Do You Need to Change Your Narrative Around Sexuality?

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I’ve discovered that, like everything else in my life from the way my kids behave, to the things that happen, sex is yet another thing that reflects back to me parts of myself that may be about old thought patterns and feelings.

When I was reading about Pavan Amara’s Take Back Your Body project, although I’ve never experienced sexual abuse directly, I could relate to the concept that taking back the narrative of sex is a crucial part of healing.

Amara says “After any sort of sexual violence, the way you think about sex and your body changes, so you think it’s not under your control, or you have to go with someone else’s likes and dislikes and you lose that connection to yourself. We look at ways of taking that back.”

Whether a person has been abused or not, I believe an unhealthy narrative about sex prevails among the collective conscious, and feelings of fear and shame still too often dominate the landscape in both sexes.
I recall listening to Teal Swan sharing that each time she runs a workshop and asks participants to raise their hands if they have felt fear for their life, all the women and many men raise their hands. When she starts to narrow that down to a shorter and shorter timeframe, the men are often gobsmacked that most women in the room still have their hands up when she asks who has felt that fear in the last week.

History tells us that females (and many males) have suffered at the hands of power-hungry men for centuries and, while life in the twenty-first century is changing in many places, oppression still exists both in the world around us and reverberates in the world within us. This is something I am mindful of in relation to my own experiences and those of my children.

My eldest daughter was inadvertently exposed to the topic of sex in a fictional story she had listened to recently that had been miscategorised under children’s books rather than for young adults. The main thread of the story was about time travelling back to Arthurian times to save the future. However, the plot apparently also included two teenage girls having sex and a baby being born.

This brought up questions for her about what sex is and, while I did not mind having the conversation, I hadn’t anticipated having to answer quite so many questions for another year or two. I had to explain to a somewhat bewildered young girl, who finds the whole concept rather abstract, that a whole new view of the world opens up when hormones start flooding our bodies in the teenage years; sex becomes desirable (when allowed to unfold naturally) and is just nature’s way of making sure we humans survive.

It made me reflect on my own experiences emerging into young adulthood, recalling the perplexing question of what a French kiss might be and what exactly was I to do with my tongue? And just how embarrassing everything seemed at that age, even asking that question of anyone was too much.

When I think of my first kiss in that genre, with an eleven year old boy in my class using his swanky digital watch to time it to two minutes, his tongue like a slab of meat sitting unchewed in my mouth, and his eyes focused sideward to the timer on his wrist, it was clear I wasn’t the only one clueless and uniformed. Of course, that was just the overhang of Victorian virtuosity in our upbringing.

Here, on the opposite side of the world, my partner was brought up in a different culture entirely; Kiwi male bravado reflects an archetype of patriarchal male entitlement to female flesh, like a set of untrained puppies that grow old having learned no tricks at all except the art of enthusiastic and instant gratification. 

Both those examples are clearly not everyone’s experience, especially those that have been exposed to sex or experienced sexual abuse at a young age, but it demonstrates how we all view sex through a filter of our own experiences; and there does seem a lack of examples around what healthy sexuality might look like.

Being the digital age there is no lack of material available on the topic of sex, but how much of it is actually helpful? I’ve noticed in this era of Coronavirus lockdown, on social media there seems an increase of bored blokes sharing weird videos and material designed for shock and titillation.

My youngest daughter, unbeknown to my partner, was looking over his shoulder when his phone pinged and there was one such video that popped up – sent via a social media app by an aforementioned archetype of the bored Kiwi bloke. “Mummy” she cried “someone has sent daddy a video of a man bouncing an exercise ball, like the one you used to have, on his willy.”

She thought this was hilarious, and thankfully didn’t see enough to have absorbed the sexual component of it. Needless to say, my partner has since taken a much more mindful approach to his device.

To me, of the prudish upbringing, this type of media automatically gets categorized in my psyche as smut and makes me view the man in the video (and anyone sharing it) as sad. In my partner’s psyche, it’s just funny, something to send on as a bit of bravado and one-upmanship in the shocking humour stakes.

Being a mother of daughters and someone who deeply understands how even things that are seemingly benign in intent can shape a person’s psyche, I am inclined to err on the side of caution when it comes to exposing my kids to life beyond their current point of development, a hard task in today’s world.

As I said in From Desires of the Flesh to Deep Connection our sexuality is deeply connected to all our other interactions. When I listen to the demeaning lyrics of a rap song, it creates images in my head, the same happens when watching a video, reading news, playing games… on and on. The question we each have to ask ourselves – and for our children as they emerge into young adulthood - is whether these images are pathways to love and connectedness or quite the opposite?

Science has shown us that the more exposed to something we are, the more desensitized to it we become and this is especially so when we have been indoctrinated into a way of being since early childhood, we have no conscious memory of our true feelings. I believe that many males simply don’t understand the female perspective and, what they see as harmless can often be disrespectful or even harmful.

I get that to most of the people out there sharing the videos I mentioned, it is all just a bit of fun. But there was a time – likely in childhood and before their conscious memory -  that it would have created a bad feeling within them.

Having read the work of Dr Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician with a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma, and in their potential lifelong impacts, I know the harm that comes from children being exposed too early and too insensitively to everything from noise to the thoughts and emotions of those around us.

This is where the collective consciousness on the topic of sex and sexuality gets perpetuated; where insensitivity arises.

For one friend of mine, this is a huge trigger and I understand why. Our sexuality, like everything else in our lives, develops through the filter of our experiences. Her experiences include bearing witness to a wide range of sexual abuse. As a healer, she knows the damage to our psyche when abuse occurs.

For me, as a female who has not been subject to what we would term abuse, I still bear witness to the thoughts and feelings and mistreatment of females and have my entire life. Everything from the lewd wolf whistling that accompanied any passing of a work site from a young age, to frightening moments at the hands of testosterone charged males fuelled with alcohol or even just at a football match.

There is definitely a sense in my psyche that these things are the manifestation of a collective experience that views females as objects rather than with reverence. So when it comes to the realm of my own body and my own relationships, this collective sense of my female heritage creates part of the lens through which I view sex.

I suspect the reason this plays out so emotively for me is because my soul knows reverence for both the masculine and feminine and can sense that neither is being truly honoured in much of what I’ve discussed here.

Sex is to be enjoyed, of that there is no doubt, but what are the blocks in the pathways to mutual joy that exist in your life? What are the fundamental ideas and beliefs you have that stand in the way of honouring this? What experiences do you need to heal? And what messages do we want to send to our collective sons and daughters?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be at Ease With the World Around You, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? and Womanhood: A Story of Our Time. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.