So, I've been very busy between work and theater, and haven't touched the internet for a few days, but I have had a little bit of a chance to work on re-writing Boys of the Gallery (see last post). So far, I think it's saying more what I want it to say without compromising the integrity of the story itself.
And the writing will be different as well -- there's a huge gap between my skill at fourteen and my skill now, so if anything, it's an encouraging project. I'll post the rewrite as it comes.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
A Personal Entry
Today, I went past an old neighborhood where my partner used to live (and where I spent most of my time during the first year or so of high school) -- the apartment that inspired Sang and Murray's apartment in The Boys of the Gallery -- and the building she lived in has been torn down.
It was kind of an emotional moment for me. Not only did we have so many memories there, but I have so many memories tied there for my characters. Of all of the characters in BotG, Sang and Murray were my favorites to write together, and they seemed the most tangibly real, even through their outlandish design. And of course, writing the scenes that happened in that house -- all of the former victims of a pedophile photographer coming together to stop him from getting away with murder, but not being able to escape the past they all shared -- were so tangible to me just because of the setting. When I read over those scenes, I can see the unique way light comes through those dusty windows, I can hear the way conversations muffle in those walls, and I can feel the rain leaking through the balcony awning. Most of all, I feel Dash's hesitation and uncertainty -- the loneliness he feels as he considers leaving them in the middle of the night.
I'm so sad it's gone now, but reading those scenes again will bring it back as strongly as if I were walking up those steep, narrow stairs and down that dark hallway. Maybe it will give me an excuse to begin revising after so long, to finally make the scenes before those in that place match the message I had hoped to send with the rest of the work.
It was kind of an emotional moment for me. Not only did we have so many memories there, but I have so many memories tied there for my characters. Of all of the characters in BotG, Sang and Murray were my favorites to write together, and they seemed the most tangibly real, even through their outlandish design. And of course, writing the scenes that happened in that house -- all of the former victims of a pedophile photographer coming together to stop him from getting away with murder, but not being able to escape the past they all shared -- were so tangible to me just because of the setting. When I read over those scenes, I can see the unique way light comes through those dusty windows, I can hear the way conversations muffle in those walls, and I can feel the rain leaking through the balcony awning. Most of all, I feel Dash's hesitation and uncertainty -- the loneliness he feels as he considers leaving them in the middle of the night.
I'm so sad it's gone now, but reading those scenes again will bring it back as strongly as if I were walking up those steep, narrow stairs and down that dark hallway. Maybe it will give me an excuse to begin revising after so long, to finally make the scenes before those in that place match the message I had hoped to send with the rest of the work.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Cyber Angels
In my conversation with Rob Taylor (see below), Rob's polite, civil personality suggested that I seek to ally myself with a child advocacy organization to help parents recognize the sort of grooming I went through. The organizations he mentioned were all fairly radical, and all linked back to Wikisposure, which I have no respect for and refuse to ally myself with. So I did some research on my own, and found CyberAngels. I contacted them today, and hopefully will be able to do what I can to help. They seem very reputable.
I'll let everyone know how this turns out, one way or another. Does anyone else have suggestions for reputable sites?
I'll let everyone know how this turns out, one way or another. Does anyone else have suggestions for reputable sites?
My Conversation With Rob Taylor
From my Facebook. Also note that he is much more civil when he has to talk to someone directly than when he attacks them on his blog, calling nearly everyone who isn't him a child rapist. Let me put it this way: I like Email!Rob. I can talk to him, and he is very polite. Blog!Rob seems to be out for the attention he gets by being a sensationalist, and doesn't seem to admit he's wrong very well.
But, in any case, here is our conversation, him in bold, me in italics.
I saw your comment and would like to give you a forum to fully express your point of view. I have responded already and my feelings are unchanged but I'm old fashioned enough to remember when we of the Old Ways looked out for younger sisters and brothers. Though I have no sway with PJ on whether your page will stay up and will relate your new found disaprroval to them on my blog and privately.
I also think you could do much good for children by helping out if you have indeed recognized your errors. The grooming of victims is something many don't understand and your experience could be a great help to parents.
Thank you. This whole ordeal has come back time and time again, and it's not a period in my life I'm proud of. I was young and I was misled into thinking that they were the morally just party. I know now that that is not true, and I want to correct what I did. If you know of any advocacy organizations that could benefit from my experience, please let me know. I want to help in any way I can to prevent what happened to me happening to someone else. It ruins your life, and you never suspect that anything is wrong. I can only be glad that I realized that there was.
