In the 90’s women across the United States marched together in a movement called Take Back the Night. Often topless in political performance art, the radical messaging was: We too own the night. We own our bodies. If we come together in solidarity and awareness, we can subdue the violence that has occupied the night and prevented women from moving safely for twelve hours of every day.
The subtext was powerful.
In the darkness, in the hidden, in the secretive, even there, if we want to be safe, it will be through a grid of connection that violence is subdued.
But, to echo Ram Dass, “it is not that you want too much, it is that you do not want enough”.
We went far but not far enough.
Taking back the night doesn’t buy women freedom and safety. But taking back sex does.
Take back a woman’s choice—in every aspect of her life—as to what she does with her body.
The great freedom fighters were imprisoned because they were too effective. Colonizers knew that were they to continue to do their work, too many would get free, too many would break free from mental slavery. And the power structures would crumble.
This is sex. The ultimate liberating practice.
Sex is held by men in the prison of commerce and transaction and porn. Woman, sex, eroticism, pleasure have been bound by cultural projections of what’s appropriate, acceptable, reasonable to be desired.
But sex is ours. As women. And what is ours has been usurped and controlled and made into a commodity.
A woman’s sex has been controlled and “protected” by male strictures emanating from religion, social convention, government and the “saviors” both female and male, the collaborators who pose as virtuous helpers but hide their handcuffs and prison keys behind their backs.
It’s like any other time in history when a repressive regime creates a frightened culture of frightened children who “tell” on their families, friends, neighbors so that they won’t become targets of the inquisition.
Joseph McCarthy led such an inquisition in the 1950s in America. He led a commission in the Senate to have actors, writers, scientists, thinkers, gay people, anyone who was different be accused of being communist spies. Once that happened they lost their social support, their ability to work, or live anything like a normal life.
Of course it turned out that McCarthy, the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and Roy Cohn, the lawyer who was McCarthy’s partner in this endeavor, were roaringly, secretly, flamingly gay.
The upholding of the systematic war on sex by women is no different. Communists have been replaced with sexual predators. Those accused of sexual impropriety are MeToo’d, even if they did not in fact commit sexual impropriety. But it’s too late, the frenzy has already taken hold and everyone has been enlisted to hunt down and eliminate Americas ‘Moral Enemy,’- anyone with a detectable trace of sexual energy. It is a system governed by fear and moral outrage.
And now women are collaborators in a similar war, the new agents of oppression. They have used our fear of being attacked to attack to destroy lives in the same way, but this time, there has been a bigger consequence in the harm women have done to themselves.
Through the new inquisition on sexual predation, we have taken away our own autonomy. We have rendered ourselves helpless and crippled.
If power and authority were to boil down to one thing it would be the power to define.
By insisting on controlling the thoughts and behaviors of others through the threat of ruin, women have abdicated the right to define real power, the world of sexuality, for ourselves.
Woman have abdicated the right to define what it means even to be a woman.
Everything is about sex except for sex.
Sex is about power
She who defines sex, owns the power.
She who defines, owns the world.
The nature of genuine power is that which uplifts, benefits and makes whole.
This is the call to all women
Take back the night
Take back sex
Free sex
Free women