ColumnStereotypes about female sexuality are mostly a load of bunk, and they’re hurting our sex and love lives. ENOUGH ALREADY.
If you still believe that men are the horny ones – the ones that “can’t keep it in their pants” or only “think with their d**ks,” you’ve been brainwashed, and I would like to un-wash your brain. We’ve been socialized to believe that women are less libidinous, more marriage-minded, and wired to crave romance and/or nurturing — not sex.
The truth is that women are likely more libidinous than men, and many desire multiple partners, sometimes at the same time, and sometimes as serial monogamists. (Science is beginning to back this up – they’ve only just begun to study it.) Shocked? Don’t be — explore it and own it if you feel it. Women are also multi-orgasmic, and possess the only body part whose sole purpose is pleasure (the clitoris). And our sexuality doesn’t turn off like a switch at menopause.
There are a lot of myths to bust.
It’s all quite ironic that we continue to believe women want sex less than men, given the hard work that the Greeks, Romans, early (and late) Christians, Jews, and Muslims and others have done to convince us that women’s unrestrained sexual desire can only be tamed by male ownership of female bodies. After a few centuries hunting witches they switched it up yet again – women were to be perceived as perfect little princesses, yet they had to be harnessed in corsets. These women eventually became the “happy” housewives of the ’50s, who were corseted in new ways.
Then we got the pill and a lot changed, but the pervasiveness of the beauty myth continues to keep us in chains. (Note: I’m talking mainly about the arc of women’s sexuality in the West here – female genital mutilation is still the norm in certain areas of the world, owing to the belief that women are too carnal for their own good.)
Before we were owned, we were venerated. Evidence of pre-agricultural fertility cults show that women’s bodies occupied an exalted place in the consciousness of the era. This might have been based on the way we bled with the cycles of the Moon, or because we seemed to be solely responsible for birth and life itself. Whatever the reasons, there was a time when women’s sexuality was sacred.
We were proud to be whores before we were cast as Madonnas. I think it’s about time we took our power back, sexual and otherwise. Before the Greco-Roman patriarchs began their systemic repression of women’s rights and lives, there was prehistory. It’s unwise to romanticize any historical epoch, given that we weren’t there and can only hypothesize about the conditions in which our ancestors lived. But “Sex at Dawn,” one of my favorite books of the last ten years, does a nice job of showing us why evolutionary psychologists have gotten everything so very wrong. And yet they’ve shaped our cultural consciousness. How do we untangle all the crossed wires that claim to define how we’re wired?
It’s as of yet impossible to identify where nature ends and nurture begins, but culture plays a major role in our self-perception and our relationships. The popularity of shows like “The Bachelor” and the annoying ubiquity of Patti Stenger prove that we’re up against a major meme machine and it’s going to take a person-by-person, relationship-by-relationship transformation to shift our consciousness. Sex, and in particular, women’s sexuality, has lived in the shadows of our psyches because it was deemed too overpowering. Instead of trying to control it, we must allow ourselves to experience all of its dimensions. That doesn’t mean we’ll engage in 24/7 orgies and none of us will ever work again (as Republicans seem to fear).
We live in binaries, and it’s about time for a breakthrough. From compulsory heterosexuality to compulsory motherhood to monogamy, marriage, engagement rings, and more, there’s much we accept as rote. We often participate without question, because it’s in our movies and on our TV’s and our Facebook feeds. But is it what you really want? Only you can answer that.
Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com, and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.
Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality
Related on EcoSalon:
The Art of Receiving: Do You Deserve Pleasure?
Tantra 101: Sacred Sex for the Rest of Us
9 Natural Ways To Spice Up Your Sex Life
Image: James Clear