I don’t do Valentine’s sex. I don’t do birthday sex. Sometimes I don’t even do anniversary sex.
I don’t give my body as a gift. I don’t give my body as consolation. I don’t give my body as apology. I don’t give my body as “thank you”. I don’t give my body as “leave me alone”. I don’t give my body as “you’ve waited long enough”.
I don’t give my body under pressure. I don’t give my body for someone else’s pleasure alone. I don’t give my body to get permission for the trip I want to go on, the job I want to take, the friend I want to see. I don’t use my body to bargain. I have. Too many times. I won’t do it anymore.
I don’t have sex when I feel it’s expected of me. I don’t have sex when it’s needed too much or too urgently. I don’t give my body as a marital duty. I don’t give my body to prove my love and devotion. I don’t give my body to prove I care about my partner’s feelings.
Wow, lady, you sound like a lot of fun. Maybe you need to get laid.
I feel like I need to say:
Hey, I’m not the bitter bitch.
Hey, I’m not the bad wife, the withholding punisher, the selfish man eater.
Hey, I’m not the dried-up waif, the husk of a woman, brittle on the inside.
I have sex when I feel desire and want to share it as a way to connect with my partner. Only then. I have sex how I want it and when I want it. My partner is happy to meet me in that space.
This is where I am. This is me on my journey of healing from sexual abuse, reclaiming my independent sexuality, learning to be present in my body, becoming comfortable with the vulnerability of intimacy, and feeling safe witnessing and embodying intense sexual energy.
You don’t need to be healing from sexual abuse to feel this way. To some extent, we’ve all been exposed to a harmful culture around our sexuality and have healing and individuation work to do. Certified sex therapist Chelsea Wakefield writes in her book In Search of Aphrodite: Women, Archetypes, and Sex Therapy: “It could be said that every woman raised in this culture has some degree of sexual trauma, because we internalize such toxic messages about what sex is and what it means, along with the shaming and constricting scripts regarding who, when, where, how, and why we are to have sex” On top of that, we’ve been “socialized in a world that links sexuality with domination and eroticizes violence”.
…..
“Is the sex still good after three years of dating?” a fringe friend once asked me in college in the brazen ways these conversations come up.
“Yeah, it is,” I said without much thought. “Wow. I’m impressed,” she responded.
That interaction still haunts me. “Is the sex still good?”
At times even within an unhealthy, toxic relationship, I craved connection, and I craved pleasure. I still experienced orgasms. Did that mean it was good? Isn’t that what every woman wants–the elusive orgasm? Sometimes we were happy, and when he pushed me too far, he said “sorry” and begged for my forgiveness. And I thought this was just what it was like to be in a sexual relationship. I thought my boyfriend being pushy about sex until I gave in was normal. You know, men and their needs, men and their one-track minds, men and their fantasies. I thought it was normal that there would be things I didn’t want to do but that I needed to do in order to be a giving, considerate partner.
Besides, when I finally gave in to doing something sexually that I had been resisting, for a short amount of time, I gained the power. I got a free pass. I got freedom. I bought myself peace. I bought myself time until the next time he insisted on touching me. I bought myself time with my friends or a night out at a party. I had done the thing that proved I was loyal. I had convincingly expressed my attraction to him, and he would lay off on the jealousy and accusations for awhile.
Sex was my only power in the relationship. He didn’t trust my words, he didn’t honor my feelings, he didn’t respect my values. But sex? If I put on a good performance, he believed it. There was so much anger in my submission. Men are pitiful. They think they’re so tough, but they become desperate and weak at the sight of ass and titties. It’s too damn easy. All you have to do is say the right words and make the right sounds, and when they finish, they go limp and fall asleep like a milk-drunk puppy.
He hurt me, and I resisted the best way I knew how.
Sex was my power. At the same time, sex was my abuse. I was in control until I wasn’t in control. I was in control in the framework that he built, in the cage where he kept me. I tried to leave the relationship multiple times over the years, only to find myself in the middle of a suicide crisis, in a hostage situation without my keys and phone, or pinned under the heavy weight of his body on the bed.
