The less control one has over their life, the more likely they are to act out in some fashion. I know this because my life was rigidly controlled and I acted out spectacularly. Luckily for me, my acting out was never discovered by my family, my fans, nor the press.
Maybe there really is a God.
I grew up in a musical family. Which is a major understatement. My family was a massive Christian Folk group. We toured the United States back and forth for decades. Our albums sold millions, but we never cracked the main stream Top 40. It didn't bother most of us, we were just singing and playing.
I was born into the business. I was the last child of eight, every one of us in the band. The brothers had become a hit in the early eighties. My father was their first song writer, my mom the manager. By the time I was born the band had been touring for over a decade, making millions, spreading the Word.
When I was old enough to join the band at five, I had been training to sing and play anything with a string for as long as I could remember. I had watched my older siblings perform and couldn't wait to be old enough to be allowed to be in the band.
I loved performing. Still do, which is why my details are going to be vague about where, when and whom. While on stage my life was pure heaven. I was adored, cherished and loved by everyone and I loved everyone right back. I was everyone's little angel.
Offstage, I was lost in a maelstrom of personalities and political machinations.
Everyone, from my father and mother, to each of my siblings and all the crew who toured with us, each one of them needed something from me constantly. I was the youngest, popular, most pliable and the easiest to make into a product.
This isn't going to be a Poor Little Rich Girl story, I am merely giving you a background for how I began acting out from the constant pressure and repression I endured. We were a celebrity family, when that still meant something, before Reality T.V.. We were Christian and made our entire fortune espousing the Word of The Gospel. Scandals had happened all around us, but never to us. My parents are True Believers, and refused to allow their children to be smeared by gossip and scandal.
They were strict. My father exerted extreme control over his flock. The older kids were paired up with younger kids, both encouraged to watch over each other physically and morally. We toured about 80% of the year, in four tour buses, and we were supervising each other constantly.
There was an abundance of love, but any misbehavior was dealt with publically, in front of the whole family and crew, and it was severe. Most often the offender was told to stand in the middle of the circle, told to find bible passages that related to their particular offense and then to improvise a sermon condemning their own behavior. Poor sermons were utterly humiliating affairs for all concerned. An awful punishment, not worth risking.
There was never any violence or physical punishment. It was all emotional and generally public, a minimum of seven siblings and two parents present. One was never allowed privacy to deal with humiliation, shame or embarrassment.
Puberty was awful.
It probably sucked for all of my older siblings for many reasons, but here is why it was terrible for me. Everyone else around me had already done it. I was the youngest person in my world at all times, except on stage. It wasn't until I was 17 that one of my oldest siblings had a child.
Somehow they all noticed the moment I developed any hint of breasts.
My brothers, although still in direct competition with me for stage time and adoration from the crowd and our parents, had always been kind to me and physically affectionate. When one of them noticed I had a slight swell of breast when I was twelve, suddenly all four brothers and my father ceased touching me. At all.
At times we would brush against each other in the bus, or moving around the world, but they always flinched away immediately. It was devastating. I felt like a monster, a pariah. I wept and yearned for touch.
My sisters and I cuddled more, and it helped, but I'd lost four friends, and a father in a very quick period, and I was bereft of masculine energy all at once. Because of my breasts. My three older sisters all compared their larger breasts to mine, telling me any number of stories about what it now meant that I had breasts. All in all it seemed that breasts were a burden I didn't want.
I learned later that my father was the reason the boys had stopped touching me. He's set a strict rule for when the children entered puberty. Sex was a taboo subject, other than to acknowledge it existed as a means to reproduce and carry the Lord's work forward. No touching.
Needless to say sex became an obsession of mine.
It didn't occur to me until I was twenty that I could potentially seek out sex on my own.
I'm guessing that sexual desire is formed in each of us differently, it sure looks like it to me, but mine was built around the forbidden aspect of it. The biblical aspect of sex, all the strange stories of incest and rape didn't strike me as sexual then, though I read that it does for others.
