Trigger Warning - Abuse Story - Torture

I’ve never been married, never had a love life, though I’ve always wanted one. I’ve never even been on a date. I’ve always loved one woman or another from afar. I could never imagine anybody ever wanting to have anything to do with me. Before the sexual abuse, I dreamed of what adulthood would be like, being married and having kids, having a job and coming home to a loving wife. Those thoughts disappeared when it happened.

This is the story of the sexual abuse:

One Sunday morning in March of 1969, I had to pee before I went to Sunday School. I was seven years old at the time - I turned eight years old in April. When I peed that morning, there was some blood in my urine. It looked a little red. Later, in the middle of the afternoon, I had to pee again. Then it looked like I was peeing nothing but blood. I said absentmindedly “It’s doing it again!”

My mom was the only other person in the house. My dad had gone somewhere and my sister was outside. My mom said, “What’s doing what again?”

I answered, “Come see.” She came into the bathroom and saw the blood in the toilet. She looked like she was ready to faint.

I saw my pediatrician, then got referred to a pair of urologists. I don’t remember their names. One of them looked like the actor Richard Benjamin. The other one was older. He had salt-and-pepper hair and was stocky.

The doctors determined that I was peeing blood because my urethra was too narrow. When I peed, the urine passed through the urethra with so much pressure, that it ate away the lining. So I was bleeding all up and down my urethra when I peed, along the inside of my penis.

I had to have surgery to widen the urethra, but it could wait until the school year was over. They operated in early June. I had a roommate in the hospital who was there because he had “knots” in his armpits - strange lumps in the skin. His mom seemed snotty. I went in on a Wednesday, had surgery on Friday and was out on Saturday.

When I tried to pee after the surgery, it hurt like a living hell. I was peeing through raw tissue. The other boy’s mother, whom I thought was snotty, held me, trying to comfort me, while I inadvertently peed on her while screaming in pain.

They had told me that there would be no pain before or after the surgery. Liars! That was standard procedure when dealing with child patients in those days. They believed that if they told the truth about the pain to come, the children would freak out.

In those days the parent would leave the child alone with the doctor, thinking that the child would want privacy. That meant that the child was left in the hands of the doctor, defenseless.

Every time the salt-and-pepper-haired doctor got me alone in an exam room, from March through June, he did stuff to me. A lot of what I remember has the quality of a partial memory, like waking up from a nightmare. There’s a black void for part of each visit, but then I remember him grabbing onto my testicles. He would hold them both in his hand and twist the entire scrotum around as far as it would go one way, then the other, making it hurt as much as he could. Then, causing even more pain, he would squeeze them. He would squeeze them together and squeeze them one at a time. He would pull on them as if he were trying to pull them right off of my body. I would be frozen in horror and pain and when he saw that frozen look on my face, he would grin. That’s an image I will never forget. That expression on his face answered the question I had as to why he was doing all of this: he enjoyed it. He was torturing me for fun. These words do not do justice to the horrific experience or to the extreme pain. The testicles have a very high concentration of pain receptors. They are an incredibly sensitive part of the body, and the most vulnerable.

This torture happened on more than one occasion, with some possible variation in technique. He knew how to make things hurt, as he was an expert in the male reproductive system. I do remember that I made sure I was fully dressed again as quickly as possible before my mom came back in the exam room to get me, and I was relieved to be out of there as soon as possible. I felt safe when I got back home again.

At that age, I didn’t understand the function of the testicles, either. I didn’t know what they were or why they hung down outside my body. I wondered from time to time why some of my body parts hung down outside my body like that, in a little sack of skin. Why weren’t they up inside my body with the rest of my organs? We weren’t told until we were in sixth grade. We should have been taught about our bodies much earlier. A greater understanding of ourselves and our body parts would have led to much less worrying and anxiety, especially for those of us who had been sexually abused. If we knew more, maybe we would have been able to talk more about what was done to us.

