Woman on Fire (9 page)

Many women choke, like I did, when they need to speak up about sex, or in sex. It's common for women to feel muted sexually for a lot of reasons. We aren't socialized to speak up for ourselves, we don't know what we want so we don't know what to ask for, we feel uncomfortable saying “no,” we feel we might be judged for saying “yes,” we are afraid we'll be rejected, we don't want to seem like we don't know what we are doing sexually, we just don't like any confrontation, and we've never had great sexual communication modeled for us.

Most people like a sexual partner who speaks up for herself and says what she wants or doesn't want because most people want to respect your wants and needs. If they don't, they aren't worth your time anyway. If you don't say what you are a “yes” for, you won't get it. If you don't say what is a “no” for you, you forsake yourself. Neither scenario is favorable.

As far as feeling sexually inexperienced or not knowing what you want . . . it can be so freeing to just say that. I often hear from women that they don't know what to say. They get the words all stuck in their throat and can't get anything out. Here are some openers that can cue your partner to help and engage:

“I feel confused right now and I'm just not sure what to say.”

“There's something I want to say, but I'm having a hard time getting the words out.”

“There's something I want to say, but I'm afraid of what you will think.”

“I don't have a lot of experience with _____, but I'm interested to learn more and see if it's something I might be into trying.”

“I like kissing you. I'm unsure what else would feel good.”

“I like you, but I feel shy about it.”

“I'm not sure what I desire right now. Would you help me explore it so I can figure it out?”

“I need some help figuring out what to do/what I want.”

“I like what you are doing with your hand there. Can you make an adjustment in pressure/speed/position . . . ?”

There is an invitation, if not an outright request, in each of these openers. Invitation and request will go a long way in breaking the ice. You have to start somewhere, even if it's just acknowledging how awkward you feel but that you want to talk about sex. Most people feel awkward, so just putting that out there can help disarm your partner or date and open up communication. We think we are supposed to have it all together and be perfect when it comes to sex. Sex is not perfect. You don't have to be perfect. There are so many unknowns. It's okay. It's vulnerable to admit you don't know everything about sex, and sharing that vulnerability is actually what will bring you closer to your partner, because they probably feel vulnerable too.

If at all possible, get yourself into a situation where you can learn and practice talking about sex. Taking a class or being in a program that is designed to help you explore it does more to get the frog out of the throat than nearly anything. Maybe you host a women's night in which you come up with sex questions and you talk about them. Everyone will be relieved to have an outlet for the conversation! Having people in your life who are skilled and comfortable talking about sex is immensely helpful.

After overcoming my initial shock in SOC152, I was desensitized by both Professor Baldwins' ability to nonchalantly discuss the formerly unspeakable. The mute girl smashed on the couch under her boyfriend recovered. I learned to really talk about sex. My growing outspoken passion spurred me toward a deep desire to do something meaningful for others, and that opened the door to a rather unconventional path. It changed my story. I have no regrets for any of my experiences now and I fully embrace them for how they formed me.

Unlock your silence, unleash your voice, and rewrite the stories that keep you small and from stepping into the sexual being you want to be. Sex will be better, life will be better, and it might lead to something totally unexpected.

Element 2:
RELEASE

MAKE SPACE FOR THE SEXUAL SELF YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR

In this chapter, we are going to make room. We have all taken things on in our sexual lives that have not served us or no longer do. Release is about letting go of the guilt, shame, patterns, and trauma that have you stuck, afraid, sad, and disenfranchised from your own body and sexuality. It's about letting go of beliefs about yourself or about sexuality that keep you stuck.

There is so much we have to release about sex. Sex itself can be an enormous release, yet so many of our feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and experiences about sex are small and tight. They need to go so we can fully enjoy sex and our sexuality now and from this day forward. Let's get spacious about sex.

When we are young, we all take things on that
ultimately do not fit who we are as we grow into our adult selves. We get them from peers, parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, and other people who influence us. We get them from religious doctrine, media, and other cultural frameworks. It is a developmental rite of passage to release the values, beliefs, and feelings we were taught and do not feel aligned with, so we can find out who we really are and live by the belief system that is right for us as adults, as independent agents of our own lives. What do you need to release in order to be the sexual person you want to be? What ideas, beliefs, habits, and approaches need to go? What healing needs to happen so you can make space for what you want to bring in?

