Read Online Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture by Chelsea Cain - Free Book Online
Authors: Chelsea Cain
Tags: United States, Fiction, General, Social Science, History, Literary Criticism, Girls, 20th Century, American, Biography, Essay/s, Literary Collections, Social History, Social History - 1960-1970, 1960-1970, Hippies - United States, United States - History - 1961-1969, Hippies, Girls - United States - History - 20th Century, Girls - United States
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No boundaries, no guidance, no protection. Nothing was sacred.
And yet, as a kid, everyone envied me my mother. She let me do anything I wanted. I could roam the streets after midnight on a school night, or fuck a classmate on an open field after a football game. All she wanted was the details, which she promptly passed on to her friends, along with the size of my brother’s dick.
My hippie mother even suggested people for me to sleep with, didn’t understand when I wouldn’t, especially if it was someone she wanted. She saw nothing wrong with the local mechanic taking pictures of me naked. After all, he took some of her.
Neither parent provided protection. I think my mom naively believed that all you do need is love, that love will heal all wounds, that there is no such thing as inherent evil. She couldn’t imagine such evil, so couldn’t guard against it. After a while, in self-defense, I lied to my friends about curfews (that I had one) and restrictions (that I had some). I wanted limits before I got eaten up. But by then it was too late.
I slept with my best male friend (to Pink Floyd, of course). I slept with my best friend’s boyfriend. All this would’ve been fine and dandy except I felt like shit. One of my friends laughingly called me a slut, but I knew she meant it. Another girlfriend wrote me a nasty letter after I slept with a guy I hadn’t known she liked.
As I got older, I did my best to have a protective boyfriend around, someone to fall back on, so I had a ‘legitimate’ excuse to turn people down. As if what I wanted didn’t count. Sorry, can’t menage a trois. My boyfriend, you know.
The fifteen-year-old my mother bedded became my lover fifteen years later. My mother abused him, he later abused me. Instigated by good ol’ free love.
I guess I’m lucky to be alive. I have no STDs, I’m HIV-negative. But free love exacted a terrible price on my family. These days I trust no one either over or under thirty. I have no real friends, no support, no closeness. Neither my brother nor I can keep a meaningful relationship going for very long before it self-destructs. We’ve both been in jail for domestic violence, and we both continue to flail in the maze of our desecrated sexuality.
Free love freely fostered self-hatred, which manifested itself in eating disorders and suicidal tendencies. I became so disconnected from my body that my gynecologist would find objects (tampons, condoms) left in my vagina for days. I didn’t feel them rotting inside me.
I was primed to be the sexiest, the wildest, the least hung up. Liberal. A hippie’s kid. Untainted by rules and regulations. Unconstrained. Free.
These days I have so many hang-ups, I’m surprised I can walk down the street without tripping. And actually, there were years when I couldn’t walk down the street; I couldn’t even leave my house. Nowhere was safe except, paradoxically, my bed. Depression and sex, with bed as part of the disease and the cure.
If you saw me now you’d have no inkling that I used to dance to the blues in such a way that the musicians all had hard-ons, that my favorite movie, after The Rocky Horror Picture Show , was 9 ‘ / 2 Weeks .
Today I rarely wear revealing clothes outside of the house. I don’t like dirty jokes or double entendres, and I hate Valentine’s Day, with its corresponding message, ‘Everybody copulate!’ Some would call me frigid.
I read self-help books that say sex is healthy, sexual urges are normal, I’m not a slut. But that vaguely echoes what my mother taught me. Sex is good. Sex is fun. Sex is sport.
Nowadays I have only fantasies, because I am too damn tired to deal with people. After so many years of sexual abuse, and being the sexiest slut on the block, ironically, I can’t have sex.
For a period of time, I cried every time I came, and exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I gained weight, wore baggy clothes, shaved my head.
I call myself
No boundaries, no guidance, no protection. Nothing was sacred.
And yet, as a kid, everyone envied me my mother. She let me do anything I wanted. I could roam the streets after midnight on a school night, or fuck a classmate on an open field after a football game. All she wanted was the details, which she promptly passed on to her friends, along with the size of my brother’s dick.
My hippie mother even suggested people for me to sleep with, didn’t understand when I wouldn’t, especially if it was someone she wanted. She saw nothing wrong with the local mechanic taking pictures of me naked. After all, he took some of her.
Neither parent provided protection. I think my mom naively believed that all you do need is love, that love will heal all wounds, that there is no such thing as inherent evil. She couldn’t imagine such evil, so couldn’t guard against it. After a while, in self-defense, I lied to my friends about curfews (that I had one) and restrictions (that I had some). I wanted limits before I got eaten up. But by then it was too late.
I slept with my best male friend (to Pink Floyd, of course). I slept with my best friend’s boyfriend. All this would’ve been fine and dandy except I felt like shit. One of my friends laughingly called me a slut, but I knew she meant it. Another girlfriend wrote me a nasty letter after I slept with a guy I hadn’t known she liked.
As I got older, I did my best to have a protective boyfriend around, someone to fall back on, so I had a ‘legitimate’ excuse to turn people down. As if what I wanted didn’t count. Sorry, can’t menage a trois. My boyfriend, you know.
The fifteen-year-old my mother bedded became my lover fifteen years later. My mother abused him, he later abused me. Instigated by good ol’ free love.
I guess I’m lucky to be alive. I have no STDs, I’m HIV-negative. But free love exacted a terrible price on my family. These days I trust no one either over or under thirty. I have no real friends, no support, no closeness. Neither my brother nor I can keep a meaningful relationship going for very long before it self-destructs. We’ve both been in jail for domestic violence, and we both continue to flail in the maze of our desecrated sexuality.
Free love freely fostered self-hatred, which manifested itself in eating disorders and suicidal tendencies. I became so disconnected from my body that my gynecologist would find objects (tampons, condoms) left in my vagina for days. I didn’t feel them rotting inside me.
I was primed to be the sexiest, the wildest, the least hung up. Liberal. A hippie’s kid. Untainted by rules and regulations. Unconstrained. Free.
These days I have so many hang-ups, I’m surprised I can walk down the street without tripping. And actually, there were years when I couldn’t walk down the street; I couldn’t even leave my house. Nowhere was safe except, paradoxically, my bed. Depression and sex, with bed as part of the disease and the cure.
If you saw me now you’d have no inkling that I used to dance to the blues in such a way that the musicians all had hard-ons, that my favorite movie, after The Rocky Horror Picture Show , was 9 ‘ / 2 Weeks .
Today I rarely wear revealing clothes outside of the house. I don’t like dirty jokes or double entendres, and I hate Valentine’s Day, with its corresponding message, ‘Everybody copulate!’ Some would call me frigid.
I read self-help books that say sex is healthy, sexual urges are normal, I’m not a slut. But that vaguely echoes what my mother taught me. Sex is good. Sex is fun. Sex is sport.
Nowadays I have only fantasies, because I am too damn tired to deal with people. After so many years of sexual abuse, and being the sexiest slut on the block, ironically, I can’t have sex.
For a period of time, I cried every time I came, and exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I gained weight, wore baggy clothes, shaved my head.
I call myself
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