The Wild Woman Walk Back

After having tasted the wild edge of their erotic power, women may find themselves summoned back toward the familiar circle of belonging, toward the approving gaze of the world of convention. The systems that say a woman’s value is contingent on her ability to keep her appetites hidden or, when revealed, to recant them in a language the masculine can tolerate. 

What cannot be metabolized by the system must be denied or disguised. And so, she is taught the ritual of reversal, the public undoing of her own experience, the practiced apology for having been too much, too wanton, too alive. It is a subtle but relentless demand: return to the fold, repent of your unruliness, narrate your adventures as confusion or coercion or temporary madness, so that your membership may be restored. 

In this way, a woman’s body becomes a kind of confessional booth, a place where she first erupts with sovereignty and then, trembling with the aftershocks of her own liberation, must renounce the very force that animated her. The price of re-admittance to the club of Man is the willingness to declare her power an aberration, her agency an accident, her desire a thing that happened to her, never something she summoned. It is a pact as old as time: trade in your memory for safety, exchange your truth for a role in the ongoing pageant of innocence. 

To keep the world orderly, she must betray her erotic experience and translate it back into the sanctioned language of regret, misunderstanding, or victimhood, all so the spell remains unbroken and the collective trance can continue undisturbed.