I'll tell you
We're not gonna prove nothing nothing
Sittin’ around watching each other starve
What we need is action/strategy
I want, I want, I want
I want it now
I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe
I do, I do, I do
Bikini Kill
How many of us allow penetration before we are really ready?
Not just able to tolerate it, which most of us are familiar with, but ready as in WANTING IT. Deeply hungry for it. So aroused we can’t wait a single second longer.
How many of us have ever waited for that feeling?
How many of us know what fucking is like when we’re that kind of turned on?
My personal and professional observation is that very few of us do, and I’m curious about why that is.
Looking around, it seems evident that people with vaginas have been trained to center the experiences of people with penises. With very few exceptions anywhere on this planet, we are born and raised into a cock-centric culture. And, as gender roles constantly impose and enact themselves onto our bodies, this dynamic translates across a gendered reality in all sorts of ways.
Consider for a moment that it wasn’t terribly long ago that women were the legal property of men, and that despite the relative changes in women’s legal and social status - such as it is: the Equal Rights Amendment still has not passed as of this update in November of 2019, although hope springs eternal - where we’re at is in many ways a direct carryover from many, many generations of servitude. Even if we weren’t constantly being reminded by church/state/school/porn/media/parents/peers/the lame gesture that passes for most sex ed, our bodies forget nothing.
And then take in how fantastically radical and brave and utterly marvelous it actually is, given all of that, that so many of us are standing for our own pleasure, our desires, and our entirely subjective experiences of sexuality. That we are valuing ourselves first. That we are claiming full ownership of ourselves.
This is the most intimate and fundamental of all possible revolutions. Right here in your pants.
Imagine a world in which the word foreplay has no meaning - ‘fore what, exactly, babe? - and porn has incredibly varied sexual scripts besides penis-in-vagina intercourse, and our most common word for internal sexual anatomy is a word meaning ‘place of power’ or ‘gates of glory’ or ‘that which grasps’ or ‘miraculous voluptuousness’ or some such thing, rather than a word whose root means ‘sheath for a sword’.
A world in which heterosexual women statistically describe ‘good sex’ as an experience of pleasure and turn-on and orgasm, rather than describing sex that isn’t too memorably painful.
A world in which the language of ‘losing one’s virginity’ has finally given way to the language of “sexual debuts’ with all of its suggestion of confidence and choice, and the metric that defines what first sex is, as Jessica Valenti suggested long ago, is about a partner giving you an orgasm for the first time - or simply about you’ve decided that you have now had sex according to your own definitions.
A world where no one thinks the presence or condition of anybody’s hymen means anything, because, as it happens, it actually really fucking doesn’t.
Imagine a world with state-funded sex ed that not only includes in-depth discussions of comparative methods of freely-available birth control for people of all genders AND some compassionate framing around abortion - but also includes frank discussions of pleasure for everyone.
Imagine!
I think it would help us out - the majority of humans on earth who have vulvas - simply to make clear to everyone that bodies with vulvas do not get turned on in the same way as bodies with penises.
Our arc of arousal is substantially different. And there isn’t a damn thing wrong with that.
For example:
The vast majority of bodies with vulvas do not come from penetration alone. Certainly not the way most of us have learned to do it from watching porn (which is largely, again, made by and for for men, and is a particularly powerful cock-centric tool of education that forms long-lasting expectations and habits.) That sequence - brief foreplay followed by hard fucking - works great in the linear boner-stimulation-ejaculation arc most penis-bodies are accustomed to, and have limited themselves to.
But that is not how most of us with vulvas do the thing. It simply isn’t how we’re built.
And it’s not pathological. It’s not a problem to be solved or something broken that needs fixing.
It’s completely normal.
And yet women frequently show up in my practice convinced they’re somehow broken because they aren’t having vaginal orgasms on cue.
What IS pathological is the ease with which we pathologize the female sexual body for doing what it naturally does. We fail to recognize our epic capacity for earth-shaking pleasure because we are working with a script that doesn’t suit us - and then buying into the gaslighting that would have us believe that it’s all our fault for not coming the “right” way. If you think I’m exaggerating, I strongly recommend reading some Freud, and then observing the sheer scope of his impact upon nearly every area of discourse about human identity and health. Even if feminists have been laughing his theories out the door since the sixties, his imprint is undeniable - and very, very mainstream.
We, folks with vulvas, have internalized this crap, and as a result we do not know our own superpowers.
The sexual script we are all handed upon coming of age is absurd, sad, and unbelievably damaging. Absurd because it has no bearing on the reality of our truly amazing evolutionary potential for pleasure and connection and variety and power. And sad because, despite the damage it does, we keep doing it anyways.
If the people we’re sleeping with lack curiosity about this, that is reason enough to stop sleeping with them. And the fact that we do this shit to ourselves is reason enough to take a LONG pause and consider why we keep ourselves in this particular corner.
Dig it: Our sex is FOR US.
We owe no one our sexual servitude. Those days are gone and they are never coming back.
You are free.
Free to learn your body’s desires & pleasures. To advocate for them. To be brave and ask for what you truly want. And to seek out partners who are interested in you as you are, not you playing some character they would prefer. You get to choose a partner who is nothing short of genuinely awestruck by your body.
Your yes and your no have meaning and power in this world, and all the more so when you explore how your yes lives in your body over time.
What does it feel like to want? To demand? To receive?
What does your yes feel like to you?
If our pleasure is our truest compass - and I believe with my whole heart that it is - then it’s our great work of reclaiming it that restores our sovereignty, our dignity, and our power from within.
So I put it to you:
If you’re ready to discover who you are and what you’re made of, and what you’re meant for:
Wait for penetration until you’re really, really ready.
#sexedforgrownasspeople #therevolutionwilltakeplaceinyourpants #radicalpleasure #powerofthepussy #feministsexed #newparadigm #pleasureispolitical #bikinikill #embodywork