Your Courageous Life

I’ve been working on healing a lot of things for a lot of years, and have at this point embraced the idea that healing and growing are what I’m committed to, regardless of how long the journey takes (this is nice in the sense of being able to (usually) let go of the “Why haven’t I figured it all out yet?” voices).

And one of the most tender and private opportunities to heal something that has come my way in the past few years is to heal my sexual self.

I’m still not there yet.

So this is your warning now that this is quite possibly a “TMI” or Too Much Information kind of post for some, though I don’t describe sexual acts in this post so much as I speak in very general terms about my own sexual self as it applies to the broader context of women’s sexuality–a topic that I think is perfectly healthy to talk about.

So, to continue, here’s where I’ve come from: Okay, imagine someone growing up in the post-feminist era. In one way, I have been living in the era of AIDS and teen-pregnancy, the “Don’t have sex or it could ruin the rest of your life” warning scenarios. In another way, I’ve been in the “have sex like a man” era, an era of treating sexuality as something to luxuriate in–that feelings and intimacy did not matter so much as raw, unbridled sexuality (and if you didn’t think sex was amazing, it was an indication that you were not an evolved woman). Still further, I have taken with me the pro-woman messages of exploring our inner goddess, inner sexuality, the inner woman and how it reflects in the outer. 

As a result of this, I have swiveled back and forth between so many different ways of viewing my own sexual self, at times seeing sex as dangerous and at times adopting the role of the carefree sexual woman (mostly because I thought it was what others found most attractive, and not because it was confidence I actually felt), and most recently I have been wanting to get more in touch with the inner goddess aspects of myself, the aspects of what someone might term divine woman. 

(Here’s the disclaimer where I reveal that the first time someone started talking about my “divine woman” I was all, WRETCH, GAG, NEW AGE BLECH. But the more I tried the idea on, the more I thought there was in fact something very beautiful to me about viewing women as goddess-like, because there is a very beautiful power to feminine energy).

Something I am still working on fully releasing is my anger at the way some men are socialized to view women, whether it is through the lens of viewing woman as a hysterical neurotic just because she is in touch with her emotions or the “ball-buster” if she leaves emotions out of the picture totally and makes decisions with an authority and directness that makes some men uncomfortable. I’m also really working on healing how angry I am that some men are not socialized in a healthy way sexually, and that our society tolerates–on so many levels–the symptoms of this disease (in the forms of pornography, rape, sexual harassment, and the accompanying backlashes).

By the way, I’m going to try very hard in this post to not embrace absolutes, by using qualifiers like “some.” Through my work on gender roles, I’ve learned that many men, in fact, experience a lot of pain at the hands of those women who decide to stop trusting men altogether and who lump them into the same group as an abuser. So I want to be clear that I’m saying “some” men, and not “all” men.

I’ve talked to my women friends about our sexual selves over the years, and it astonishes me how alike so many of our experiences are or have been or were at the beginning. It astonishes me how many of us are/were in fact uncertain about what we really want(ed) from our partners; how dissatisfied most of us are/were yet confused about how to explain our feelings; how much we pretend(ed) and how much we hide (or hid)–and in particular, how much we have had the common experience of “numbing out” during sexual encounters, mostly because once something started we felt something akin to, “Well, wait, things have gotten pretty far along here and now I realize that I’m not really wanting to do this, but since I don’t want to disappoint you, let’s just get it over with.”

A huge–HUGE–part of whatever healing I’ve already accomplished was to be ruthlessly committed to saying the aforementioned, if it was my truth. Quite simply, I made a commitment to myself that I would not harm my body, my emotions, or my sexual essence any longer by entering into any sexual encounter for which I was not totally present and sincerely willing on all levels. If I’m lukewarm–nope. If things are getting intense and I suddenly realize that some old pattern of pretending has been responsible for getting the encounter started–I stop. It’s awkward, yes. 

And I’m willing to put up with awkward in order to heal.

As a result of doing that, I have learned enough about myself and the impulses of my sexual self that I now can gauge much more effectively what I’m up for, and just be honest from the start. 

