Woman on Fire (6 page)

As an individual, your deepening self-awareness, self-knowledge, and confidence will give you a big sense of power. Likewise, not having these things will deplete your power or make it hard to build. You can develop more skills and knowledge through sex education. You can empower your body image and your sexual health through body knowledge, sex education, and self-love. You can develop your ability to care for yourself, your sexual and spiritual practices, and your capacity for pleasure and intimacy, which will lead to greater self-worth and happier relationships. Flirtation and seduction are ways you express power, as are your eroticism and gender expression. Your power of choice is actualized via your decision-making. Your willingness is a root of your own agency. When any of these things are deficient or out of alignment with your true desires, you will experience a loss of power or a sense of powerlessness. More acute disempowerment might come from abuse, assault, sexualization, sexual shaming, trauma or guilt, or any other way your sexual
agency feels taken away. You might also give away your own agency in the choices you make.

MY SEXUAL POWER

The preceding power list is a glimpse of what constitutes sexual power, and is by no means exhaustive. Your sexual power has many vehicles of expression and expansion. What creates power for you? When do you feel sexually powerful?

This Core Energy Model of Sexuality is another way to view the wholeness that is sexuality. Given its complexity, there is not one all-encompassing, perfect, all-knowing way of defining it. What I hope to share in this model is that sexuality is far more than sex and it is a core part of who we are that impacts us on so many levels and in so many areas of our lives. I can often hear the inner knowing in many women I speak with that there is something much greater—a bigger payoff—that working on their sexuality will mean for them. They often cannot put their finger on it, but they know that connecting more deeply to their sexuality is the key. This model is the closest way I can explain sexuality and its potential ripple effects for a powerful life.

In the next nine chapters, I share with you the Nine Elements to wake up your Erotic Energy, Personal Power, and Sexual Intelligence that have changed so many people's lives. They can do the same for you.

Whether you are in a relationship or are enjoying a solo life, you
are the architect of your experience. You are the seductress of life itself. Birthed from the core of your sexuality, your desire is the nucleus of your dreams, driven by your inner fire, and it will always guide you back to true north. So better to tap into it and begin to befriend it rather than see it as an enemy combatant, a need you will never fulfill, or an ember you can't find the oxygen to ignite. It's there, and it wants you to bring form to your dreams, motion to your sexy life, and passion to your relationships. It wants you to stop settling for less. It will light you up and guide you to live your most magnificently dynamic and powerful life—if you turn up your pilot light and let it burn. Your sexual energy is the raw fuel for your own
becoming.

Element 1:
VOICE

EXCAVATE AND REWRITE YOUR SEXUAL STORY

You have an internal and external sexual voice. Internally, you have a sexual story. It's one of the most private and precious parts of your history, and you probably do not share it with just anyone. You are careful with how you share your story, making assessments about your own safety and risks as you contemplate to whom and how you talk about it.

And that's smart. It's important not to make yourself vulnerable to the point of real harm. Your sexual story is a major undercurrent of your life. It is your intimate herstory, and holds the keys for why you do the things you do in your relationships, in sex, in creating intimacy, in loving your body, and whether you take risks or play it safe. It directs whether you speak up, use condoms, stay quiet, feel shame, go
mute, rage loud, make demands, or ask for a need at just the right pitch. Your sexual story is a part of you.

You have an internal personal risk manager in your subconscious who refers to your story—that herstory—to assess what choices you will make today based on your past experiences and the narrative you have created around them. It's prudent of your risk manager to do that. But here's the thing: some of your narrative is outdated. It doesn't represent you anymore. Some of the ways you've developed an understanding of your own sexual life are no longer serving you to be the sexual person you are becoming. And where that's true, it's time to excavate, rewrite, or let go of your stories. Even the funny ones that you can haul out at a party.

Sometimes you tell your own stories so many times they become mythologized. Sometimes you are so attached to the way things happened that you keep yourself a victim. You can't be a victim if you want to be empowered. Victimhood and empowerment are antithetical. It's time to take a hard look at the story you've been telling yourself and see if there is a more powerful one you can tell.

This is not to say you need to deny what has happened to you. In fact, as part of your own healing you may need to acknowledge your experience, say it out loud, and find peace with it. It's part of the fabric of what made you who you are, and because of that, it's important.