When Naomi came to participate in my Women's Sexually Empowered Life Program in her early twenties, she was a brilliant, talented entrepreneur who was beginning to create the life she wanted. I had known her peripherally since her teen years, and I was impressed by her intelligence, savvy, and thoughtful feminism. She was only twenty-two, but was well on her way to standing fully in her own power. I am always delighted when young women show up. Many are not ready for this work in their twenties, but Naomi certainly was. She was not only ready, she was excited to take on the world as she stepped into her own sexual power and grace, which required her coming into her sexual identity and shedding the shame she had carried about it for much of her life.

I knew from a very young age that I was attracted to other girls, but I grew up in a really heteronormative place and I had a lot of fear about it. I confessed to my mom, and while she didn't explicitly say it was bad, she urged me to keep it a secret and not tell anyone else. I could not hear the loving concern in her voice, only the fear
and the whispered conversations she had with my dad where he once sarcastically said, “Oh great, now we have to move.” I felt that there was something wrong with me on a core level . . . something bad, different from other people, that was troublesome and a burden for those close to me. I had to disguise and pretend to be normal. Being my true self was dangerous for me and bad for the people who loved me.

I had my first kiss with my best friend when I was eleven years old—a sweet, innocent moment in my room one summer evening while a thunderstorm rolled in. She was my confidante, and I loved her fiercely. Her family, however, was strongly Catholic and did not like me. Before too long, they decided that we could no longer be friends and we weren't allowed to speak anymore; my former BFF went along with it while I was left heartbroken.

The next year at school, she was passing notes in class with her new best friend and described the kiss, saying that I had “made her do it.” Someone picked up the note and read it aloud to the class while the teacher was out of the room, and before long all the kids in my grade came up to me and taunted me for being a lesbian.

I was so deeply humiliated that I didn't tell anyone—not even my mom, because I already believed that she considered this part of me a burden. We did not talk about my confessions of queer desire for many years because I had so much shame. I managed to get through the rest of the school year until the rumors died down and slowly found a group of friends who were more open-minded. I dated girls in college but didn't want to come out to my parents and felt confused about my sexual identity/orientation—“bisexual” didn't fit and I felt unworthy of calling myself “queer.” Since I had mostly been with men, I was scared of being told by a “real queer person” that I was “not queer enough.”

Naomi was carrying a lot of shame about who she was as a sexual person and it was holding her back from stepping into her true
sexual self, her desires, and being who she really was. Her process of healing that shame and releasing the beliefs she had taken on from her peers and her family made it possible for everything to change.

As you consider what you will need to release, start by thinking about what that release will make room for. What do you want to bring in? Do you want to feel more pleasure and sexual freedom? Do you want to learn how to have unencumbered orgasms? Do you want to feel comfortable being beautiful, sexy, and confident? Do you want to claim your true identity? Do you want to bring a lover into your life with whom you can explore sexual ecstasy to the depths? Do you want to bring in full-out enjoyment of your body? Do you want to feel whole and free? What does that look like? How do you want to feel in your sexuality? How do you want to feel in sex?

Part of this process is having some idea for where you are going.
As you reach toward being something bigger and more expansive than you have ever been, you will have to release the things and people that keep you small and no longer serve your journey and who you are becoming. Sometimes that feels hard, but it's necessary. In order to be something new, you have to make room. You have to give something up. It's the quantum physics of personal growth.

Voids always get filled with something. As you release and make more space inside of yourself and in your life, you will fill it. So get clear now on what you want to fill it with. Even if it's just how you want to feel. Do this with great intention. Leave it up to chance and you might find yourself on another circuitous journey when you really want to go right for the gold.

SEXUAL VISIONING

1. What Do You Want to Bring In?

Take a few minutes to freewrite about what you want to bring into your life around your sexuality, sex life, relationships, and personal power. Who do you want to be as a sexual person? What do you want to experience? How do you want to feel?

2. What Will You Need to Release?

Then write about what you know you will have to give up or release in order to make space for this vision. What beliefs, values, patterns, relationships, or emotional states will you need to let go of?