Instead my sexuality was formed in the tiny glimpses of sexual dynamics in films and on T.V., in overheard conversations and whispered curse words. To my young, pubescent mind sex became a terrifying, random, violent activity. One that fascinated me. No-one ever said sex could be about pleasure, but intuitively I knew there was a release of some sort, an abandon in sex that I yearned for.
Finally, it dawned on me that I could seek out that freedom and finally release the tension that constantly surrounded me.
The first time I got away it only worked because I didn't make a big deal of it. I walked up to one of our security guards as I stepped off the bus outside the hotel. I said, "I'm just going to go for a quick walk. I'll let you know as soon as I get back." I smiled and wandered off into the night for the first time in my life without anyone at my side.
The freedom was intoxicating. My heart was racing, and I couldn't stop grinning.
Also, I was amazingly horny.
Let me try and help you understand. I could masturbate, carefully and quietly. On tour it could either be in my bunk on the bus at night, but the tension of having my sisters above and beside me on their own bunks really limited the frequency and intensity. Once in a while I might try in an hotel room bed with a sister in the next bed, likely waiting for me to go to sleep so she could masturbate too.
So it was bathrooms, and the bus bathroom was never to be used for number two while driving. One couldn't masturbate unless it was a quick one.
That left public restrooms.
Unisex restrooms have a lot of awful, intriguing ideas written on them. My imagination was a fertile bed for all manner of dark, sordid ideas. Staring at filthy words, or pictographs carved into metal walls, I touched myself and carved grooves in my psyche.
On that first night out in the world, without chaperone for the first time, I looked at every person as a sexual object. Old, young, male, or female I wondered what sort of awful, sexual things they would do when alone.
When a middle aged man smiled and winked at me as we passed, I stopped in my tracks and watched him walk away unaware of my fascination.
That had been the first person who had ever flirted with me when I was free to do anything about it, no sibling or parent in sight. I felt weak in the knees. That simple male attention was a drop of benediction to a dying soul bereft of masculine affection.
Am I being overly dramatic?
Imagine yourself spending the vast majority of your puberty unable to flirt with the gender you are attracted to? At all. Not even from the stage because cameras want you to be the angelic, perfect, virgin even though you are an adult and a sexual being!
Too specific...? My bad.
Suffice it to say I was vibrating as I walked down the road. In my demure skirt, and button down sweater, I looked like a Sunday school teacher. The men smelled my naiveté because I was literally gawking at all of them.
Eventually one approached.
This guy was exactly the kind of creep who would pounce on a girl as out of her element as I obviously was. He was older than me, but I was as young a twenty year old as you could imagine. He was wiry, strong, and intense. I suppose he looked Italian, but I couldn't say. His skin was not pale, but it wasn't Mediterranean dark. Brown eyes, dark thick hair and a huge smile were what hypnotised me.
I watched his eyes roam over my body, and it felt as palpable as a touch, I had never been so overtly assessed as a sexual being before. I began to blush as his eyes darted back and forth from my body to my face rapidly. As he spoke at an intimate volume, invading my space, I trembled. Oddly, I worried if I was pretty enough.
I never grew tall, Five foot three, and I'm quite petite. I sometimes weigh as little as a hundred and five pounds when we are deep in the tour, like that night. I never grew more than an A cup breast, and my hips were narrow and sleight. I had a good butt, I thought. Full and firm, but I was self-conscious of my small breasts and fragile looking frame.
I don't get a lot of sun, so I'm pale, but our stylists loved my hair golden-blonde, so they dyed it to look like I spent a lot of time in the sun. My complexion was good so I didn't need much foundation, but we always did my eyes and cheeks simply. The fans wanted me to still be who I was when I was younger, and I was dressed and made-up in a style I'd worn years ago.
What I'm saying is I didn't feel at all like a mature, sophisticated woman receiving the attentions of a grown man. I felt awkward and foolish. I could tell he was laughing at me, and I burned with shame. I wanted to be worldly and desirable, not a child anymore.