The truth is that despite the work I’ve already done, what I keep finding when I return to looking at this issue in a core way, excavating it on deeper and deeper levels, is this: I’m still angry. I’m still so, so, so fucking pissed at the abuse of women that I hear about or see. The anger sometimes feels bottomless. I do forgiveness work around all of the experiences that I have had at the hands of men, times where my sexual boundaries have been violated, and still–the next time I process the issue, there is more anger there. I’m so angry at the messages that women are liars when they report being raped. I’m so angry at the sexualization of women that I see in the media. I’m so angry when I see men who sort of shame-facedly admit that they know that the pornography industry is full of abuses of women, yet they don’t change what they do (porn does exist that is made by actors who are protected by a sex-workers union! there are other options that are still erotic but that don’t involve sex slaves or women hyped up on drugs!). I’m so angry when I hear about stories of women being trafficked for the sex industry.

It made me so angry when, last week, I was cat-called at when I walked through a dark parking lot, and then when I didn’t respond, the guys were all, “God, you need to smile,” as if I was just such a bitch because I didn’t think they were flattering me by objectifying me. I was so angry that they didn’t see–or chose not to act upon–the obvious situation here, that I was a woman walking alone through a dark parking lot with a gang of guys leaning against their car, making comments about me purely based on my body. I was so angry that they would take advantage of their obvious power in that situation, to gratify themselves.

I know that in fact, what I’m angry at here is not actually men–I’m angry at the socialization of the culture. I’m angry that we live in a culture where we don’t teach our men to be men, to respect women. I’m angry that we live in a culture that perpetuates a lie of what a man must be. I’m also angry when I see women buying into that. I’m angry when I see women training their little boys to “be a man.” I’m angry when I hear about fathers who don’t step up and teach their sons how to handle sexuality (yes, I get it that they weren’t taught these things, either–I’m angry that with the wealth of resources at our disposal, they don’t just fucking step up already and get past their own selfish fears of not knowing how to do it, and teach already–teach, teach, teach your sons how to be men so that the women in this world can walk with strength and support you as men!). I’m angry at the sickness of the culture that I see and how powerless I am to snap my fingers and make it all stop.

And–you might see where I’m going with this–I’m angry at, and need to forgive…

ME.

Yes, me.

I need to forgive me for the times when I didn’t speak up about my sexual boundaries, thus further perpetuating the confusion and allowing myself to be violated on some level (I’m thinking here of encounters in which I was consensual and gave no indication of not being willing, yet inside I knew that I was consenting only to not disappoint, and that in fact it was not my truth that I was honestly willing).

I need to forgive me for all of the times that my anger has spilled over into hatred of men, my brothers on this planet. 

I need to forgive me for all of the times I’ve had an expectation of a man that stemmed from my conditioning around what it means to “be a man.”

I need to forgive me for all of the times that I’ve bought into conditioning and expectations of what it means to “be a woman.”

I need to forgive me for the times when I saw one of my sisters being mistreated and I didn’t speak up–the times I saw a couple arguing and a man said something totally degrading but I was too afraid to speak up; the time I was pretty sure a woman on BART had a guy talking to her in an aggressive way and she was afraid to change seats and I could have gone over and offered to sit with her but I didn’t; the times I’ve heard people make homophobic or gender-negative remarks and haven’t spoken up.

I need to forgive me for trying to take on/pretend roles that I wasn’t really into, all to please a man.

I need to forgive me for the times when another woman professed that she was completely comfortable in her sexual self and I let myself feel “less-than” because of that.

I need to forgive me for a few times when I didn’t speak up for myself when other women openly treated me as if something was wrong with me, like I wasn’t evolved, when I was honest about the very conflicts I describe here. 

When it all comes right down to it, I can only ever own my own part–that’s it, that’s all I have any control over–and I have learned time and time again that when I heal and forgive myself for those parts, the upset in other parts lessens.

But man, it is a current of anger that I find really hard to step out of. 

I feel it necessary to add that I’m not seeking advice (though feel free to chime in with your comments!), and that while my anger is what I’m present to when I type this entry, on the whole my sexual self is embraced and healed in a lot of different ways. It is not all doldrums (in fact, there is quite a lot that is nothing but fun, and that I won’t get into because that would be TMI). It is just what I notice coming up in this moment, and it struck me as something to speak into, because I know that as a woman, I am not alone.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 4:22 pm |