Madison oversexualizing herself to a cringy degree reminded me of how I coped with grooming.

You know, seeing her doing this overly suggestive stuff once in a while just made me cringe, but when I looked at many examples back to back, I started to actually feel sorry for her from a genuine place. Caught myself by surprise tbh. Her behavior reminded me of the way I coped after being groomed as a preteen, I'm surprised I'm only see it now.

Please note: I wanna stay as far as possible from making any invasive claims on why Madison acts this way, especially any claims as to whether or how she was traumatized. If she has had those experiences, it should be her story to tell. I am not a professional, so this is a projection, not a diagnosis :) I just saw that my experience overlaps in specific ways and wanted to share.

I am mostly scared to post, but I wanna take an opportunity to educate share some about aftereffects of grooming/sexual trauma even long after the fact. I just feel there is not enough common knowledge about specifics despite so many survivors, so I hope you will find my example insightful. My point is, trauma can bend you in any shape, including making a complete fool of yourself, just to inform more aware of complexity snark. I hope I don‘t come off as holier than thou or as if I’m trying to shame you out of snarking, I love it here. I‘m here not to shame but to dissect and theorize for hopefully some roundabout insight.

cw: more grooming details, mentions of clothes taken off and nude pictures, nothing more explicit

My experience:

My groomer initially showered me with affection, and I got strongly dependent on it as an otherwise lonely kid. Then I (very conviniently) got taught how I could earn this affection once it got removed, it was always some sexually explicit thing that otherwise felt too "advanced" for my 11-old so-mature-for-my-age face. So when the grooming and the rewarding ended, I wasn't happy it was over. I felt terribly empty and deprived, I was craving affection all the time while also feeling deeply embarassed for it, and so the way I thought to earn affection turned into my coping.

I ended up developing an addictive habit of getting validation by chatting and sending nudes to tons of random creepy men online, saying and doing everything I could think of that would make them attracted to me, though never feeling validated quite enough. So I was always coming back for more even after getting creeped out by obvious pedos, degraded or blackmailed, all because the craving for validation was so powerful and I knew no other way to satisfy it than perform the right thing.

Why I feel Madison:

It does seem to me like she suffers the same struggle for genuine affection, but (she thinks)her best shot is to please men at all costs, even down to performing these incredibly unnatural quirks and oversexualized poses.
Back then I didn‘t actually enjoy faking my behaviour for men, I avoided all thinking about it. At the same time it’s hard to overstate how little I cared about being genuine and honest and „myself“, I was just doing the right moves that would get me that dopamine hit. In that mindset you don‘t think about your morals or what your behaviour says about you as a person, or how poorly you treat yourself, I couldn‘t care less about genuine connection. This trauma coping just blends everything else out.

This is where I start to think that if Madison also has some (sexually) traumatic background, her behaviour would make A LOT of sense to me. She appears like a thoughtless carefree bimbo on one side, openly doing these very sexualized behaviours as if she likes it and owns it; yet verbally she doesn’t admit and approve of what she’s doing.

Of course, the hypocrisy could also come from wanting to be slutty but not wanting to be slutshamed, but then her sluttiness would be genuine and natural, right? Instead we see her following porn trends, with fake and stiff movements that read as the opposite of sexy often.

Projecting my experience some more, I imagine she would be in a cycle of compulsively trying to sexually please - feeling rewarded - feeling too ashamed to be able to reflect on what goes wrong - can‘t try a different way if u can‘t reflect - just promising to never do it again - without solution the problem remains the same - without an alternetive behaviour your resistence weakens - you give into harmful behaviour again - the cycle continues.

It was a mess and I am very glad I‘m better now. Largely thanks to actual maturing lol, around 18 I started to understand that I‘m serving actual gross pedofiles, so it became less and less attractive to play a fucktoy. Also getting into better, more vulnerable friendships where I could feel seen and loved, but for who I actually am (and not for how quickly I agree to undress), helped the most I think.

As I started to heal I found out that I didn‘t actually need sexual validation, I just needed genuine personal validation. The sexual validation is just more reliable and easy to get, especially being conventionally attractive like Madison. There are so many men you could be sure to get validation from reliably, every time you need it. You know what to do and say to get this sexual validation every single time. The validation itself is Temu-quality, but it is safe and reliable. That's why I for example happily settled for creepy slimy breadcrumbs of affection.

