100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed - Brossura

It opens innocently enough: the diary starts off with a tone of self-absorbed adolescent wistfulness. The fourteen-year-old Melissa starts taking notes about her feelings during a very hot summer. Her bedroom is plastered with Klimt posters and photos of Marlene Dietrich. She is a loner, fond of classical music. She examines her body in the mirror, pleasurably yet without desire. Her friend Alessandra introduces her to Daniele, an eighteen-year-old who intrigues her. She is embarrassed when he asks her if she is a virgin and she says yes. He invites her to his home to go swimming, and after cornering her in a secluded room and kissing her passionately, he asks, "Do you feel like doing it?" She declines coyly, but soon he is pushing her face below his waist. When she takes his penis in her mouth, he comes immediately. "Is this the way it's done?" she asks him. He isn't very nice to her, but the act fills her with a "strange contentment." The diary then jumps to her fifteenth birthday, and then Daniele's nineteenth. She is smitten with him, can't keep her mind on her Latin lessons, tells him she wants to make love, but he responds that she doesn't "even know how to suck him off." She depicts her parents as not very caring of her, and feels unloved. She starts masturbating habitually and finally offers herself to Daniele, who tells her that he'll have sex with her only if their relationship remains purely sexual. She hopes that it will turn into love. When she arrives to have sex with him, he mistreats her; when he finally penetrates her and she claims not to feel any pain, he accuses her of lying to him about being a virgin. They begin to meet regularly to have sex on the beach, but she is unsatisfied, detached, deeply hurt by his abusive treatment. She feels guilty and sad when she confronts Daniele with his abuse of her, and he is humiliated: he bursts into tears. She stops seeing him, but the relief is mixed with the desire for self-punishment One day at a school a