Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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Puberty hit me hard the summer between 6th and 7th grade when I was 12. Suddenly my body was alive and pulsing with the need to touch and be touched.

I’d been reading my mom’s paperback romance novels for a couple of years but this summer whole passages made SENSE in a way they hadn’t before and I began looking at my playmates in new, distracting ways. Two of them in particular: a girl and a boy.

The girl, Letty, I’d been friends with for years. We were the same age, often in the same class in school. We’d grown up playing dress ups and watching cartoons together and running in and out of each other’s houses. She lived 5 houses down the street from me, and her parents were influential in the neighborhood Latter Day Saints ward (of which for years we were the only neighbors not members). She had long blond hair and bright blue eyes and freckles. And she was to be a Good Influence on me. At this point I was not considered a Bad Influence on her, it should be noted, just someone who was in danger of being lost. I found myself spending a lot of time counting the freckles on her cheeks that summer and inventing excuses to touch her. I think about her and my memories turn golden and warm and slow.

Then there was the boy who lived next door. He’d moved into the house just that spring (the second non-Mormon family on the street) and from the first he disturbed me. I used to spend a great deal of time in my house, peeking out the curtains watching the neighborhood kids play. So I saw him way before he saw me, and for some reason I decided that I did not want to meet him, ever. Apparently, he decided that he very much wanted to meet me. The other neighborhood kids would try to get me to come out and play, but if he was around I would tell them no. If he came to join us, I would walk away — no matter where “away” would take me. One day the girl across the street knocked on my door and asked if I could play. I asked if this boy was going to be there, she said no. I closed the door for a second to go ask my mom permission and when I opened the door again there was the boy. I went to slam the door shut and his arm shot out and his hand grabbed the door and forced it back open. We struggled and then I stopped for a minute and he said, “I’m Jake, I know you’re Kasini. Why don’t you like me?” I smiled pretty and said it was because he smelled and in the moment that shock spread across his face I shoved at his hand and slammed the door shut and yelled through the shut door that he’d never enter my house again.

The next day my little brother (19 months younger than I) brought home his new best friend, Jake. I glared at him over the dinner table. He smiled pretty at me.

That summer was split between the warm honey of Letty and the spitting fury of Jake. All wrapped up in my cozy little porn distribution ring.

Uh, porn? Porn. I had found my dad’s porn collection and I decided that it was not right to keep all that glorious information to myself.

Over the first several weeks of that summer I operated a porn distribution ring. A lending library of lasciviousness. Only a couple magazines out at a time, so it wouldn’t be obvious that someone was tampering with the trade. Both Jake and Letty were customers. Letty because… well because I was trying to get her to let me educate her better. And Jake because… he found out and threatened to rat me out if I didn’t include him. The little fucker.

Now I also spent those first several weeks of summer slowly seducing Letty. Afternoons of brushing hair while we looked at the playboys, my fingers grazing her neck, her shoulders, her cheeks. I’d push her shirt up and while away hours drawing idle pictures on her back, my fingers slowly straying to the sides of her breasts, down her hips. One day I was on my period (probably my second one ever) and I had both of our shirts off and both of us were licking and stroking each other’s breasts and nipples, fascinated about the way our nipples hardened and softened, our breaths quickening and our pelvises slowly rocking. I undid her pants and slid my hand down between her legs, terrified at what I was doing but too aroused to stop. I so very much wanted her own hand between my legs touching that place where so much tension was building. But I was on my period and I wasn’t allowed to use tampons, so I touched her and touched her as our mutual frustration mounted, and then people were home for the afternoon and our privacy was gone.

Now the boy… I didn’t understand the reactions he was getting out of me. Not just physical but… ok, see? I’m very, very nice. A genuinely nice person. I am empathetic and sympathetic. I tell white lies to protect people’s feelings. I may think really mean things in my head, but I never say them. Well, I might say them now that I’m in my mid-thirties, but back then? I was the sweetest dreamiest girl you could meet. Ok, yes, I was running a porn distribution ring and seducing my girlfriend, but I was so NICE about it. But this boy… as you saw above, I was mean to him. Snarky and snide and insulting.

I slammed his hand in a door and laughed. I’d make cookies and pass them out to all the kids around and pointedly not give him one. He’d stand up and saunter over to me and take a cookie anyway, his eyes daring me to stop him. I’d sneer and hold eye contact, putting all the disdain I felt for him into my eyes and we’d stand there for a long time, our little battle of wills, while the rest of the kids just got confused, until something happened to break our stance. Eventually I stopped avoiding him. I’d go out of my way to cross his path so I could say new, mean things to him. I would tease him and taunt him until he’d chase me and pin me in a corner somewhere and we’d have a few flustered moments before I’d break away and escape, adrenalin rushing…

In mid summer, the week after I had my hand down Letty’s pants, my porn ring was busted up. Letty’s mom had walked in on her with her magazine and Letty had confessed. It was a Huge Deal. I was a pariah and my parents were perverts. My dad threw all of his porn away and not only was I grounded with no privileges for the rest of the summer, but I wasn’t allowed to play with anyone. Not only me, but my brothers, too. No one wanted their kids to play with any of us. We had proved them right that anyone who wasn’t Mormon was immoral. But Jake’s family wasn’t Mormon, and so Jake still came over. The only neighborhood kid who did.

It didn’t really matter to me anymore, though. After 2 days of crying every sexual thought or impulse I had was locked up away in a deep box. I was a pervert, I was a child molester (yes, my friends were my age, but in my mind they were children and I molested them and so I was a child molester no matter that I was a child myself) I was not to be trusted. Jake seemed… sorta at a loss. He tried to be nice, but I didn’t play the game anymore and things fell flat. A week after school started he moved away. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t moved, if I’d come out of my deep depression with him still next door. No matter. I didn’t do any further sexual experimentation of ANY sort until I was 19.

I’d even mostly forgotten Jake until just this past year. It wasn’t until I started exploring BDSM, and started experimenting with men, that I remembered that summer and the way I felt and acted with Jake. It kind of makes me laugh, being bisexual in hindsight. I’m so used to hearing women re-tell their sexual histories after coming out as bi or queer, pulling out half-remembered, or mostly buried memories of experimenting with girls when pubescent or prepubescent, and here I am doing the same only in reverse. It’s more than about the boy, though. In looking back, even though I’ve spent the last 18 years as a lesbian, the experimentation with the boy was probably more significant to my psyche than with the girl. Not because of the genitalia, but because of the energy exchange.

My experimentation with Letty was sweet and lovely. And remained with me enough that when I DID start coming back to sexual energy when I was 19, it was women I was looking to be sexual with. But the interactions with Jake left me… riled and fiery, disturbed in a way that I didn’t know how to handle, and yet craved. I tied all of that in with my shame that summer, but now that I’m exploring kink, that same exhilaration is back and it electrifies me. I am a brat. I am provocative and playful. I am snarky and snide. I will prod, and tease, and push the person (male or female, masculine or feminine) with me to the point where the darkness inside them breaks through that civilized veneer and snatches me up and sweeps us both away.

When I was 12 I was both sugar and spice, and then for a long, long time I was sugar only. Now I have my spice back and my spice burns.