Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Tangent - Some Women

Some women go their entire lives shrouded in an invisible layer of apprehension about their sexuality. Maybe something happened to them as children; not something bad like molestation, but simply a lack of information. Maybe their families, especially their mothers, were self-conscious and embarrassed by sex and lust and need and everything that goes along with that. Maybe when their daughters saw something or read something that they didn't understand there was no one to talk about it with. And maybe all the information available from other sources, like neighbor kids or television, was slanted in the direction of "sex is bad", especially when women were involved.

Maybe the message at home was that only bad girls had sex before they were married, and that desiring someone that you didn't love made you bad, and that acting on that desire made you a slut. Maybe all traces of sexuality and desirability were treated like bad things that should be hidden, because after all, you wouldn't want to corrupt the children. Maybe, because of a religious belief, it was taken as a given that sex, both wanting it and having it, was the source of all that was wrong in the world, and that the only thing worse than fornicating with someone was to pleasure oneself, and that the only thing worse than that was to talk about it.

Maybe they never thought they lived up to the physical ideal of what a desirable woman should look like, the desirable woman that they were taught at home was bad but that they were told everywhere else was the standard of beauty. Maybe they felt like they were being bad for wanting to be desirable, even before they knew that "desirable" was what they wanted.

Maybe they were taught that only one kind of race or religion or gender was the "proper" one to desire, and that any other feeling or need was wrong. Maybe they were taught that any deviation from the "proper" path made them wicked, or useless, or damned.

And then maybe they grew up, went out into the world, and tried to manage as best they could. Maybe they married the first man they ever kissed and stayed together forever. Maybe they were raped by the first man they ever kissed and had no one to turn to, and let that event effect every other intimate encounter for the rest of their lives. Maybe they rebelled against what they had been taught and became promiscuous and wanton and reckless, exposing themselves needlessly to disease and unplanned pregnancy and heartache, because the path they needed to follow was so far removed from the one they knew that they had to trek through a wilderness to reach it.

Maybe they were so insecure about how they looked or acted or felt while aroused that they could never surrender to the pleasure of a complete sexual experience. An experience with no fear, with total acceptance for themselves and from their partner, and no shame in how they felt or in how they acted upon those feelings.
And people wonder why erotic fiction is so very, very popular right now.

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