And while I knew it's degrading and embarassing, I didn't see the biggest way in which this coping was harming me and is maybe harming Madison the same way. It's not being promiscuous or slutty that was harmful, it wasn't god punishing me for my sins, it was the wrong reward circuit. I turned to sexualized validation because I was insecure and didn't have other good sources of validation in my life yet. I was aware that I am lying and putting on an act for quick joy, but I didn't see how it could be harmful in the long run. Every successful exchange I internalized more and more that my worth is in the act I can put on, in the right behaviour I can display, faking and lying is encouraged, it's just a sign of how skilled and mature I am!
Sounds like a good strategy for an influencer actually, huh...
I heard of healthy deep connections and the concept sounded great, but I didn't feel like I was worth something like that, so I guarded my insecurity by sexualizing myself. My friendships propped me out a lot, so now I feel like I can compare. The validation from sexualizing always was shallow and faded fast, partly because it was easy to get, but partly I think because it was my performance that was being rewarded, not me. So after an evening of chats I would end with "I can perform, people like how I perform". But with genuine connections now I feel rewarded not only for how I perform, but how I am and who I am and what I genuinely think and want. I sometimes feel fully seen, it is incomparable to being rewarded just for a performance or a product you made.

The catch is that this shift from to genuine relationships requires reflection, bravery and believing in your innate worth to risk it all and be genuine. I got very lucky with my friendships, and I have only understanding for ppl who can't get out of this hole. To save yourself without help and right conditions is some unrealistic bootstraps-y expectation.

I feel that attractiveness might serve Madison a disservice. When your attractiveness is your claim to fame and you get aggressively rewarded for leaning into it, it would be SO hard to not be tempted to turn to this shallow attention when I feel lonely and insecure. Ofc, seeking validation is normal, you can seek attention without trauma, but the way Madison resorts to oversexualization shows this specific desperation for reliable validation that I know intimately(pun not intended). The horrors in her head must be bad enough prioritize validation over self worth, her avoidance of it all is proof she is too embarassed to confront her struggle. It‘s this dissonance between her words in interviews and what she actually does when she sees a camera that makes her inner conflict so obvious.

Idk, don't fight me, it is hard for me too see her position and not feel sad for her. I know she‘s suffering but doesn‘t know how to use all those ressources of hers for her benefit, like that money that feeds her body dismorphia instead of paying for effective therapy, I feel like she could reflect under strict guidance.
No ressources, not building good supportive relationships, friendly or romantic, since it never lasts and doesn‘t appear genuine - little hope for healing there.
She built her image and self worth on pretending and lying, so she is probably convinced that her true self is worthless and feels forever stuck pretending - also little inner support for better choices.

You see why I‘m sympathetic? While so stupidly privileged, her cards look disasterous when it comes to her chance at happiness and peace, and a lot seems to stem from poor upbringing/experiences.

I talked a lot about shame and her feeling embarassed for herself here, and I don‘t wanna leave it unchecked: if my reading of the situation is right, she deserves no shame, guilt or embarassment for how some traumatic experience shaped her. I‘m not trying to paint it like something is not, doing onlyfans faces for male validation still comes off embarassing or cringey, even as a trauma coping. But that doesn‘t conclude that she‘s just a bad embarassing person and has to carry that cross forever, you know?

In my case self-sexualizing behaviour was just a painful nasty(and embarassing) symptom of the trauma and so I think it deserves to be viewed neutrally — the victim doesn‘t choose it, it‘s like a scar. Or imagine some embarassing physical symptom ppl don‘t choose, like with ibs. You didn‘t choose it, so you can‘t carry all that guilt and shame, it‘s not fair. You can only try to get better.

There is a common misunderstanding with harmful behaviours, that with enough willpower you can just stop doing it, you just gotta want it bad enough. Idk, in my experience it was never simple: you need time, right ressources and luck. So best thing I ever did about my deep shame was to extend yourself and your need to cope(however it manifests) understanding and work on judging yourself less. Once there is no scary shame around an issue it actually becomes possible to interact with it and improve. That‘s how I managed to mostly untangle a lot of my trauma pains and knots without a therapist, couldn't afford one :')

The shame for me took such an overwhelming amount of my mental space that all I was doing was with the goal to avoid it. I was so sure I would never be able to tell anybody the truth, sending nudes like a whore seemed impossible to justify. I thought there‘s nothing more pathetic and my inner image would be forever tainted. Now it‘s a nice contrast to be able to say that I don‘t feel at fault for my trauma or the way I coped as well as almost no shame. I yap about it on the internet instead...

Ok this turned out very long, forgive me that it’s all over the place and I hope i made the parallels visible. Also forgive my spelling, writing in a second language with no spell check is my excuse 🥲