I grew up feeling like a sex object.
I was harassed constantly.
I cut my hair short to be less attractive and stopped wearing heels — so I can run at a moment’s notice if I had to.
I tried to avoid men and thought perhaps I would only date women. Women were interested in all of me. Men would follow me down the street and make kissy noises or even bark at me.
I got the message day-in, day-out that biology was my destiny and I was just there to look pretty.
I received a Ph.D. in science but the incessant focus on my looks continued.
I couldn’t understand it.
I rejected my sexual self completely in order to try to avoid the attention. I felt frustrated and angry.
When I talked to my mother about the harassment, she said I should enjoy it. When I talked to some male friends, they said that’s just how guys are and to relax.
I pushed away my desire, cut myself off from my femininity, and determined to be respected for my smarts.
And I was miserable.
Eventually, I decided to face my fears, and I found myself in a workshop on conscious sexuality. I came face to face with how disconnected I was from my body and my desire.
During a ritual that was the culmination of a week’s worth of vulnerability, discomfort, and unlearning, my connection to myself jolted itself back online like a million fireworks at once, and a new feeling of aliveness and energy flooded through me. Something deep shifted.
For the first time in YEARS, I felt powerful, alive, and playful. I realized I loved sex, and even more, I loved that feeling of being so connected with a partner afterward. I loved FEELING. I loved being silly. Conscious sex was such an effective way of bringing down barriers, breaking through my nerdy awkwardness, and having precious shared moments of pleasure and fun. It was all I wanted to do, all the time.
I watched my desire take over and try to drive me. I watched how easily and impulsively it could drive me to do things. And I realized that if my desire was SO all-consuming, what must it be like for men?
This realization transformed me. The decades of pent-up anger and frustration dissipated. I started talking to men about their experiences. And, I started delighting in myself as a sexual being.
The way men responded to me changed. I felt respected and (usually) no longer afraid. I felt powerful because I was connected to myself. This didn’t make the years of harassment okay, and it didn’t make it stop completely, but with my new-found empathy and inner power, I was no longer consumed by anger and frustration. A huge weight lifted off of me.
I have had incredible, healing, connected, loving, & respectful experiences with men since then. Men who opened the door for my sexual awakening. Men who loved me for my intellect and who also loved to hold me when I cried during sex. I came to deeply cherish men as lovers, partners, and healers.
During the years when I felt angry and afraid, part of me knew there was something I was missing. I knew that I didn’t want to go on like that, but I didn’t know how to work with what I was feeling.
It was my energetic awakening combined with sexual awakening that allowed me to work through my years of pain. And it was the men who showed up to be present with me exactly as I was who catalyzed it all.
I simply had no paradigm for men as a healing force in sex. I had had no exposure or education in this — I thought sex was about pleasing my male partner in his drive toward the relief of orgasm and ejaculation, a very shallow view of male sexuality, as I came to realize. I was afraid of male anger if I didn’t measure up.
But the men I met who had gone through what I call a ‘men’s sexual awakening’ didn’t expect me to please them. Instead, they wanted me to feel safe to come home to myself and my capacity for pleasure. They were men who had studied sex, relationships, emotions, and women. Men who were confident and powerful but from a heart-centered place — meaning they cared and used their power for deepening together — not into some kind of sticky possession of each other, but into a connection based on care, respect, and awe.
In sexual spaces where men didn’t need anything from me and weren’t worried about their prowess as lovers, and where they wouldn’t let me collapse into my usual habits, self-consciousness, or shame, but kept calling me back to love — this kind of space short-circuited the emotional patterns I had been running for years. My sexually awakened male lovers demanded only my presence with them, and so our connection and our pleasure were more profound than I ever imagined possible.
It was a raw, primal, embodied healing, made all the more powerful by using sexual energy.
It was a remarkable education that gave me a new appreciation for men, the potential of the male body, and sexual energy as a healing power rather than something to be afraid of, ashamed of, or ignored. And it catalyzed a love, curiosity, and empathy for men that gave me my power back.
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Previously published on “Hello, Love”, a Medium publication.
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Photo credit: Paloma A. on Unsplash