Mental Health

Among the many pervy and kinky people who came into Object (the sex shop I worked at in Baltimore in the late 90's) none were so stealthily maladjusted as Tina.
Tina was a white woman in her late forties, with a messy, dark bob, dark eyes and thin lips. She looked like an academic which is exactly what she was: just a few months shy of her doctorate in psychology she happily prattled on about her burgeoning sex therapy practice and all the latest studies debunking ideas of what is normal and abnormal in the full spectrum of human sexuality.

As a customer, Tina was fun. She was bawdy and joyful, extremely complimentary to the point of flattery. She loved Object as an aesthetic and as a place where both the employees and the customers were friendly and open. She adored gay men and often declared that she wished she had been born a gay man, because, she said, then she could just be open about her sex life and instead of people being incensed they would just laugh and say "you go girl!". She made the usual outraged claim that a double standard exists in sexual expression: men are applauded for their sexual lives, but women are supposed to be innocent of their own desires. Nothing new and nothing to find fault with there. So why write about Tina? What's so special about a sex positive therapist frequenting a classy shop with folks who generally share her views? Well, Tina was an exhibitionist who was doing a bang up job of screwing up her kid.

Tina idolized Annie Sprinkle, a sex worker turned performance artist, turned angry-sex-worker-performance-artist, who specialized in water sports. Annie Sprinkle's shows are heartbreaking and revolting and if you've never seen her perform, prepare yourself to see youth and joy and romance nearly obliterated. Tina was working up an extremely kinky burlesque show around corsets, golden showers and live sex, wishing to put back some of the mystery and charm that Annie Sprinkle metaphorically clobbers to death with a rancid fish carcass. Whatever, as Dan Savage would say, lifts your luggage. But not long after Tina first discovered Object, she did something strange: she brought her twelve year old daughter, Zoe, into the store. Tina had no qualms with either exposing Zoe to the weird items and odd people found in such a place and encouraged Zoe to talk to people about their kinks and lifestyle choices. Amazingly, some obliged, but most just stared at Tina as if she were insane, which she was. Some just fled at the mere sight of the young girl. But Tina clucked her tongue at these people and hoped that Zoe would never be so ashamed.

As if this were not enough, Tina enthusiastically talked about her show and her kinks in front of Zoe. She also discussed her limp-dick ex husband, her own sexual abuse at the hands of her brothers and father, her inability to have an orgasm until she was 39, and finally she tried to give Zoe a lesson in Sex Toys 101.

Now, it is, of course, illegal for a minor, even accompanied by a guardian, to be in a sex shop, and we made that clear to Tina. When we first told her that Zoe was not allowed in the store, she was incredulous.
"But I'm with her! " Tina said.
"Doesn't matter," I said. "No one under 18 is allowed in a sex shop. You know that." As I said this, a stripper, herself barely 18 strolled in with an infant in a snuggly. Tina raised an eyebrow and I sighed.
"This is absurd! This is the kind of puritanical bullshit that a repressed society comes up with! Ridiculous to tell a human being that she is too young to know about her own body! There's nothing on display here that is unnatural or that she won't someday encounter!" I shot a glance at the wall of porn videos and my eyes rested on a video called "Anal Alice: White Trash Slut" that had a picture of a bleached blond looking pretty worn and spreading her ass cheeks in the general direction of a Natty Bo tall boy. I thought it was a pretty unlikely that Zoe would ever have a chance encounter with that, but it's true that, really, you never know.
"Tina, there's a difference. This place is for people who are already fucked in the head" Tina couldn't help smiling at this. "Zoe will go bonkers in her own good time and she won't need your help to do it."
"Jess, you're forgetting I'm a shrink," Tina said as if this would settle the issue.
"No, Tina, I am not. You people are notorious for screwing up your kids."
I thought then that we'd reached an amicable understanding, but instead, Tina dug in her heels. I don't know what battle exactly she thought she was fighting, but Tina started arriving at the store with Zoe and then making a big show of having her stand outside while she shopped and kibbitzed. Baltimore, at that time was not a safe place anywhere, at any time of day, for a 12 year old white girl to just be hanging out on a stoop, particularly one in front of a sex shop. So, of course, we let Zoe. We made her hang out with one of the employees at the cash register, which, in spite of the display of lubes, thongs for men and poppers, we thought was somewhat less bizarre to a preteen than other areas in the store. We would try to make small talk with her, but her mother would butt in and give us a rundown of Zoe's social life and when the girl looked like she would melt into tears, we all made sure to point out that her mother was crazy and to ignore her. Stupid advice, but we weren't in the business of counseling 12 year olds. Her mother was.

Eventually, my boss put his foot down. He told Tina she was a nutcase who was putting her shit on her daughter and putting his business at risk. One snowy afternoon, they started shouting at each other. Tina was banned and she stormed out hollering "I've never been treated so disrespectfully in my life!" which was so patently false I imagine she must have grimaced after saying it, but I couldn't know for sure because she was already out the door.

For what it's worth, Tina wasn't doing what she was doing to Zoe because she was sadistic or compulsive. Just the opposite. She was trying to spare her daughter the horrors of her own life. And I can't say I blamed Tina for wanting Zoe to be knowledgeable. Most kids who are sexually abused are the victims of someone they know and trust, and don't even know that what's happening is wrong- if you're a kid and a grownup tells you to do something, you do it and just assume that this is how people behave. By giving Zoe an early and semi levelheaded introduction to sex she was showing her what consenting adults do and that there are many ways to behave...as a consenting adult. The other thing that she was showing Zoe, and what might be more to the point, is that sex is meant to be pleasurable! I mean, what a rip off sex has been to so many women for so long, and particularly for Tina. After 35 years of joyless sex Tina eventually found that she could enjoy it and moreover, she enjoyed kinks! I imagine her first orgasm must have been so full of... anger! To suddenly know that it was supposed to be enjoyable must have made all the other experiences that much worse. Tina, understandably and not unlike most parents, wanted her daughter's life to be better than her own.

I write all this as if I could just look at her and have these wonderful insights, but I'm not that intuitive. My guesses come from the long conversations Tina and I had before she was banned from the store. In her early 40s she had got (sexy) Jesus and now she was a proselytizer, a missionary of anything but missionary. I'm pretty sure a lot of what she told me was part of her show, and though she invited me to see it multiple times, I had no interest in watching Tina do... anything. Ultimately, I didn't like Tina, because for all her good will and intentions, she was damaging Zoe, at least judging by the girl's pained looks and general air of silence and misery. It wasn't fair to Zoe to have a mother who was an exhibitionist. Tina was working out her childhood through her child, which is the sign of a narcissist and an unhealthy psyche. And since, at the time, I identified with Zoe way more than I identified with Tina, I hated Tina.

At one point, I briefly considered calling child services. I thought what Tina was doing might amount to emotional abuse, but then I thought of Zoe in foster care in Baltimore and decided that was far worse than whatever poor judgement Tina might have. But I relished visions of the police storming in on one of Tina's shows. I imagined a basement cabaret, a dusty red curtain fringed with gold, smokey tables obscuring furtive onlookers, Tina in the spotlight wearing one of the leather corsets she liked so much, and pissing into the mouth of a willing member of the audience when the agents burst in. They would stand there, in their cheap suits, forms and documents in hand. I imagined their surprise, their jaws dropping, and then quickly closing again.