Day 24
30 day/30 minute writing practice
Our Bodies, Our Desires: Part Two
Body and sex positive/conscious friends of mine often talk about how to bring messages, teachings, guidance to the youth of today and yes adults too! So many of us have not had pleasurable initiations to our bodies, to sexual longings and desires. So many of us have had violent sexual experiences acted upon our bodies, psyches, hearts as children and into our adult years, trauma buried, normalized, internalized and then in many cases worked out onto the bodies/psyches/hearts of other children, youth, adults.
Many of us move into trauma responses when children/youth ask questions around sex. We either shut down, get angry, soothe over tell them they are too young to be studying sex. And when we do find them exploring on pornography sites or re enacting, non consensually sexual innuendos or actions with children, youth, adults we blame, shame, beat, excommunicate…
Children and youth can find sex on the net in a matter of seconds. What kind of sex… most likely violent (normalized), male dominant, women subservient, dehumanizing and sadistic. So many youth do not have any other sexual template then the pornography that is all of the above. Imagine this a template for many youths first exposure to sex. Long deep sigh.
In the Earth Children’s series, (Clan of the Cave Bear, Valley of the Horses, the Mammoth Hunters, The Plains of Passage, Shelters of Stone….) set in prehistoric times before everything got fucked up by male dominant religious capitalist systems, Jean Auel exposes her readers to first homo sapiens and their sacred rituals around sex: pleasurable, exquisite and delightful, a natural part of homo sapiens development. Youth men and women are initiated into adulthood through the Rites of Pleasure, where a sacred loving and caring guide takes individuals through their first experience of sex. One of the main characters, Jondalor is given his rites of pleasure by designated sacred giving woman and later he becomes a guide to the world of pleasure.
I am reminded as I write this of a recent Italian film maya and I watched that also provided a young man with an older (30’s) man who became his first lover and it was beautiful and healthy and fair and equitable and sensual and loving and mutually desirable and consensual.
How do we advocate for this, how do we teach this, how do we value and envision and reimagine and provide opportunities for young people to be exposed to the kind of love that is real with real bodies, with mutual consent, with yes and no sanctified and embodied; so that our bodies, minds and hearts can speak and sing the language of pleasure, shameless and free.