What I want you to know is how grateful I am that I learned what it was to have my sex and desire directed entirely by someone else, that I know what it is to feel my voice wanting to speak requests and boundaries that are stuck deep in my esophagus, suffocating my agency as they beg to be born, and that I am not now, nor was I ever, a victim. What I want you to know is that every one of those subjugating or powerless moments brought me to this place of vision, on a mission as a sexuality advocate, a fierce woman on fire who has come with this message to support you in your own sexual awakening. It was out of those moments when I couldn't
speak my truth that I birthed the woman who would. That is the story I am going to tell you. I made it through, and so can you, no matter the trauma, the exile from your own pleasure, the disconnection from your own desire or the ability to voice it, the disbelief that it can be different, or the stories that aren't the ones you want to live.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

—M
ARGARET
A
TWOOD

One of my mentors, Janene Sneider, used to say that in the gender wars, women lost their voices and men lost their ability to emote. It's a broad stroke, but it's in large part true. I know many powerful women who are not afraid to speak up for themselves at work or in life or demand justice in the world but lose their voice sexually. Otherwise powerful women will morph into nervous, coy girls in front of men (especially ones they are attracted to), not speak up during sex if they want something or if something hurts, and become afraid to assert themselves or be who they really are in sexual situations. Powerful women can become mute and submissive around potential partners. One woman wrote to me recently, “When I'm really sexually attracted to someone I lose my voice, and that surprises me.”

To be sexually empowered, the first element is your voice. You've got to find and uncage it. If you never learned to talk about sex or utter your desires, there is a voice that wants to be unlocked. There are conversations to have. If you are silent during sex and do not even allow yourself to make sounds as a free part of sexual pleasure,
you are amputating your own ecstasy. Your voice is a tool for pleasure and it enhances sex tremendously. It is an intrinsic part of your own sexual expression and power. This is the external sexual voice.

We learn to have sex silently. Don't get caught (whether you were masturbating or with someone else). Don't let them hear you. We learn to hold our breath, stifle our own voice, and then we wonder why it's hard to have an orgasm.

I spent years not knowing how to have orgasms because I lacked resources, information, and role models that could assist me to learn how. And I learned to keep a lid on it and be very quiet. I never had sex education at all until I went to college, but in my first year the Baldwins walked into the lecture hall and my world changed.

John and Janice Baldwin were legends at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I was an undergrad. They taught what was easily the most popular class on campus: SOC152. It was in Campbell Hall, and the Baldwins packed the house every quarter with roughly nine hundred students. Their classes were always brimming with those eager and nervous to learn about that hushed, undiscussed topic that impacted every one of our late-adolescent lives:
sex
.

I had never been taught to touch my own body, and I didn't know how to talk about sex. In fact, I'd been taught
not
to. I had attended three different high schools and had strategically avoided taking health class because I thought I was “healthy,” which meant I unwittingly skirted my way out of any sex education whatsoever. And even if I had gotten some sex ed, it would be unlikely it would have encouraged healthy attitudes toward sex and masturbation.

John and Janice Baldwin actually encouraged me to touch my genitals, to get to know them, and to learn how to pleasure myself. They even assigned it! Being an overachiever, I took it on, and that act of self-possession completely changed my relationship to my body, my sexuality, my pleasure, and my power. There, as a first-year
student in SOC152, a whole world began to open up for me—a world that was shut down from a young age.

I read my Masters and Johnson sexuality textbook cover to cover—I don't believe I ever did that again in my entire student career. I was hungry for the information—so many of the questions I'd had for years about my body and sex and what was normal were being answered. I finally had role models for how to talk about sex, and I began to find my voice.

The Baldwins asked us to turn in a short application if we were interested in their advanced sexuality course, SOC152B. It was a seminar open to only fifteen students. After the way SOC152 had changed my life, I was determined to be a part of it.

The summer after my freshman year I got a letter in the mail from the Baldwins inviting me to take their advanced seminar. I was out of my mind with excitement. An opportunity to sit in a small room with these two smart sex educators and discuss sexuality issues in depth? Heaven!

I was already becoming an advanced sexuality student. My passion for sexuality had been lit and I was learning to talk about it in a way not many people around me could. I was in, and though I didn't know it at the time, I had already begun to live my life's purpose. I knew I wanted to work to empower women and girls, and I just wasn't sure how. I wanted to impact people's lives, to usher them toward their own sexual self-knowledge, self-actualization, and sexual empowerment.

My personal growth from my own places of shame, confusion, and pain about sexuality led me to become more powerful—more powerful as a woman, more powerful in my relationships, more powerful as an educator, and more powerful as a sexual being. More powerful in the world.

