online friends
on digital grooming
tw: This essay discusses online CSA
At a friend’s house the other week, someone asked me if I would fuck my clone. I said, who wouldn’t? Turns out - plenty of people in that room.
Conversely, I had no interest in a doppelgänger, a tulpa, or a clone that had experienced even a month’s worth of life experience disparate from my own. I wanted to fuck a perfect replication of my present self or not at all. It wouldn’t even register to me as sex. I imagine it would be the first time I’ve ever fucked myself with a modicum of kindness or presence.
I went on Omegle a lot as a kid. This had basically the expected results; I got a Kik account and six anonymous “girlfriends,” played Donkey Kong Country in a web browser while strange men jerked off to me.
Even when I wasn’t sexting, I got plenty of practice sending half-hearted pleas to maladjusted adults, asking that they refrain from killing themselves at least until after I got home from this Bar Mitzvah. When a broken webcam would tell me she was also 13, I played along. I liked the illusion of not being alone - sexually or otherwise.
Please don’t mistake my ambivalent tone as being permissive of my experiences. There was serious violence enacted on me via these unregulated platforms during the height of my adolescence. But I find it useful to identify where trauma manifests without trying to tie it explicitly to every individual event in my life. Sometimes you get raped and it’s fine, and it doesn’t mean you didn’t get raped, or that you think rape is okay. It’s just how people work. Our brains are not if-then statements.
But my experiences did hurt me, just not in the ways that I think people might guess. They hurt me because I liked it. I got the opportunity to express my newfound desires, so I let myself be taken advantage of. I developed a real paranoid shame about this. Obviously, I was too young to have enough awareness or maturity to consent (legally or emotionally). But I was not too young to feel like I could, to internalize the delusion that I had agreed to something I knew was wrong. In my adolescent mind, this made me just as bad as the adults on the other end.
I remember one time, when I was 15, I found another actual real-life 15-year old on Omegle. After we got disconnected, I cried. I thought that she was the only other person who would ever know what it was like to want this. We were both named Sam, but she had red hair. I think about her a lot.
I was a stone top between the ages of 19 and 24, which are objectively the funniest years to be a stone top. Sex has always been safest to me as an act of voyeurism and deference. My first girlfriend asked why I always kissed with my eyes wide open. “What’s the point if I can’t see you?”
When I was a child I would cry if I remembered too early in the day that I could take manual breaths, or blink on command. If I was already in bed, it wouldn’t matter, because I could just go to sleep. But too soon after waking up, my whole day would be spent re-triggering this same panic.
That is basically what getting touched during sex has felt like to me for my entire life. Things like love and fetish and taboo and sweetness are coping skills; they are the adult equivalent to naming every book on my shelf from memory, warding off the same inevitable pang. I have never experienced a sex life not dominated by disassociation. At this point, I probably never will.
Someone the other day went into my message requests on Twitter and asked me if I used to go on Omegle. They swore they recognized me. What’s terrifying is that I did not recognize them. I had never seen them before in my life.
Instead, I was struck by the memory of encountering myself on the site. It was a recording from a few months prior. I was dressed in a different shirt, but it was the same chair, facing towards the front-yard, off-screen, where my tulpa kept glancing to make sure my parents weren’t coming down the driveway. It startled me so bad I accidentally clicked off it. But I stayed online for the next hour, cycling through hundreds of users trying to get back to my clone. Eventually I gave up. I pushed them out of my mind.
But that message stirred within me a dormant guilt. My image had been used to hurt someone else without me knowing. It did not matter that I had put tattoos on my skin or injected HRT or layered off the stubble from that video. There is forever a version of my body out there that is not my own.
I think a tough pill to swallow for anyone, is that you can’t stop this - on a personal or institutional level. Even if we were to posses perfect and moral moderation, we couldn’t fully account for all the ways kids will naturally seek out community around shared interest; these spaces will inevitably get infiltrated. There are some evolving safeguards, but it’s basically the Wild West. Instituting meaningful safe spaces for children to be online would require totally dismantling and rebuilding the internet ecosystem as it is. It is profitable to let kids get groomed - for police, for tech companies, for politicians who use it as a cover for passing extreme surveillance legislation.
I was never truly unique in my experience of this, and I will only grow less alone in this as more and more generations grow up online. Most recent reports place the rates of digital CSA at around 1 in 12. After looking into the methodologies, I wouldn’t be surprised if that number is much higher - but I’m not a data scientist and I am biased.
We do not have the language to talk about this. We say, “Oh, Gen-Z hates sex,” as if that is an accurate or adequate summation of contemporary attitudes. Nobody who sought to protect me had any sense for what it might look like. It’s clear that one of the most important things one can do is communicate with children about this - but even I have no idea how one might go about that. I’ve never had a Roblox account. My trauma is low-key chopped.
Since high school, at least half of the most relationships in my life have been maintained online. Even now, when I live a half-mile from a dozen friends and two miles from a dozen more, my long-distance friendships have remained steadfast.
This really began when I was adopted in the Letterboxd comments by a handful of video store scums and female festival programmers in their late 20s. They looked out for me, entertained my intense rambling on movies and school and whatever. Over the years, I’ve asked them why they tolerated me. They shrug and smile. “You were funny and weird and lonely. You liked things no one your age liked.” In other words, they wanted to look out for me.
In retrospect, it’s funny that I would probably not have been comfortable enough to wantonly befriend my digital stewards if I had not first been abused. It’s not like I’m glad I went through it all, and I’m sure I could have found some community regardless. But I know I would not have so immediately recognized their generosity. I would not have let them care for me the way they did. I can’t imagine who I’d be without them.
You know, I read aloud to myself, clause by clause, as I write anything. I also do the majority of work on my Substack in public (libraries, coffeeshops, transit). I don’t feel vulnerable oversharing on the internet. But muttering these words to myself ten feet from a stranger who isn’t listening, I felt pretty sheepish. Isn’t that silly?
I wonder, sometimes, if I’d like dissociate during sex less if I hadn’t been groomed online. Hypotheticals like that are not particularly useful, but they are inevitable. A few years ago, I was living alone for the first time in my life, newly single and an absolute disaster. I’d fuck constantly, hosting hookups and kicking them out once I felt my brain reattach to my body. It sucked but I figured this was the best I could do.
During this time, I accidentally picked up the habit of calling up one of my friends in the immediate aftermath. She was a temporary hermit, obsessively working on her latest art project and desperate for every distraction. I reached the point where I would call her halfway up the three flights of stairs, not 30 seconds after seeing my guests out. She joked that I was being rude, that I should talk to these people instead of her. But she always picked up anyway.
love ya lots,
helmet girl xx
I was a stone top between the ages of 19 and 24, which are objectively the funniest years to be a stone top. Sex has always been safest to me as an act of voyeurism and deference. My first girlfriend asked why I always kissed with my eyes wide open. “What’s the point if I can’t see you?”
i don't know how much i like relating to this, but anyway thank you for the article :)
excellently written as always, coming away with feelings I am nowhere near eloquent enough to describe.
thank you.