by GinaSmith » Mon Sep 05, 2011 9:06 pm
I remember being sexually aware in some way at 7 or 8, but my sexuality didn't become fully fledged until I was just before my 10th birthday. I remember the exact moment - walking behind two girls (who were probably a few years older than me) at a holiday camp and suddenly it was like an epiphany. I followed them down the road for a few hundred metres; I knew my parents would be worried about why I was taking longer to get back to the bungalow than I should do, and I was probably only ten minutes later than expected, but suddenly I was overwhelmingly attracted to these two girls. After that I found myself attracted to girls in my class, etc.
Since then, my upper age range has expanded as I've gotten older, but my lower age range (of attraction, I should stress, not acting on attraction) has remained the same. Why? I don't know. Possibly part of the reason I'm so comfortable with my sexuality is that I'm attracted to girls from the age around which I became sexually aware, and in a logical way that doesn't not make sense to me (if I may be so crude as to employ a double negative) and I'd find it hard to imagine it being any other way. But then we're all 'prisoners' inside our own sexualities; I can't step outside mine and fully appreciate why someone feels the way they do.
Oh, just in case it's not clear why I'm saying all this (which I'll concede it probably isn't!), I'm responding to Michael's comment about whether age range of sexual attraction grows or gets stuck. I don't have a concrete answer so I'm just sharing personal experience, and hope that it benefits in some way.