Pagans Against Child Abuse is good but we'll want to check you out first. I'm curious. You were groomed for the site (not unusual) but why and how? I think we need to know how you came into contact with these people in the first place.
I would say visit a site called Absolute Zero United. And on a religious note there are rites you can use to control your, shall we say impulses. I am an alcoholic and I control my addiction in part through magic. I feel as though your own shall we say addiction, can be controlled the same way.
Also people, place and things. You need to cut ties with not just the people online, but the materials and morality they represent. Let me ask you a question-why did you comment on that post today?
Thanks again, and I'm sorry this is going to be such a long message, but I feel like I need to answer your questions as fully as I can. Even writing it down and telling someone helps me work through a lot of the why of it, which I haven't really understood.
The scary thing is, I came to them on my own. When I was almost thirteen, my mother passed away from an aortic aneurysm. A couple months later, my father began dating her best friend. I was home alone more often than not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it was any of their fault, but those were my circumstances. I felt abandoned and alone. A lot of girls my age might have turned to parties and sex within their own social group to cope with that sort of feeling, but I didn't have many friends and spent a lot of time online. I don't remember exactly how I came to the Free Spirits, I just know that there was a curiosity in me for everything taboo, to push every limit, and that I needed someone or something to protect me. When I found them, I posed alternately as a boy my own age, as a transgendered individual, or as a man. Sometimes I was myself. It's amazing and terrifying how you think you're finding something you agree with, but really, you're twisting your own views to match what you see. I learned to twist not only my views, but the views of other people as well, and that is exactly how this movement gains what little acceptance it does. These people say, "Oh, we don't want to have sex with children, we would never rape or take advantage of a child. We just want to love and protect children." which sounds good if you can ignore their rants about abolishing the age of consent. When I was a minor, of course I could ignore that. Almost every minor who is curious about sex or drinking or driving or cigarettes thinks that the legal age for all of them should be lowered because they don't want to wait to fulfill that curiosity. I believed everything they said, and when they said they were being persecuted, I lashed out at whoever they said was doing the persecuting.
It's almost like a cult, in a way. Everyone who is lured in comes for different reasons, but they're all missing something, and the ones who have already been absorbed by that cult deceive them into thinking they can find it through being a part of their movement. They justify what they do to you and it sounds logical because you've already grown to trust them. And even once you get out, there's this Stockholm-syndrome type of thing where, even if you know that they're wrong and that they're lying to you, and that they are the bad guy, you feel like they were your friends. Finding my profile on there was a wake-up call to me. I realized that I can't let myself feel that sympathy for them that they bred in me, or I'm exactly like the worst of them. That it doesn't matter if I don't count myself among them anymore, if I reach out to them, that's exactly what I am. And I think that's what I need to let go of most.
I don't have urges to have sex with children. My fantasy was always to be the child, to have someone like these men, who I imagined were good, honest people, to protect me. It was never even really a sexual urge, but looking back now, I see how I twisted my own needs so I could fit in. It's weird, and I don't understand it -- I'm not a psychologist -- but somehow, through my need to be protected, I became the sexualized child, obsessed with it and with becoming it, because, looking at these men and what they had to say, that was how I could gain attention from someone like them. I joined dating sites when I was as young as fourteen, posing as an eighteen year old boy. At fifteen, I entered an online relationship with a forty year old man whom I told I was sixteen (then the age of consent in Indiana). I made a few attempts at meeting him in person, but I always backed out. I couldn't handle the repercussions.
Someone from the Free Spirits sent me an email, asking me how I was handling being profiled. I had no idea that I had been. I left that community a long time ago, though I still felt sympathy for them, and am still dealing with those feelings that these people are my friends. I know that they aren't, but it is difficult to leave behind something that you really believed was truth. I just wanted these people who were compiling information about my life and posting it publicly to know that they had the wrong information -- they took pictures of me from last year and information on me from then as well, like my age and my undergrad status, and applied it to things I had said when I was younger and still involved with the Free Spirits. The quote they love to use about me being able to convince anyone -- I said that when I was 15 or 16. by the time I was 17, I had cut off from the Free Spirits. It just seemed to me like the PJ people were using pieces of my life out of context to further their cause, and no matter how just the cause, I don't think that justifies lying, omitting, or not giving the whole story. I don't think it's justified for anyone to take away my voice for things I said when I was still a child.
