a tie and the girl with a skirt and sweater.

Sophomore year, they had half-closed eyes, smiles not so wide but still happy, shorts, wild hair, earrings, and very casual shirts.

Junior year, they were “cool,” with sandals, messy clothes, more earrings, wild clothes, the guy’s hair long and the girl’s hair cropped, their eyes tired, their smiles dopey (the guy) or nonexistent (the girl).

Senior year, they dressed professionally, the girl’s hair long and the guy’s hair cut short, looking like businesspeople–except with bags under the eyes on their bright, shining faces.

When I started work at an insurance company right after July 4, this sat on my desk under a small length of chain mail that Donato or Cugan gave me. The warm fuzzy sat on my computer.

My roommies and I promised to keep in touch with each other, which we did. Remember, this is when everyone got e-mail, and in the 2010s, Facebook!

Saturday, May 20. Graduation finally came, and all this was resolved: Phil, Peter, Shawn, trouble after trouble in other areas–all these things were history. I had a good man.

In only a few months, I proved Dirk wrong about me, that I would not end up an old maid. I did nothing he advised unless I’d already been doing it. I was just myself.

I’d hear young people, such as soon-to-be high-school graduates, complain about Wisconsin and that they wanted to get away from it as soon as possible.

Yet I, on the other hand, came from out of state and wanted to go back to Wisconsin because it was fun and interesting to me.

This was not an indictment against Indiana or South Bend, which probably had more things going on than my new city or S– did.

Rather, I was fascinated by the differences in culture and accent, and would miss these things if I stayed in Indiana. I just knew that any friends I made in Indiana would hear me go on and on about how different things were in Wisconsin. And, most of all, I wanted to be with my friends.

On graduation day, I didn’t go to the morning breakfast or baccalaureate service, which weren’t required and were far too early. But I did go to the lunch and, of course, commencement, and then the reception (which I couldn’t wait for.)

Graduation. Maura, Phil’s mother, graduated that day, and sat near me because the graduates sat together. She gave me a warm hello. When her turn came to get her diploma, friends and family cheered. One of them cried, “Way to go, Maura!”

Taylor was there, I believe. I don’t remember if Phil was there, but even seeing his mother made me feel weird. She didn’t seem to like me any less for what had happened, but I hadn’t seen her since September. Seeing her again reminded me of Phil.

Rather than this graduation being one of my happiest moments, I was sick of school and couldn’t wait for graduation to be over. (I’ve since learned that Cugan felt the same way at his graduation.)

I was nervous, though I didn’t let my one or two minor mess-ups bother me. (I found them amusing, actually. I forget what they were, though I might have gone the wrong way once or stumbled into a chair.)

Get me outta here! I kept thinking. I even felt this way as we filed out of the hall at the end. All I wanted to do was be with Cugan and attend Mermaid’s, which I couldn’t because it was the same day.

I arranged with Pearl and Sharon, who were booked in that same apartment for next year, to use their storage room for a good amount of my stuff. I gave them my dustmop, which I no longer needed.

I was to fetch the stuff later on after I got a job, got a car, and then moved back to S–, which I expected to do within the next school year. Fortunately, this worked out, as I found a job, got a car, and moved to Fond du Lac less than two months later.

When all my things were packed in the car or stored in the storage room, and I had talked to and introduced Catherine to my parents, it was time to go.

The things in the car were to be loaded into a van belonging to Cugan’s dad, which Cugan took to Mermaid’s.

I called the Residence Life Coordinator (RLC) to check out, thinking it would just be a matter of telling her I was leaving, and then leaving. I was only the first one to leave in my apartment, after all: Pearl and maybe the others would leave the next day.

But even though I was only the first to check out, RLC told me I couldn’t until all the furniture in the entire apartment was back in the original places.

!!!

I’d call her up and tell her things were ready, but she’d come over and say something still wasn’t right.

We were there for hours after the 4:00 reception (which was short and informal, and in the cafeteria).

I don’t remember how late we finally left, but it seemed like we never would. We were pooped out and sick of it all, and just wanted to leave. We also wanted dinner.

We feared Pearl wouldn’t be able to get around, since all the beds had to be set on the floor and not bunked, and the official arrangement was so impractical that it was hard even for the able-bodied to move around in the tiny bedrooms.

Pearl decided that she and her family would take care of the vacuuming the next day.

RLC found problems here and there to charge us all for, even though they were probably just normal wear and tear.

At long last, RLC okayed my leaving, so my parents and I fled. We went to dinner (starving by now), then stayed overnight in a hotel.

I had no idea when I would see my roommates again.

The next day, my parents drove me to Mermaid’s, wondering who all the strange people were and what kind of group this SCA was, anyway. (Mom feared they might be druggies.) We found Cugan sitting with his tent, which I think he had taken down by then, and he looked happy to see me. We loaded my things from the car and into his dad’s van, and then my parents left for South Bend.

Cugan, as autocrat, or the guy in charge, had to make sure the campsite was cleaned up properly by noon, when the event was officially over. I helped sweep out cabins, and may have done other things as well, so I helped at Mermaid’s that year even though I didn’t even attend it.

Cugan found a lump in one of the beds in the dormitory–one of the college-age girls, still asleep. He had hoped everyone was up and would be gone from the site by the time they were supposed to leave.

I later saw this girl by the horses in a long, white, flowing gown that reminded me of Melissa’s gown in Dragonslayer. (Melissa was the first maiden shown being sacrificed to the dragon. The name is only used in the novelization.) This was my dream gown.

Cugan ran hither and thither and cleaned, wishing more of the shire members would help him. Finally, cleanup was finished, everyone left the site, and his stressful time as autocrat was officially over.

Index
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound

January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD

February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992: