XoJane

I started having sex with adult men when I was 13 years old. Neglected at home and ostracized at school, I found comfort in the sexual attentions of older men. Unlike boys my own age, who cruelly taunted me, older men were nice to me. Unlike my emotionally distant father, older men paid attention to me. And so I created Prodigy chat rooms with names like "13yo girl home alone" and spent hours chatting and having phone sex with the men who would find me there. I was not coerced. And yet, on Monday, Stacey Rambold, a Senior High teacher convicted of raping 14-year-old Cherice Morales, who later committed suicide, was sentenced to spend just 30 days in jail. The judge also said Morales was "older than her chronological age." Yep, you read that right. After the sentencing, the victim's mother shouted "You people suck!" The fact is, a 14-year-old girl may be capable of agreeing to sex with a 49-year-old man, but she doesn't have the emotional and mental maturity to consent.

How To Walk Through Walls In 7 Steps Everyone wants to follow their passion. I want to follow mine. I hope you want to follow yours. But how often have I said to myself one of these excuses: “I can’t right now because” , or “I’m not good enough because…”, or “I have a foreign accent” and I put myself in a prison that I created and I lock the doors behind me. How do we break down the wall that we, through our “education”, “culture”, “backgrounds”, etc, put up brick by brick for ourselves. I know it’s hard for me to break down this wall for myself. When I was growing up in Argentina, people were disappearing right off the streets and never returning because they dared to break down the wall. The wall is not really a wall, it is something much more harmful and solid than that, it is our inner saboteur, and it tends to appear in the form of a thought, it may sound like this: I was at a dinner last month deep in Texas with five men, all of them brilliant. 1. I know how cheesy this sounds. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Be quiet.

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