I had that place of sexual shame: the one where a woman is terrified to touch her own body and doesn't know how to have an orgasm. I was one of the millions of women who carry an insidious shame because they never taught me about my own pleasure, my own body, never named my clitoris, and kept subtly instructing me to strive to have vaginal orgasms.

For me, it had a clear beginning when I was shamed as a little girl who took great pleasure in her discovery of the unique smell of the magical kingdom between her legs. When I was about seven or eight years old, I started a ritual that was very satisfying for me. I noticed that my genitals smelled very different from any other part of my body. Having a normal curiosity, I would touch them through my clothes and I would smell the scent of my own body on my fingers. I found it fascinating. I liked it. I enjoyed the scent of my own sex, even at that little age.

One day, I was following my mother outside at Rosicrucian Temple and probably without even thinking about it, did my little
genital touch-and-smell ritual. I thought I was being stealth, but my mother whipped her head around, glared down at me, and said in a stern whisper, “Stop
touching
yourself and
smelling
yourself!” She really emphasized “smelling.”

I was stunned. I knew enough to know not to do this totally in bird's-eye view, but her reaction was so dramatic that I thought, “This must be
really
bad.” Already, my body, my senses, and (though I didn't have a word for it at the time) my sexuality were all suspect.

Her unintended shaming was highly effective: I didn't touch myself again for
ten years
, not even when my high school boyfriend and first love, who tried tirelessly to help me orgasm, moved my hand to my vulva during sex in an attempt to help me help myself. Trained at age eight, I instinctually yanked it away. I had internalized that it was bad to touch my sexual body parts so deeply in that brief, three-second exchange that it prevented me from touching my own genitals except to clean them until I entered adulthood.

I had been taught not to ever touch myself in order to feel pleasure. I felt additional shame that I couldn't orgasm. I had no idea how to figure it out and just thought that if my boyfriend kept trying hard enough, eventually we'd figure it out and it would happen. But I had to release the idea that someone else would do it. I had to do it myself. I had to learn the mechanics of my own body, and that required releasing my shame around self-pleasuring and masturbation and the idea that someone else was responsible for my pleasure.

It was not until I went to college and my sexuality instructors gave me permission, an assignment in fact, to go home and touch my genitals that I actually did so without reservation. Me and my yoni were reunited. It took a little while, but the orgasms that eventually came washed away the shame that had kept me alien in my own body and from my own capacity for pleasure. I could see truth because finally, I figured out how to have an orgasm! There was no way this was “bad.” And then I had an orgasm with a partner for the first time! It was indeed possible! Finally, I understood how my body
worked and what felt good. Finally, I felt in control of my pleasure and I took full responsibility for it. Finally, I could show my lover how I liked to be approached and touched.

My story is hardly unusual. We all can conjure a moment when someone shamed us about sexuality, our body, our gender, our desire, our pleasure, how we love, or how we do sex. We all have stories of squashed curiosity or sexual ignorance. My mother had hers. What does that shame do? It keeps us disconnected from truth, desire, and joy.

Those moments were what they were, and they might have been painful. Yet we have to love ourselves enough to heal and move beyond them into the truth of our own wholeness. To heal sexual shame is to embrace something new about sexuality. Education and new experiences are balms for healing our shame and growing as sexual people. Ultimately, we each have to free ourselves and let go of the shame and other feelings that keep us stuck and dissatisfied.

Those shaming moments have tremendous long-standing impact, as in Naomi's experience of homophobic teasing. She says:

When I participated in the sexual empowerment program, thirteen years after my shaming experience at school, I had a flash of understanding that almost tore me in two. I suddenly saw the ways in which I still carried this shame about my sexual self, and how it had prevented me from feeling whole, from believing I was worthy of the relationships and community I really wanted. It was like a huge weight came off me all at once. Very soon after that I moved to a new place, found a welcoming queer community, and was able to tell my family about my experiences as a young girl. My mom was upset to hear about everything that had happened without her
knowing. I now realize that if I had told her what was going on at the time, she would have supported me. My shame had prevented me from reaching out for help, which just deepened my feelings of isolation and unworthiness.