This is it so far. If he responds again (and I think he will, he does need more material to post and feel morally superior about), I will certainly post it.
But, in any case, here is our conversation, him in bold, me in italics.
I saw your comment and would like to give you a forum to fully express your point of view. I have responded already and my feelings are unchanged but I'm old fashioned enough to remember when we of the Old Ways looked out for younger sisters and brothers. Though I have no sway with PJ on whether your page will stay up and will relate your new found disaprroval to them on my blog and privately.
I also think you could do much good for children by helping out if you have indeed recognized your errors. The grooming of victims is something many don't understand and your experience could be a great help to parents.
Thank you. This whole ordeal has come back time and time again, and it's not a period in my life I'm proud of. I was young and I was misled into thinking that they were the morally just party. I know now that that is not true, and I want to correct what I did. If you know of any advocacy organizations that could benefit from my experience, please let me know. I want to help in any way I can to prevent what happened to me happening to someone else. It ruins your life, and you never suspect that anything is wrong. I can only be glad that I realized that there was.
Pagans Against Child Abuse is good but we'll want to check you out first. I'm curious. You were groomed for the site (not unusual) but why and how? I think we need to know how you came into contact with these people in the first place.
I would say visit a site called Absolute Zero United. And on a religious note there are rites you can use to control your, shall we say impulses. I am an alcoholic and I control my addiction in part through magic. I feel as though your own shall we say addiction, can be controlled the same way.
Also people, place and things. You need to cut ties with not just the people online, but the materials and morality they represent. Let me ask you a question-why did you comment on that post today?
Thanks again, and I'm sorry this is going to be such a long message, but I feel like I need to answer your questions as fully as I can. Even writing it down and telling someone helps me work through a lot of the why of it, which I haven't really understood.
The scary thing is, I came to them on my own. When I was almost thirteen, my mother passed away from an aortic aneurysm. A couple months later, my father began dating her best friend. I was home alone more often than not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it was any of their fault, but those were my circumstances. I felt abandoned and alone. A lot of girls my age might have turned to parties and sex within their own social group to cope with that sort of feeling, but I didn't have many friends and spent a lot of time online. I don't remember exactly how I came to the Free Spirits, I just know that there was a curiosity in me for everything taboo, to push every limit, and that I needed someone or something to protect me. When I found them, I posed alternately as a boy my own age, as a transgendered individual, or as a man. Sometimes I was myself. It's amazing and terrifying how you think you're finding something you agree with, but really, you're twisting your own views to match what you see. I learned to twist not only my views, but the views of other people as well, and that is exactly how this movement gains what little acceptance it does. These people say, "Oh, we don't want to have sex with children, we would never rape or take advantage of a child. We just want to love and protect children." which sounds good if you can ignore their rants about abolishing the age of consent. When I was a minor, of course I could ignore that. Almost every minor who is curious about sex or drinking or driving or cigarettes thinks that the legal age for all of them should be lowered because they don't want to wait to fulfill that curiosity. I believed everything they said, and when they said they were being persecuted, I lashed out at whoever they said was doing the persecuting.
It's almost like a cult, in a way. Everyone who is lured in comes for different reasons, but they're all missing something, and the ones who have already been absorbed by that cult deceive them into thinking they can find it through being a part of their movement. They justify what they do to you and it sounds logical because you've already grown to trust them. And even once you get out, there's this Stockholm-syndrome type of thing where, even if you know that they're wrong and that they're lying to you, and that they are the bad guy, you feel like they were your friends. Finding my profile on there was a wake-up call to me. I realized that I can't let myself feel that sympathy for them that they bred in me, or I'm exactly like the worst of them. That it doesn't matter if I don't count myself among them anymore, if I reach out to them, that's exactly what I am. And I think that's what I need to let go of most.
I don't have urges to have sex with children. My fantasy was always to be the child, to have someone like these men, who I imagined were good, honest people, to protect me. It was never even really a sexual urge, but looking back now, I see how I twisted my own needs so I could fit in. It's weird, and I don't understand it -- I'm not a psychologist -- but somehow, through my need to be protected, I became the sexualized child, obsessed with it and with becoming it, because, looking at these men and what they had to say, that was how I could gain attention from someone like them. I joined dating sites when I was as young as fourteen, posing as an eighteen year old boy. At fifteen, I entered an online relationship with a forty year old man whom I told I was sixteen (then the age of consent in Indiana). I made a few attempts at meeting him in person, but I always backed out. I couldn't handle the repercussions.
