If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations […], then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.
In high school, a wise teacher assigned the short story “Wild Swans” by Alice Munro. […] In just a few short pages, Munro lays it all out : how the force of one’s adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment ; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim ; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life.