Each time I had sex with the person who treated me this way, I felt a chink chiseled from my soul. To give my body to someone who didn’t respect my mind and my heart caused deep, lasting damage. But not having someone respect my mind and heart wasn’t anything new, so surrendering my body came next.
How many little girls have had their ideas dismissed, their dissenting opinions invalidated, their concerns labeled as “too sensitive”? I did when I was growing up, so when my boyfriend said I was making too big of a deal out of something or just being too sensitive, it didn’t raise a red flag. The men who loved me and raised me and protected me did that, too. Disrespect didn’t seem incompatible with love.
While the gatekeepers of our budding sexuality guard the purity of our bodies, they tear down our confidence and self-respect, they teach us to go quiet with our thoughts, and they cause us to doubt our feelings and intuition. They don’t know that they’re grooming us for the very thing they want to protect us from. My no’s were worn down. I became like the emery board scratched too many times, worn into smoothness, faded into blandness. I lost my resistance. I hardly knew what I wanted.
“Is the sex still good?”
I learned to distance myself from my body. I learned to make the right noises and moves for the whole thing to end quickly. Who I was in those moments flashes back in my memory. She’s stored in my lips and in my hips. I feel disgusted, repulsed, when I see her. Then I try to not become her captor, too. I try to tell her, It’s ok. You did the best you knew to do in that moment.
It didn’t start this way. It started with what felt like mutual respect. It started with what felt like respect of boundaries. I was a senior in high school ready to move on with my life when I lost my virginity to him. I was ready to move on to the next stage. I thought sex would help me do that. The world seemed divided between virgins and people who had experienced sex, and I wanted to be on the other side of anything uninitiated and unenlightened. I wanted to enter the adult world. I wanted to be seen.
….
The first time my now-husband kissed me, out in the open by the steps of my dorm, I felt like my ex-boyfriend was watching. I felt like my mouth wasn’t mine. I pulled back because panic hit me. I was doing something wrong, I would be in trouble, I would pay for this. I felt like my ex owned me and would reclaim what was his–all the more aggressively if he knew another man had touched me.
It had been less than six months since I had left the emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that ended in rape. My ex-boyfriend was still trying to contact me regularly. I still feared that he may show up anywhere he thought he could find me, and sometimes he did.
I had received almost no counseling–the sessions I did attend unfortunately did me more harm than good. “Remind me why you’re scared of your ex-boyfriend again…?” the male counselor at my college asked after I had told him my ex had raped me. I never went back.
I decided I didn’t need counseling. There was such an immense sense of relief and gratitude in being brought back to life after the abuse that the traumatic effects of what I had experienced didn’t hit me right away. I needed the joy, I needed to soak up every drop of the joy and freedom, to be reminded of the vast good in the world and to fix my eyes on that after the crushing years under his weight. I floated in the euphoria of survival.
I proceeded slowly and cautiously in dating Lloyd. No sex. I needed time. But I knew I wanted to experience emotional and physical intimacy within a safe, healthy relationship. I needed to know I could still feel desire. I needed to know it hadn’t been stolen from me. I wasn’t ready for sex, but I was ready for connection. I enjoyed being alluring, seductive, mysterious, luminous. I discovered who I was again as a sensual woman. To know that that had not been taken from me was a gift in that time.
But deep down I worried that sex made people out of control. That had been my experience. Sex could take what appeared to be reasonable men and turn them into rabid, unpredictable creatures. I didn’t want to see what this nice guy I was dating looked like when he went somewhere else, out of his mind and into his body. Would he get drunk on the power of that moment? Would he begin to need it like an addiction? Once he has felt himself moving my body, would he feel like he could move other parts of me, too–move my will, my values, my future? Where else would he try to insert himself in the private realms of my life? What would he think he had claim to?
