[Content warning: child abuse, rape, genital self-harm]
A few weeks ago I saw someone tweet that they didn't see people talking about genital self-harm. Before seeing that tweet I didn't speak of it. I didn't share my experience of it. I barely ever thought about it. It isn't something I have done for a number of years and I have tried to bury those memories. But that tweet opened up a box in my mind and suddenly I remembered things I hadn't thought about for a long while, things that wanted to be talked about. Things that wanted to be heard. I'm currently working on a larger blog post about the subject, but I felt I also wanted to write about my own experience in a more expressive way. I've put it together below as an image.
Self-Flagellation is I believe the technical word for genital self-harm. Nuns used to (or perhaps still do) would whip themselves in the private regions to purge themselves of what they believed were sinful urges from Satan.