On the Childhood Origin of Perverts

I think my proclivities were mostly the result of lurid covers of mystery books owned by my father (I remember in particular a frisson created at age 8 by one of a large-breasted woman with a look of desperation on her face being pulled/held below the surface of the ocean by a man's hand. Something about the look on her face just affected me powerfully in ways I couldn't then specify; I knew there was something 'dirty' about it, and that I'd get in trouble if I was caught staring at it, but I didn't even know what sex was yet, much less what this was about.

In the same period when I was gazing at these hard-boiled mystery book covers (and at some salacious record covers of my dad's - thank you Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and Herb Alpert!), there was a series of plastic model kits being sold by the Aurora company that featured lurid tableaux that you could glue together and paint. One was "The Victim" - a woman about to be raped, or ravished, or harmed in some way. I seem to recall a dungeon tableaux as well, equipped with a busty attendant or victim. I wanted these, though I couldn't have said why at the time. They are evidently now highly prized collector's items; I'd buy them if I had the scratch.

At about the same time, I was a big fan of the Batman TV show, which always featured our heroes being tied up by one villain or another. My favorite episodes were when Catwoman was the villainess - that lead to a fetish for spandex & catsuits that is now 35 years old. There were other moments too: an episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that had one of the protagonists tied to a chair being tortured by sonic waves or something like that.

Also at this time, there was a slightly older girl in the neighborhood, the American-born daughter of Filipino immigrants attached to the same Navy base my father was stationed at. She must have been 10 and she liked to play a variant of chase/doctor/victim-and-rescuer in which I'd chase her, catch her, 'inspect' her (never all that explicitly), at which point she'd dramatically escape and pin me down, always careful to position her crotch right over my face. This was enormously exciting in ways that I didn't understand at the time. This may have been the origin of my attraction for more darkly-complected women, come to think of it. I can still picture her dark brown legs holding down my arms while her rainbow-patterned bathing suit hovered over me.

All of this was in the early 1970s. Polymorphously perverse little creatures, children. Now from all this you might assume that I ended up a submissive or at least a bottom. Nope; confirmed dominant/top. That switch didn't occur until adolescence, though, a topic for another time.