It wasn’t just his sexual power I was afraid of; it was mine, too. Would I activate this dangerous force in him that he had never felt before? Would I be his undoing, would I drive him crazy? Years later I realized that I worried that sex turned me into a seductress, an enchantress. As if I were casting a spell over him and rendering him senseless. Maybe that’s why he married me, I worried. I had him under my sex spell, in my web of passion. I got him to marry me before it wore off. Does he regret it now? Does he regret it now that the spell has broken?
And somehow, it was his weakness that I was afraid of, as well. I didn’t want to see what he looked like in the moment of complete surrender. I would rather see him strong, self-contained, separate. Would he become the satiated lump of a sleeping body beside me while I lay awake feeling empty? Would he disappear into himself? Would we walk into our own private rooms within ourselves and close the doors? Lights out.
To my delight and relief, I found that when we did eventually have sex, I enjoyed being a sexual woman again. He did not become someone else, and neither did I. Within a healthy relationship, with a partner who respected my boundaries, sex felt safe. I thought I was in the clear, past my previous trauma.
…..
We got married just over a year after we started dating. In the first couple years of marriage, things became more complicated. All of a sudden sexual boundaries blurred, and dynamics became strained. After the initial love rush of our relationship settled in, I started to feel less comfortable being sexually vulnerable and found myself being triggered by past abuse. Things that I once felt enthusiastic about now made me nervous and anxious.
I was contending with the question, “What does it mean to be a good wife?“ In my more cynical moments, it was a question of “What do I owe him sexually? If I don’t give this to him, what will happen? Will he be driven to affairs with other women? Will he start to resent me? Will we lose our connection? Will we become just like roommates?” In other moments, it was more a question of “How do I care for my own needs and be responsive to and considerate of my partner’s needs?”
I started to wonder, If you have complete trust in a person and their intentions, is it really that big of a deal to have sex when you don’t completely feel like it?
Should I just do this for him–is it really that hard for me to just go along with it? We’re not doing anything we haven’t done before. I love him, and he loves me. I know he doesn’t want to hurt me.
It was a big deal. The times we had sex when I wasn’t into it left me feeling icky and back in an unsafe place. Having emotionally unsafe sex started to make me lose trust in him. Then I started wanting to avoid sex altogether. It seemed like the less sex I wanted, the more he asked for it, and sex started to feel like the pesky thing I knew I would have to face at the end of the day. I started to feel like I was surely saying “no” too many times, that he would worry that I didn’t love him, wasn’t attracted to him anymore. And truthfully, the more he wanted sex, the less attraction I felt.
One day I began to release the fear that I was being selfish or doing our marriage harm. “Listen,” I told him. “I’m protecting our marriage by not having sex when I don’t want to. There have been too many times in my past when I have said ‘yes’ to sex but didn’t feel ‘yes’. It created a lot of resentment, power issues, and manipulation. This is not what I want sex to turn into for us. This is not what I want our relationship to become. I don’t want the good blended in with more ambivalence.”
Sex is a part of honoring myself and my body. Any unkindness I do to myself, like having sex when I’m not enthusiastic about it or when it makes me feel bad in any way, is an unkindness to my partner and to our relationship. Taking care of yourself is not selfish. Sometimes it is the greatest kindness you can do for those you love and for the world.
….
“Do you think it’s ok to have your own sexuality separate from your partner?” my therapist asked me this fall.
“Umm…what does that even mean?” I wondered. Does it mean we sleep with other people? Is she talking about masturbation? Is it not feeling guilty if I find another person attractive?
First I was nervous. It felt dangerous. Would this get me in trouble? Is this ok for a Christian? Is this ok for a mother? Would I bring shame on my family? What if this ends with my discovering that I don’t need a man? What if I fall in love with someone else?
Slow down, sister. All we’re talking about here is your own sexuality.
Then I paused for a moment and smiled at the idea because I liked the sound of it: My own sexuality. My sexuality belongs to me. My sexuality is a creative, empowering energy. My sexuality is part of who I am, not just something I have to give. My sexuality doesn’t belong to my husband. I can have a sense of myself as a sexual being that is separate from another person. I can reclaim my sexuality as part of my own wholeness.
