Part Seven - Keeping it in the Family

Some people like to joke: "Incest is best, just keep it in the family"; but writing as a survivor, I've got to say that incest is not funny. Not funny at all.

As a little boy I had incestuous sex with both of my brothers, one of them being the abuser. After my abusive brother moved away, I continued the incest with my other brother. That part of our familial relationship ended when both of us became fed up with our own self-disgust and shame, and the two of us never spoke about it again for over 30 years. As a matter of fact, we've only just recently begun talking about everything we did alone together as well as with our abuser. These have been awkward conversations as we sort through blame and shame in search of vindication and healing. Part of that process is acknowledging and repenting of those deeds for which we are responsible; but more importantly, with that repentance needs to come self-forgiveness along with letting go the guilt and shame which was never ours to begin with.

If that's where my story of sex with my siblings ended, it would have been enough guilt, shame and familial dysfunction to mess up my life for the rest of my life; but unfortunately, there was one more experience before I finally packed up all my belongings and moved myself away from that house of shame.

My final incestuous episode is also my most difficult to share, not because it was more horrible than what happened to me as a little boy but because of my age at the time, my culpability in the act and with whom the inappropriate sex took place. I can't remember if I was 15 or 16 at the time; but I'm leaning towards 15 going on 16, which would have made the other person 23 years old at the time.

My final act of incest was with my sister. I have beat myself up over this one for decades, and greatly feared what happened between the two of us might some day come to light and expose me for the disgusting, sexually twisted pervert I really am. The actual activity was brief and took place over a few hours on a Saturday evening and Sunday morning, never to be repeated (or discussed) again. I'm beginning to understand this as another situation where I was sexually victimized; but it's much more difficult to shake my complicity in this act of incest than I can do with what happened with my abusive brother.

My memory of this final, disgusting and shameful experience of my childhood began one Saturday night with my sister and I discussing sex and sharing with one another our individual stashes of pornography. I had Hustler, Penthouse Letters and a few other magazines and my sister had a few Playgirl magazines along with an extremely descriptive and sexually extremist erotic novel titled Rx for Sex. Without getting too explicit on details, the plot of the book involved a young married couple seeing a sex therapist and primarily what the therapist and his staff did with the wife to open her mind (and other body parts) to things she (and I) had previously never imagined.

Reading to one another from our respective stash of filth served as a form of mutual seduction...or at least that's the way I interpreted it for the past 30+ years. We read to each other until we became so aroused that we could look past the horror of a little brother and big sister having sex with one another and just get on with the act. Like I wrote above, it was short-lived. We did a few things that Saturday night and a few more things the next Sunday morning and that was that. While I probably felt more shame at the time and continuing on through my life about this than she did, I never interpreted those few hours as abuse on either of our parts; but rather as an episode of mutual moral weakness. We were both complicit, the act was consensual...or was it?

While I cannot disown my own lust and lack of self control in the experience, not to mention my continued reliance upon pornography, I'm beginning to see the bigger picture behind those hours of shame. Yes, I was in the wrong. Yes, I still feel guilt over this. Yes, I wish it had never happened. And yes, I can never dis-invest myself of at least some of the blame; but just as my abusive brother groomed me in preparation for our incestuous activity, so did my big sister (whether consciously or not).

What happened that weekend didn't begin Saturday at dusk, as I had always recounted it in my mind; but much earlier, as my sister began sharing sexual materials with me. Just as she supplied porn to my abusiver; she provided me with porn, erotica and catheter condoms from the nursing home and excitedly told stories about sexually touching some of the residents. She also gave vivid descriptions of XXX magazines which she didn't bring home featuring bestiality, and as she described the images in those magazines, her sense of sexual arousal over the idea of sex with farm animals was very evident. In other words, my sister was a bit twisted herself in her sexuality as well.

And there was one other thing: some time before the events of that shameful weekend, my sister told me she had shaved her pubic area and lifted her nightgown to show me. Again, just to explain it now, I felt inside myself a mixture of sexual arousal and disgust at seeing my sister's private parts...but in the end, carnal desire won out over personal morals and cultural ethics.

So was I abused by my sister? Yes. Yes and no; but yes, I was abused. Looking back now and remembering the weeks and months building up to that weekend, I can see how she prepared me (consciously or not) to do something which normally, even for a sick, twisted, sexually corrupted adolescent boy like myself, would have found difficult to pursue. Yes, I was abused. While I will continue to take some responsibility as a sexually mature boy with raging sexual desires, I was still a kid (emotionally and psychologically immature) and she was the adult in the situation. Yes, I was wrong; but I think I can say with all things considered, she was more wrong.

I've tried to comprehend what happened that weekend within the light of myself having already been sexually corrupted as a young boy, my way-too-early introduction to pornography and my continued use of even harder pornography upon entering adolescence. I believe there is some truth to my previous theory. I was corrupt. I was damaged goods. I had a skewed understanding of sex and sexuality which certainly affected my continued behavior with my brother and most likely influenced my lack of restraint with my sister. Yes, this is true; but I also was victimized by a sibling who was quite a bit older than me, a sibling with sexual desires begging the opportunity for exploitation of the nearest, easiest-to-access subject: ME.

Lately I've been reading a lot about survivors of childhood sexual abuse and one thing which comes up repeatedly is that, having been victimized as a child, the survivor continues to place him or herself in a position to be re-victimized both sexually as well as in other ways, including being bullied through childhood and even adult relationships. I'll address that when I write about my relationships over the years with friends, co-workers and authority figures was affected by my past; but this final story was my final sexually dysfunctional experience within my own family. It was the end of what began with my oldest brother, and the beginning of a huge, internal, twisted mess I'm still untangling.