This article in the New York Times finds me fuming. I keep wondering, "What if it had been me?" "What if I become like them?" I really don't know how to articulate this outrage...
A couple of months ago, at my friend, R's wedding, my friend E and I offer our pregnant friend, G, who has brought her daughter, C—she's in her terrible two—to spend one night in our hotel room. In the morning, while G is getting ready in the bathroom, leaving E and me to tend to her child, laid on top of the bed I had used but had given up for the guests is C rolling, crawling, and trying to stand on the bouncy surface, oftentimes close to falling. I quickly make my way over to the bed and sit down, forming a barrier between C and the floor. Like what a good uncle should do, I pick her up, bounce her up and down, gently toss her down, all of which make C giggle with delight. At one point I even tickle her. Then E, looking on from across the room, pipes in saying, "You know what they say, most molestations start with tickling."
Bam! I feel like I've been punched in the stomach; the word, "tickling," echoes in my head.
Then, my mind plays back old memories I'm suppressing. Those of their hands. Those of pleasure... Yes, I know what they did is wrong, but I can't deny the pleasure their hands brought. And I hate myself for having liked their touches. Sometimes I wonder (and I don't know if I can explain my thought cogently but), if Kinsey is right about the sexuality rating scale and nurture does make the man you are (or nurture can increase the expressivity of a low penetrant gene), then have I been pushed towards the homosexual range because of pleasure, nurture's positive reinforcer? Then can the lingering memories of what had happened cause me to become like them, the monsters with their hands?
I don't want to open my Pandora's box any further...
Christmass approaches and yet I'm writing about...
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