It felt daring to say: My sexuality doesn’t belong to my husband. It felt like breaking a vow. It felt like raising a dam between myself and the flooding force of sexual culture and patriarchal Christianity. It surprised me that these felt like new freedoms because I’m a feminist. And, yet, I thought in that moment, “What is my sexuality without a man, without a man’s gaze? If I just think about this feminine energy separate from a man, what would that feel like?”
My body is mine…My body is mine, and my pleasure is mine.
My desire is not an answer to his desire. My desire is its own strong voice, its own declaration, its own question.
Before, if I experienced sexual desire and didn’t offer it to my husband, it felt like a waste. It felt like something I withheld. It felt like a secret, a secret I shouldn’t keep to myself. I felt guilty. Quick, jump on this chance while you feel it! Now I feel like it’s never wasted. Sometimes I enjoy experiencing the desire and keeping it to myself. If I notice and appreciate the desire for its own life-affirming value, it is only adding to my empowering energy and will ultimately allow me to connect in a deeper way with my partner. I give myself permission to be my own lover. I give myself permission to touch myself so I can practice fully surrendering to the rapture of the moment in a way that I’m not yet ready for even my husband to see.
….
This Valentine’s Day I left the book of Rumi’s poetry open on the bed for my husband to find our favorite sensual verse of poetry that always makes us laugh:
“Someone in charge would give up all his power,
if he caught one whiff of the wine-musk
from the room where the lovers
are doing who-knows-what!”
We read it aloud and shared a rollicking laugh. My husband knew, however, that this was not an invitation to be doing who-knows-what that night. Instead, I started to tell him about this risky piece I was working on about sexuality.
“Tell me more,” he said.
I recited from memory, “I don’t do Valentine’s sex. I don’t do birthday sex. I don’t do anniversary sex… I don’t give my body as a gift. I don’t give my body as consolation. I don’t give my body as apology.”
You know, your basic pillow talk.
With his head on the pillow, he just smiled at me.
“I love your ‘no,’” he said. “I love how strong you are. I love that you’re working on your own sexuality. I love that we only have sex when you really want to. And I love just being close to you.”
And then I felt my desire flare. I needed to say those words. I didn’t know how much I needed to speak them. To have my “no” affirmed so fully took me to a new level of healing. I asked my husband if I could just put my hand on his skin. I didn’t touch him because I thought he deserved it after that generous affirmation. I didn’t touch him the way I thought I was supposed to touch a man. I didn’t touch him the way you do to purposefully arouse a man. I just looked at this person I love and touched with tenderness and curiosity. Calmly, slowly, unscripted, in a way that unfolded before me. This was not the skillful touch of a sexually initiated woman with a plan. It was just me expressing myself. I felt my desire grow. Soon I wanted to be touched, too.
And on the night with so much cultural pressure on romance that it generally makes me anxious and firmly closed-off to physical intimacy, I experienced one of the most genuine expressions of my sexuality that I ever have felt.
“There was a time when sexuality was revered as a mystery and viewed as a source of cleansing, having magical powers to heal,” Wakefield writes. “Sexuality could elevate consciousness, even enlighten. Sexual union with a temple priestess was seen as having the power to recivilize, reinstate humanity, heal the wounds of war, and make men whole.”
That night I became the priestess. I healed myself. And in healing myself, I healed my vision of my husband, too, restored him to a greater humanity. I saw him gentle, revering, loving, as vulnerable as he was strong.
I haven’t reached the end of my healing. One night didn’t make me whole. But with each piece of healing that slips into place, pulled where it naturally fits by some magnetic force, I am afforded a larger picture of the possibility of wholeness and what that will feel like.
I’m empowered by my “no”. I have to give plenty of space for my “no” in order to grow into an enthusiastic, genuine, whole-hearted YES. Each “no” helps me make my way towards my bigger, burning “yes”. This “no” is not the end of my journey. My desire is bigger than my fear. My wholeness is bigger than my wounding.
Photo credit: Josh Hailey Studios
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