Another berlin story

How Berlin's Sex Scene Helped Me Heal from Sexual Abuse

Mika Vri

Photo: Mika Vri

Mika Vri comes from a small place in Moldova. She moved to Berlin about 4 years ago, and it was supposed to just be a chapter. Instead, it rewrote her life in the most unexpected way. She is the author of Slut Theory, a collection of real diaries on desire and damage. This book started as self-therapy and ended up becoming a fun, real - now open to readers - journey on how Berlin helped her unlearn old patterns.

I was about six years old when a fully grown man touched me in ways I didn't even have words for. By the time I learned the words, the damage was already part of me. I had mistaken it for my personality, and learned way too late that it was the shame internalized. Why was I the one to feel ashamed for it? Back then, there was no other way around it.

I grew up in Moldova, in a family where the body or sexuality was never a topic, but purity was. So every time someone would get close to the topic of me saving myself for my future husband, it would kill me a little from the inside, because I wasn't sure if I was "pure" or not. Because I wasn't sure if what had happened to me was what was happening between married couples. I was confused and ashamed throughout my formative years.

I left at eighteen, but I took that shame with me without wanting to. It had already shaped me in the way that I would act in grown-up relationships, in bed, in conversations about sexuality and pleasure. Intimacy felt often scary,  and I was so blind to it that I thought I was broken for not being able to orgasm with my partners. I never connected it to what happened to me early on, because I'd buried those encounters so deep that they were almost impossible to find. I was the only one in my friends group who wouldn't experience the magic of orgasms, and I thought it was my body that was broken. Later I discovered it was my mind. Now I know it was both. My body always remembered what my mind tried to forget.

What changed that - and this might surprise people - was Berlin's sex scene.

I moved to Berlin in my mid-twenties. I was so gullible; I actually had no idea about its true party scene and openness level. The first time I went to KitKat, I felt like everyone was performing. How could you be comfortable in a place like this? I never minded being naked on a beach, because nobody is touching you there. But in a club, where people are usually touchy and pretty disrespectful? “What am I doing here?,” I kept asking myself for the first 10 minutes. It didn't take me long, though, to feel safer than I'd felt working club staff in Barcelona, where at least one person a night would grab your ass "by mistake."

If someone had told me that becoming part of this scene would help me the most in healing my sexual abuse trauma, I would have told them they were absolutely insane. How could that be possible?

Well, consent. With every “would it be okay if I got closer”, every "did you ask her if you could touch her while I fuck her?", every "would you like to tell me your non-negotiables before we even start", I got closer to owning my body again. I remember the first Terminal event I went to. I had no idea what to expect, and went alone, as none of my friends were into those kinds of events. Like any Terminal event, there are rules and dares, and one of them was that I had to say “NO” at least three times during the night, whenever someone asked me for something. That was probably the first time in my adult life I said “no” to someone who wanted to kiss me, without feeling bad about it. Just no, I am not feeling it. I really didn't want to be kissed by him, but in any other situation, I could never be this direct.
I'm not sure I’ve ever felt so empowered in my whole life until that moment. As if I had just learned how to breathe deeper for the first time. As if something that had been kneeling inside me for years finally stood up. That might have been the first time I told someone “no”, instead of just shutting down while my mind escaped my body until it was all over.

For someone whose body had learned early that other people's desire was something that happened to you, rather than with you - this was disorienting in the best possible way. It was the first environment where I was actually invited to say “no”. And the clubs were the best training for that. The clubs were where I learned that my body belonged to me, not to whoever was stronger in the room.

I want to be honest by saying that this was not a smooth transition. There were still nights when I dissociated. Still, I had partners who tripped something old in me without meaning to. Still, there were mornings when I woke up feeling like I was six years old and very small. I found what I call the love of my life - someone who makes me orgasm and listens to my body on a daily basis - and even he tripped something in me once. I will never be able to erase what happened to me. But I can go past it. My body now has proof it can feel safe even in desire.

I eventually wrote a book about this entire journey - “Slut Theory” - because I kept looking for it and couldn't find it. One that didn't separate sexuality from trauma, but shared the full trajectory, from afraid of sex to empowered by it, with all its honesty intact.

What Berlin gave me is hard to name without sounding like a cliché: it gave me back the relationship between want and safe. For a long time those two things lived on opposite sides of my nervous system. The radical care I found in some of Berlin’s most misunderstood spaces helped me put them in the same room.

It seems that the most unexpected places can put you back together.

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