I’ve often wondered, though it might not make sense to others, if the medical stuff I went through, along with the torture, had anything to do with why my penis never grew much. It’s very small and it’s quite humiliating and embarrassing. I’m also impotent and have been so for twenty years. I wonder, too, if the junk done to me in 1969 has something to do with that. I also wonder if my testicles are normal, both in size and function. I wish I could get some answers, but the doctors don’t take my questions seriously. I feel like my genitals were mutilated and disfigured by what was done to them in 1969.

I can’t stand to be examined by male doctors because of that experience, and so I try to go to only female doctors. When you’re a man asking a female doctor about problems with your genitals, they get suspicious and think you’re a pervert of some sort. They don’t want to examine you. This is so wrong and unfair. I haven’t had a thorough physical exam for many years because of this.

At the risk of repeating myself, our testicles and scrotum are the most personal, vulnerable and sensitive body part. Having someone torture me that way when I was a little boy was the ultimate horror. Everybody needs to take that seriously and not see it as funny. The modern entertainment industry and the media in general think it’s a joke whenever a man’s genitals are injured in any way. People laugh when they see a man clutching at his groin and writhing in pain. They laugh when a man is kicked in the groin. They laugh when they hear news stories of angry girlfriends or wives severing their boyfriend’s or husband’s penis. This is sexual assault and mutilation. It is disgusting and subhuman to do something like this, and it’s not funny.

I didn’t tell what the doctor did to me because I was scared. I thought my parents would punish me for talking about that part of my body. That was against the rules. It would also be “my word against his”. I’d been in situations in school where people told lies and when I told the truth, I was called a liar and the liar’s words were considered to be the truth.

I was taught that boys weren’t supposed to complain, to whine, or cry about anything. It wasn’t about being seen as less of a man, as some people claim, it’s what we were taught: boys aren’t supposed to cry. Our teachers punished boys for crying, to teach us to be quiet and hold it in. They drilled it into our heads to keep silent and stop our tears from coming. These teachers were women, too, who are supposed to be so sympathetic and compassionate.

As time went on, it just seemed too embarrassing to talk about and I had no one to tell. Girls had places they could go to talk about sensitive topics, such as school nurses and student counselors, but boys did not. We weren’t supposed to go to anyone about any personal problems.

During and after the abuse, I realized even more strongly that my dad was right: I was a worthless piece of garbage. I would never live the life I had imagined for myself when I was little. I would be lucky if I could have any friends at all, and no girl would ever like me. When I grew to be a man, no woman would ever love me. I thought for certain that girls and women could see through me and see me for the garbage that I was. I might look a little human on the outside, enough to fool guys, but not enough to fool girls and women. I was going to be stuck alone for life.

Also, my viewpoint changed during the abuse. I no longer saw people as mostly good and nice, but probably evil disguised as good, especially men (even though I’m male myself) and doctors. The world was much darker and dangerous. It was scary now. There was risk of being hurt everywhere, and no one to protect me from it.

In the early 2000s I went through three different therapists and talked about everything except for the sexual abuse. I just couldn’t get into that, so all that time and money was wasted. Then I went for over a decade without therapy. In 2018, it really hit me that I had been sexually abused and I had to deal with it. I finally saw a therapist in the spring of 2019 and she was horrible. Even though she specialized in sexual abuse, she didn’t take male survivors seriously. She didn’t seem to think that boys could be hurt as bad as girls. I saw her only about four times and gave up.

In October 2019, I went to my 40-year high school reunion. It was devastating for me. I saw a woman I have very strong feelings for. She didn’t even know who I was. After that, I was then in the worst pain of my life, emotionally and psychologically. I knew I had to find a new therapist or I would hang myself.

I saw a therapist just before Christmas of 2019. A few weeks later, I saw her a second time. She told me that though she worked with a couple other guys who had been sexually abused, she couldn’t help me. She didn’t say why. I found another therapist later in January of 2020. I still see her. I also go to group sessions which are a little helpful. It will take a long time, after holding a lifetime of pain building up inside me for 50 years, to see results. The beliefs I’ve had about myself and everything else have been a part of me since the sexual abuse and they’re not going to change easily.

Now it’s November of 2021 and I’m 60 years old. I wonder what I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life besides the therapy.