I have been thinking about this guy who was around the San Francisco scene years ago. I’m going to call him Deep Tissue Dude because one of the ways he made friends was by giving free massages to people, mostly women. He did have professional training and he was extremely technically skilled. It wasn’t his primary job (most folks struggle to survive in the Bay Area on just a massage therapist wage) but when he was in between tech gigs he would take on some clients to fill in the gap.

I met him after I left my Owner. I was 23 and I was going to Burning Man events with folks who were slightly overlapping with the kink community in part because I was trying to find a different community group where I wouldn’t have to see my ex and partly because I was in a weird place with my self harming behavior. I don’t think that extreme promiscuity is always done from a place of self harm but I can say that my own promiscuity is sometimes done from a place of love and connection and sometimes it is based on the fact that I had a sociopathic pedophile as a father who told me I existed in the world because men need a place to put their dicks. I had been in therapy on and off for 20 years at that point but I had not yet met the therapist who really rocked my whole world and made me really make leaps and bounds of progress with my trauma.

I met this guy and he seemed pretty cool. He talked a lot about his parenting and he talked a lot about boundaries and safety and consent and just generally he was good at giving off all the “I’m a good guy–really” signals. I feel it is important to say that he was an incredibly large man; like Samoan large. He was very tall–maybe 6’3″? (That’ll be around 190cm for the rest of you.) He had a gigantic barrel chest; he was fat but that wasn’t the dominant impression he gave. He was just massive. He was careful and deliberate about how he used his size when he interacted with women, and of course he mostly interacted with women. He hung out with men approximately how much he had to in order to pass the “Oh I know him; he’s alright” bar.

He did that thing where he walked and moved with authority so people tended to knee jerk assume that he really knew what he was talking about. He would talk about bodies and anatomy to perverts and sexually adventurous people in a way that established his authority. He was trying hard to be an important someone without actually being in a position of responsibility. He talked constantly about accountability

I’ll be frank and say that at that period of time most of the people I was hanging out with were doing a lot of drugs. MDMA was the big favorite, but GHB, nitrous, and coke were around too. I got the impression that other folks were using additional drugs but I didn’t know as much about that.

So Deep Tissue Dude never explicitly said “If you have sex with me I will give you drugs” and he never said “I will give you free massages if you have sex with me”. He was super careful to never ever be blunt about things. But he would ensure a plentiful supply of drugs for people who chose to hang around him when he was at an event. Much later I talked to other women and he crossed sexual lines during the massages quite frequently and none of us ever felt like we could bring it up. He always had a “Oh I am so sorry, I was misinterpreting your signals. I thought you wanted me to.”

I feel very required to stop at this point and explicitly say that even though I am aware that what he did was sexual assault I do not carry him in my head and in my heart as someone who assaulted me. I mean, he did but it wasn’t a big assault and it never went very far. He put his finger in my cunt once. He leaned over and licked my cunt once. Those happened several months apart and after the second time I never came back for another massage.

Why did I hang out with him at all? Why didn’t I ghost him after the first “slip”? Well, frankly, because I was fucking poor and I have chronic pain issues and he gave me help to ease the pain I was in.

I’ve been thinking about him because I think about the way that he gave me very minor uncomfortable feelings fairly quickly. I noticed that his big talk about how important his kids were in his life… was accompanied by him rarely actually seeing his kids and constantly pleading poverty for why he couldn’t afford to send child support to his “evil” ex. I noticed that he had a revolving door of “super close friends” who were always women, usually women who were under 25 and coming from backgrounds of extreme trauma. I noticed that he would always loudly, verbally set boundaries in really conservative places but then he would cross them regularly and say that he didn’t actually need the boundaries to be so conservative because actually I wasn’t taking advantage of him the way “other people” did.

He did a lot of talking about all the things he was going to do, all the ways he could do cool things for people, all the classes he could teach… and in reality outside of providing drugs he wasn’t stable or consistent or a good source of anything.

For me he was a Little Monster. He did shit he shouldn’t do; things that are literally illegal and he was messy and inappropriate. I don’t feel violated and I don’t feel like a victim.

But there were women for whom he was a Big Monster. There was one girl in particular where he gave her drugs and then he raped her. She went to the police and it was a whole shit show. I don’t know if I am remembering this completely correctly (it has been almost 20 years) but I believe it didn’t get to trial. She was slut shamed into infinity and beyond and she couldn’t handle pushing hard enough to make him pay.

I actually think of that woman, who was more of a girl at the time, quite often. Sometimes people will ask me why I am as conservative as I am with some of my boundaries in my parenting and I think of this girl. Her mother was a pro-domme and active in the scene. This girl had grown up surrounded by perverts. I met her when she was 18 and she told stories about how she had been sitting on the knees of various prominent perverts naked in hot tubs since she was 16.

I think of her every single time I tell my children how to handle nudity and adults who get close to them. (For the record my kids have been to many nudist events and I don’t think naked bodies are in any way a problem or inherently sexual.) I think of her when I tell my kids to beware of people who try really really really hard to seem trustworthy.

Why do they need to try so hard?

I think of that girl when I tell parents in the scene that it’s not a good idea to carry on with your kinky life with your children present. I think of that girl when I tell parents that I don’t think co-ops for babysitting with other kinky parents are a good idea. I mean, she isn’t even the only child of kinky parents I know who has had what seemed to me to be a very brutal entry into adulthood.

Deep Tissue Dude was blacklisted from a few events. He was no longer welcome at the Burning Man parties. Last I heard he had moved to a different city and was an integral part of the scene there.

I know he sexually assaulted at least dozens of women. I am quite certain he raped many–I have no way of guessing the number.

I think of him when I interact with people and they have messy boundaries. I think of him when I interact with people who loudly state why they are an authority and credible over and over again. I think of him when someone makes big promises about all the things they are going to do for other people.

I think of her when I watch people try to figure out how to respond to Monsters both Big and Little. There is so much silencing of discourse “don’t bring drama” and minimising the experiences of people who know something isn’t right but they aren’t sure where the line was crossed.

I know lots of people who cross a line once then they don’t cross it again. I deeply respect them. I know lots of people who cross a line then they make big protestations about how they won’t do something inappropriate again… until the next time.

When my inside voice tells me that I need to stay away from someone, when I notice that someone is inconsistent with their words versus their behavior, when I notice that someone reminds me of Monsters I used to know I listen now. I feel more emboldened to talk about stupid small things that start adding up. If I have a list of 3 or 4 small things that bother me I recognise that as meaning I will not be surprised when I find out that this person, who might be a Little Monster for me, will probably, eventually be a Big Monster for someone else.

I am grateful for the fact that I am no longer in a place in my life where the company of a Little Monster is better than being alone. I have a lot of compassion for the girl I was and the reasons that I made quite a few very poor choices in friends.

Pay attention to the integrity people have around their words. People really like to tell on themselves. When someone says “Oh, I will…” all the time but they don’t actually do it don’t be surprised when they say “Oh, I will never…” and then they do it anyway.