Women’s sexuality has been misappropriated for centuries.
We barely have a concept of our sexuality beyond how it pleases men. It doesn’t help that for centuries our pleasure has not mattered or that men believed (and many still do) that sex with women is their entitlement.
The result is that many women are just not that fussed about sex. The comment I hear most often from women about sex is, “Who cares? Like seriously, I'm over it, I'm done with it.”
It breaks my heart.
Women say NO to sex that feels like a violation. To sex that is boring and uses our bodies to give other people pleasure with no consideration of ours. Women say NO to sex that is taken from them, that depletes them, that leaves them feeling used, soiled, dirty or ashamed.
Sadly, far too many women have not had good sexual experiences. Far, far too many of us have been sexually harassed, abused or assaulted in some way. The statistics* suggest that it is pretty much a routine rite of passage for women in the modern, supposedly civilised, Western world.
The extremely high numbers of women reporting abuse disabuse the notion that it is a few bad eggs amongst men who are causing the problems.
It is not only a few men.
Men are deeply conditioned to pursue, hunt and claim women in the patriarchal model of sex that we are all raised with. Rape cases rarely ever result in a conviction because of the deep underlying societal belief that it is a woman’s place to give men sex and that it is the male role to hunt it and take it.
“Warrior sex” is a scourge of our times and is the result of deep wounding in the male sexual psyche.
Very few men I have met actually want to take anything from women. Sadly they are playing out a role to fit in as a man in a society that has a deeply warped idea of what masculinity is and it discomforts them deeply.
Men crave gentleness, physical intimacy, love and connection just as much as, if not more than, women do. But cruelly, to look like a man in our society you have to wear a mask and play a role that often pushes away what you most desire. They pretend to enjoy a toxic version of sexuality that ultimately harms them as much as the women they encounter.
This is why my heart breaks.
I see it happening all around me. There is so much rightful female rage against men. Which then fuels male rage against women. Which drives us all further apart, both sides using sex as a weapon of war rather than as a tool of love.
Pre-patriarchal societies used ritual, ceremonies and highly initiated temple priestesses to “take the war out of man”. In the competent hands of women who knew their sexuality to be goddess-given and deeply divine, men were shown how to make love rather than make war with their bodies.
Men were taken to the temples by their mothers, wives, aunties and grandmothers, to learn the art of lovemaking because when a man knows how to make love to a woman, it is the greatest gift he can give her. It is a gift that binds couples, families and societies.
In the ITV drama “Victoria”, Prince Albert, soon to be married to the young Victoria, visited a German brothel to learn the art of love making from the brothel’s madam. He cared to please the powerful woman he was about to marry and did not want to enter his marriage in an ignorant state that might cause harm.
What a pity that as a society we no longer have socially approved ways for young men to learn how to make love to a woman.
What a pity we still believe that if a woman is sexually powerful, confident and knowing that she must be a harlot or a whore.
What a pity that there are few safe ways for women to share their sexual knowledge with men who desperately need to be guided out of ignorance.
In our modern world where do men get initiated into the art of lovemaking?
Where do they go to have the war taken out of them? To be initiated from “Warrior” to “Lover” energy?
Where do men now go to learn the exquisite art of harnessing their sexual energy, and committing their entire bodies to awaken the divine in their female lovers?
Without temple priestesses to initiate our men, what are we to do? Continue to suffer the “Warrior sex” that we hate and which causes generation upon generation of trauma?
Or could we instead learn how to initiate our men into their “Lover” energy?
Once you understand some simple core principles you can teach him how to put down his sword and take off his mask.
Once you connect with the divine within yourself, you are then equipped to initiate him into his divine self.
I know it's a bit of an ask. I know that we've been highly conditioned to be passive in our sexuality. I know that we've been conditioned to sit and wait for a man to know which magic buttons to touch before we even know them ourselves.
But that's just our conditioning. Conditioning can be reconditioned! We don’t have to be passive, we don’t have to wait for men to somehow learn a different way.
We can learn new ways, new beliefs and new practices and with deep love and deep compassion for how trapped men are we can create a space in which they feel comfortable enough to remove the mask and discover their beautiful, authentic, sexual selves.
* A UN report in March 2021 reported that 97% of women, aged 18-24, in the UK had experienced some level of unwanted sexual behaviour from men.
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Photo byRhett Wesley onUnsplash