Ultimately, I came home to myself on a deep level. Several times. Coming home is like that. We do it over and over. Sometimes we
disappear and leave something precious behind. Then something happens, something opens up, something urgent calls us back to our roots. And we go home again.

In SOC152, I got permission for the first time to enjoy and explore sex. I was finding my voice and my orgasm. First, I figured out how to have orgasms with myself. I'd never done that before, and it shifted my perspective about my sexuality, pleasure, and what my body was capable of dramatically. Next came the communication with my then boyfriend so it could happen with him. I remember the joy I felt when I first had an orgasm with him. Before him, my high school sweetheart and first true love had tried for years to help me have an orgasm, and though we were deeply in love, we were sexually ignorant, and our uneducated but passionate sex life left us both feeling frustrated and dissatisfied. I enjoyed sex then, but I knew there was more.

My own process gave me compassion for the frustration many women feel in not being able to have orgasms or figure out the complex puzzle of how their sexual bodies work. I changed my experience and changed my story. Sometimes you have to change your story first in order to change your experience. We can identify so strongly with our own stories that they keep us from moving forward.

I found my voice. Like me, many women lose it in sex. Stuck in a good-girl prison, we don't express ourselves sexually. It's not proper. Or we feel shy about it because we have had no practice speaking openly about sex without fear of experiencing shame. Or we are so confused about what we want sexually that we don't know what to ask for. So we don't. Many women follow the desires of men who are taught to lead and initiate sex, and through whose lens we experience sex via film, pornography, lawmaking, legislation, sexual research, and personal heterosexual contact. Follow someone else's desire map long enough and you won't know what yours is or that you even have one. No wonder talking about it is so hard. No
wonder so many women freeze when asked by a partner about their fantasies and desires.

As a young teen, I had premature sexual experiences and faced my budding sexuality in fear and isolation. No adult ever talked to me about sex. Not one. Zero. Radio silence. I never even heard a fear-based abstinence message about sex, much less a healthy one. I certainly had not had a conversation
with myself
about sex or what I wanted to do about it, when, or with whom, because I didn't even know there was a conversation to have. How we start with sex will impact who we will be in it.

My relationship to sex started when I was a neophyte menstruator, periods all wacky, new and unreliable. I had only “dated” a couple of boys and had no sexual experience at all. I had a new boyfriend who was two years older than me. On a snowy February afternoon, he and I were making out after school on the quilt-covered couch in my living room. Suddenly my corduroys were unzipped and in an instant I felt something completely foreign, warm, and soft between my legs. If I tried to release any words, I choked. We'd just had sex, but before I could process what had happened, it was over. I zipped up my pants and we finished our visit as if we'd simply been drinking Coke and playing Atari. And so began my relationship with sex.

The next day at school, he stopped by my locker to check in. The check-in consisted of: “Do you have any regrets?”

Again, I was unprepared. How do I answer this question? I didn't know what to feel. Regrets?
That's
the question? Not, “Tell me about that experience. Is it what you wanted? How did it feel in your body? Did it feel good? What are you feeling now?” Of course, those questions come from my mature adult voice. I wouldn't have thought
of them then any more than he would have. We had no language for talking about sex, pleasure, or desire or for understanding the grandiosity of it all.

“Regrets? No, no, of course not,” I lied. In truth, I didn't understand what was happening. I played it cool and pretended everything was okay, but it was most definitely not okay.

That's how so many of us learn to treat sex—no problem, everything's cool with me, I'm good, nothing to see here, let's just not talk about it. Somehow, in the midst of my inexperience, I knew to put on my game face so I didn't reveal the shame, fear, and confusion I felt. And I stayed silent. Many of us do, and then we might start a pattern of not talking about it at all, for years, or for most of our lives. But your voice is there inside you, and sex needs a voice.

For me, a process had begun. A coming of age. A relationship to a part of myself I didn't know was there. A way of relating to boys, and later, to men. A painful process of trying to find resources to help me deal with my terror and my silence when I had pregnancy scares on an isolated air force base at the northern tip of Maine. A compassionate process of healing from a lonely place of shame for doing something I thought I shouldn't have been doing, and for somehow forsaking myself. A disempowering entry into sexual life that would eventually lead to self-empowerment through a career choice that was birthed right there on that quilt-protected couch. In that ignorance. Sexual ground zero.