How We Strangle the Erotic

Women, here’s the deal. Like Erica Jong said, the buzzword in her time was liberation. In this, her daughter’s generation, the word is control.
The God-given gifts we were blessed with to enter
A state of abandon, ecstasy, the euphoria so great
That we are willing to pull back the curtain of ego—
That the forces, the gods, the elements
Might receive us with joy, laughter, and play,
Welcome us home,
Heal us, restore us, show us, remind us, return us,
And give us our share of vision and wisdom.

That gift? The sexual energies we could ride to our liberation on,
We turn into lassos to grab for the boyfriend, the husband,
The small pittance of love or approval.
That gift, invaluable,
We ration like misers, proudly starving ourselves and the world.

We point at billionaires who could save the world with their wealth,
While looking away from the way we hoard ours.
You know that feeling—the restlessness, the anxiety,
The sense that you can’t get it going, can’t turn it on,
That you run out of power right when you get started?
That no matter how hard you kick your creative drive,
Try to force it, it remains obstinate, unwilling to move?

That is sex strangled.
Sex on a leash.
Only permitted to go where society directs it—
Into the safe spaces of owning and being owned.

Not free, not undomesticated—
No, no, no.
A woman no longer captive,
Just walking freely down Main Street, looking for her next meal?

That might terrify anyone espousing domesticity,
Anyone preaching the value of chains,
The gospel of man and ownership—
Because they, too, would be caught in those chains
When she walked with a pride unknown to the shame-based world.

With her pride,
Leading the way to the other side
Where no one has to conceal their nature,
Where liberation for women has nothing to do with the masculine practices of dissolving the self—
And everything to do with, once and for all, revealing that self.