I’ve seen thousands upon thousands of women begin to open their sexuality.
I’ve watched the process of these women who have spent lifetimes concealing, denying, and rejecting their sexuality, begin to open it.
I’ve seen the voraciousness of their hunger and desire almost as if they let an animal out of the cage. I’ve seen these women begin to explore everything that they possibly can, as if they couldn’t stop themselves, as if there were a force inside of them that had its own mind.
Until you begin to connect your attention to this hunger the only solution is the Hunger Games, like how anorexia is seen as the only solution we have for a woman’s potential for overeating. I watched these women grab everything that they possibly could. I also watched them come alive, write poetry, speak about it, share it, and connect with other women about it. Connect with men about it.
I watched these women forget all of the things they are supposed to do to be strong and self-sufficient. Forget the script that tells them to deny and reject men. What we call strength in the world is actually women pretending.
I watched them try things and I watched them get hurt. I watched them admit they want things they think they shouldn’t want.
I watched them pick up the only answer offered in the culture for that hurt: To turn away from the journey and say to themselves, “It happened to me.”
If that happens on a spiritual journey, people send you back in because everyone wants you to be on a spiritual journey.
But if it happens on a sexual journey, the whole world is waiting, saying, “See, I told you so.”
It’s almost as if there’s an entire industry built, ready to absorb women and reprogram them away from any idea that they could be powerful and strong. A world that tells them it is dangerous for a woman to have an experience of any kind, especially a sexual experience.
John McWhorter talks about the religion of anti-racism, the notion of an anti-racism that is born not of compassion or logic but a kind of religiosity that is a non-rational part of the brain. It has to remain non-rational and always see the other as an enemy; always see oneself as incapable.
I would suggest that there is a religion of anti-sexuality for women. There is a fervor. We talk about internalized misogyny as being self-loathing in a woman. What we don’t talk about is that the self you are loathing is your sexuality and the ensuing power that would come from it.