That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields Read Online Free PDF

over the railing from the third landing of the staircase, or put a plastic bag over my head—like a killer whale with a sea lion, playing with it, torturing it, loving it, laughing at my fear.
    To this day I can’t watch Star Trek because I remember it playing in Jesse’s bedroom when he’d do his thing with me; I remember him identifying a pair of underwear as being sexy (they were orange and black and satiny and felt kind of adult-like), taking them off me, and licking me down there like a dog would lick a wound, asking me if I liked it. I felt tense and weird, as if I were supposed to like it, and I told him I did, to make him feel okay about it. I remember going numb when he did that to me and staring at the blue light glowing on the ceiling, focusing in on that and disappearing until he’d stop.
    I felt sorry for him. He told me this was “our secret” and I should never tell anyone about it. There was a horrible, musky stench, of unwashed sheets and a fat, sweaty body. He wanted me to touch him and I remember thinking it was disgusting. It was sticky and smelly. I hated that part the most. Penises were the most disgusting things ever. His was. Jesse abused me while supposedly babysitting me. I asked my mom why white stuff came out of his penis.
    Carol would drink herself into Kitty, shaking in terror of my half brothers and holding me as her teddy bear to calm herself down. She was pregnant and had begun teaching me how babies were made. She soon lost the baby after Carl beat her up one night in front of me. I stayed with friends for a few days while she was in the hospital.
    I had a little blond five-year-old boyfriend I got caught with under the bed, naked. I told him how to make babies and he wanted to try, but I told him no because I might get pregnant. Upon being discovered, I was scolded and he wasn’t allowed to come over again. It was my fault and I was a bad, dirty person. His parents now thought I was, too.
    Yes, a girl can reach orgasm by age five, which is when I discovered I could masturbate. One day, when I started rubbing up against the dinner table, I was told very abruptly not to. The response from my mom feltshocking; I’d done something wrong and was never to do it again. “That’s something you do in private”—which could have been okay, but her tone was so harsh.
    I did it constantly, in my own room; I was the only one who could make myself feel bad about it, which I always did. I thought my genitals looked different from everyone else’s, and I was always covering up. I also remember always wearing underwear in front of my dad because I was a girl and he was a boy and that part of me was not to be shown to him. I thought he might do something to me, too, if he saw me “down there.” Whenever I went into my parents’ bed in the middle of the night for a cuddle and they stroked my back to calm me, I always had the (quite irrational) fear their hands might wander to the wrong place. My body was everyone else’s except mine.
    My mom would say, “It’s really important for you to be able to talk about it. You’ve been sexually abused, Sam. I want you to know you can talk about it whenever you want.” So I did: at age eight, I told all my friends I’d been sexually abused by my brother “when I was a child,” because this was supposed to make me feel better—talking about it. I knew how to talk about what happened but felt nothing; they did. I’d observe people’s expressions when I told the story. It was as if it had happened to someone else.
    Interesting that you should choose to ask me now how I view my own physical appearance, as that very same theme came up over the last few days and led to an explosion of tears the other night. I was cast in what will supposedly become a TV series. The guy who is producing it, directing it, and starring in it is an American actor I worked with last year