Someone from the Free Spirits sent me an email, asking me how I was handling being profiled. I had no idea that I had been. I left that community a long time ago, though I still felt sympathy for them, and am still dealing with those feelings that these people are my friends. I know that they aren't, but it is difficult to leave behind something that you really believed was truth. I just wanted these people who were compiling information about my life and posting it publicly to know that they had the wrong information -- they took pictures of me from last year and information on me from then as well, like my age and my undergrad status, and applied it to things I had said when I was younger and still involved with the Free Spirits. The quote they love to use about me being able to convince anyone -- I said that when I was 15 or 16. by the time I was 17, I had cut off from the Free Spirits. It just seemed to me like the PJ people were using pieces of my life out of context to further their cause, and no matter how just the cause, I don't think that justifies lying, omitting, or not giving the whole story. I don't think it's justified for anyone to take away my voice for things I said when I was still a child.
This is it so far. If he responds again (and I think he will, he does need more material to post and feel morally superior about), I will certainly post it.
A Note on Wikisposure, etc.
Wikisposure is a fantastic idea, but I think it falls prey to sensationalism and exaggeration. This is what happened in my case.
They took quotes out of context to make me seem worse, they skewed the facts every which way they could to make things I said at fourteen seem like I said them yesterday.
My Wikisposure is not me.
And Wikisposure is not helping anyone.
So if these sites won't help you protect your children, what will?
Listen to them. Know where they are, know what they're doing. Know who their friends are, in real life and online. If my father had just checked my history, I might not be writing this today.
But it isn't the fault of the parents when a child falls into the trap of pro-pedophilia propaganda. It is the fault of the predators themselves.
I don't have a solution for that. We could hunt them down, stalk them, make their lives miserable. But if your child falls victim to them, not as a sexual object, but as successor to their twisted beliefs, it will be your own child you are hunting.
Wikisposure and the like probably think that it's alright to do that, because they only see people in two divisions -- child activist and evil pedophile. They don't believe that a person can once believe something, and then realize that they were wrong.
I was groomed as a future pedophile, not by one specific person, but by a community, by a set of beliefs, and by a rhetoric that led me to believe they were right. I advocated on their behalf. I sympathized with them. Today, I realize that I was wrong. And I will do everything in my power to help those young people, who, like I did, listen to the pro-pedophilia rhetoric and are too naive to see that it is false.
They took quotes out of context to make me seem worse, they skewed the facts every which way they could to make things I said at fourteen seem like I said them yesterday.
My Wikisposure is not me.
And Wikisposure is not helping anyone.
So if these sites won't help you protect your children, what will?
Listen to them. Know where they are, know what they're doing. Know who their friends are, in real life and online. If my father had just checked my history, I might not be writing this today.
But it isn't the fault of the parents when a child falls into the trap of pro-pedophilia propaganda. It is the fault of the predators themselves.
I don't have a solution for that. We could hunt them down, stalk them, make their lives miserable. But if your child falls victim to them, not as a sexual object, but as successor to their twisted beliefs, it will be your own child you are hunting.
Wikisposure and the like probably think that it's alright to do that, because they only see people in two divisions -- child activist and evil pedophile. They don't believe that a person can once believe something, and then realize that they were wrong.
I was groomed as a future pedophile, not by one specific person, but by a community, by a set of beliefs, and by a rhetoric that led me to believe they were right. I advocated on their behalf. I sympathized with them. Today, I realize that I was wrong. And I will do everything in my power to help those young people, who, like I did, listen to the pro-pedophilia rhetoric and are too naive to see that it is false.
About Me
My name is Jessica Massey. I am 20 years old, and from the ages of 14 to 17, I was an activist for the Free Spirits, a pro-pedophilia message board. Recently I was profiled on Wikisposure and several other sites like it. Their entries were erroneous and painted a picture of my life and my experiences that was wholly false.
You won't find loaded words or rants here. I'm not trying to expose pedophiles or scare parents and children. I just want to tell my story. I want parents to understand how easily their child can become involved with these pedophiles, who claim to be good, innocent men. I want to warn parents. I want my story to keep even one young person from being brainwashed into becoming a pedophile activist.
You won't find loaded words or rants here. I'm not trying to expose pedophiles or scare parents and children. I just want to tell my story. I want parents to understand how easily their child can become involved with these pedophiles, who claim to be good, innocent men. I want to warn parents. I want my story to keep even one young person from being brainwashed into becoming a pedophile activist.
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