Photo: Melinda Alexander (@mumumansion)/Instagram

How to Throw a Party for Your Pussy

I want to talk about sex. Though my friends will tell you I always want to talk about sex.

Anyway, my freshman year in college, I went to a fraternity party and met many people, both male and female, who would go on to become my dear friends. I also met a really good-looking guy who caught my attention; he was shy and yet, once engaged, very direct and smart. I ended up upstairs with him in his loft bed, peeling out of my Norma Kamali snap-front dress with that satisfying pop pop pop, trying not to hit my head on the ceiling as I did so. We laughed a lot, and we had fun. Truth be told, I can’t remember exactly what we did sexually – if we went “all the way” or not – but I am positive we had a lot of fun.

The next night, I went back to that same fraternity with my dorm hallmates and circulated around the party. I saw my previous night’s lover across the room, waggled my fingers hello, gave a big smile and kept on with whatever conversation I was having. A half hour or so later he pulled on my arm and said, “C’mere.” He took me away from the group, walking me down a hallway. He turned to me and said, “Are you mad at me? What’s wrong?”

Wrong? Nothing. But he was genuinely confused.

That’s because we haven’t finished the revolution, ladies. I wasn’t following the script: The script that said I was supposed to now cling to him, circle around him, try to make him my boyfriend.

Because that’s the only reason women have sex, right? To seal a relationship with a man?

No. No, it’s not.

But it is the only kind of sex that women are allowed to have.

This implied and yet omnipresent social code pisses me off. We have so bastardized our ideas of what the sexual transaction is that we have unintentionally agreed to the dampening of our sexuality, which in a very real way dampens the fire within us.

We teach our daughters, when they are at that tender and so-powerful moment of coming into their maturing bodies and personalities, that they can’t fully inhabit themselves: They have to be careful. That their sexuality is precious, must be protected, that someone can “take it from you” and “use it to hurt you.”

And so we curl it up inside us and carefully pay attention, and we do the awful social dance of give and take: You give it to him, he takes it from you.

Where is our desire in all of this?

Remember 50 Shades of Gray? When that book blew up, we had to endure endless mansplaining about why that book was so popular with women: Dave Barry even wrote in Time magazine that women “didn’t just read it; they responded to it by developing erotic feelings — feelings so powerful that in some cases they wanted to have sex with their own husbands.”

[pause]

After shooting him thought arrows of hate for the predictable trope of women never wanting to have sex with their husbands, I rolled my eyes. That horribly written book was a bestseller because WOMEN WERE ALLOWED TO READ IT. In public! Without being shamed!

A few months later, I tried to solicit essays from the large pool of fantastic women writers I know about their sexual fantasies. I wanted to show that what women like and want from sex is not gray — it is every color, every imaginable thing. I wanted to publish those essays so women everywhere could read it the way they’d read 50 Shades of Gray and learn and discover more about what entices them, what captures their imagination and brings them alive.

But no one agreed to write for it. Not one of the women writers I approached. Too risky. Too naked. Not safe.

Our sexuality is not our bodies, though every beer commercial would have you believe otherwise. Our sexuality is our being.

I did get a heartbreakingly beautiful unsolicited submission from the girlfriend of a transsexual woman, writing about the painful dissonance her partner still felt sexually because she was pre-transition, still in possession of a penis she didn’t want. The piece was also incredibly erotic as she described the slow, sensual way she helped her lover leave her reviled body behind and how the two of them found each other somewhere in the ether, connected physically, yes, but by so much more that.

That’s the experience of my sexuality I desire and I enjoy. That’s what I want us all to have. I don’t want fear and social code to keep us from fully inhabiting ourselves or enjoying sex’s amazing gifts that go well beyond the orgasm.

That’s what I loved so much about that lover’s story. It makes patently clear a point that is very hard to remember in our sex-soaked, intimacy-starved culture: Our sexuality is not our bodies, though every beer commercial would have you believe otherwise. Our sexuality is our being.

I learned this from my mother. She was an incest survivor, someone on whom sex had been used as a weapon. And although she carried so much damage, she was also vibrantly alive. She was hostess extraordinaire, the person everyone wanted to be around at a party; her presence was so intensely alive it was almost a force field. My mother was a dynamic conversationalist, flirting, cajoling, teasing, flattering, playing, embracing people with her words, ideas and passions. I always understood her energy as being innately tied to her sexuality; one could not be separated from the other.

I want all women to be able to do this: to live all sides of our being and not wall them off. I want us to make room for abandon, for breaking some rules, for trusting and getting over our bodies. I often say that my body is overweight when I’m dressed and perfect while naked in a room with my boyfriend. Sex taught me that.

Sex is far more than a tightly controlled social transaction. And your sexuality is meant for far more than finding a mate and having babies.

After college and well into my adult life, I continued to be a rule flouter. And not just sexually. But I first learned that I was a rule flouter through the ways in which I gave myself permission to do what I wanted sexually. I know and understand that that and other aspects of my sexuality — my openness, my sense of adventure, my trusting nature — all came from living in and learning that side of myself.

What is the pulse deep inside you that is for you? Find it. Claim it. Have a party for it. Reconsider your sex life. How much more connected could you be? How much more open? And reconsider your life: How much more hunger could you have? How much more desire?

Let yourself know the answer to those things. The wisdom is partly within your body, and yes, within that very powerful pussy.

(Photo: Melinda Alexander (@mumumansion)/Instagram)

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