Being a young misguided male SA survivor really sucked.

I don't AT ALL intend to belittle the trauma and pain of SA survivors, especially women/girls who were assaulted by men. But being a male SA victim perpetrated primarily by female peers and even older women made me feel very alone growing up.

I'm a 30 year old Black man right now but I'm 6'3 and I've always had a stocky/muscular build. Long story short, I'm "conventionally attractive" and that has effectively disqualified me from being able to be a victim of women by ANY metric even if I was a child and the women were adults.

Unfortunately, I didn't have much guidance growing up. My parents were divorced, I had crazy mommy issues since my mother and other female family members treated me more like a boyfriend (TW) >!I was even molested by a female family member starting at 6 years old (she was 10). To this day, she still tries to grope me when I see her and acts jealous of women I being around. My entire family knows about it and they just refuse to talk about it.!<So, I spent most of my time alone grinding trying to make ends meet even as early as high school. I was basically the perfect victim. (TW: SA/Grooming) >!I was groomed into a sexual relationship with my teacher early as 15 years old. It actually continued until the very moment I graduated when she completely cut me off and I never heard from her again.!< I spent the rest of my teens and early 20s chasing that "love" from older women and constantly being used and abused by women that had no business dating someone my age.

I didn't have parental figures or even much of a family in my life, I just had friends who were often my age or younger and all chronically online. All I had was the internet and I used to be a very avid redditor even though it was an awful habit for me mentally.

Being on reddit and other sites around that time really destroyed my self-esteem and made me feel like I wasn't actually a victim. I mostly spent time online being told by both men and women that I'm not actually a victim since I probably enjoyed it or that I'm probably twisting the stories since men are inherently predatory.

At some point, I started to believe them. I used to think that women were the superior sex and incapable of doing wrong. Women and men in my life and online used to defend the women who abused me so I spent most of my transformative years thinking that I was the problem that it was my fault that I was abused and groomed or that I'm just not a victim at all because women don't abuse men only the other way around. In many ways, I felt envious of women since it felt like the same social movements that empowered female SA survivors weren't interested in holding spaces for male SA survivors. I felt like they were allowed to have their own spaces both in real life and on the internet where they can support each other but I was just alone like I had always been.

Eventually, I married a woman who didn't make me feel alone. she helped me understand that everything I've internalized is incredibly harmful and detrimental and insisted I get help. I did, I've been in counseling for a while and I've been slowly unlearning all of the harmful shit I've internalized. It's a work in progress but I'm getting there little by little. I think I just needed to get this off my chest.