Real Sex Ed

This week’s readings had the common theme of sexuality. Not sexual orientation, but sexuality. I found this week’s assignments to be enjoyable and inspirational. Sexual identity of any kind is what largely identifies women as individual persons. For this very reason women are able to be oppressed by a patriarchy that devalues female sexual freedom.

Anastasia Higginbotham describes her long process of coming to terms with her sexuality in her essay Chicks Goin’ At It. She tells of her own experience with oppressive patriarchy when she shares her encounter of being “courted” by her teacher. Higginbotham writes, “Being near him made my stomach churn, my throat ache, my eyes blur. Though I wish it had been a temporary virus, I realize now it was probably terror, and at the time it seemed quite romantic. Another of my faculty suitors had a nasty habit of pressing his bulging manhood against my back as I sat in his class furiously taking notes to prove I was smart. They were charmers, all right” (12). Society teaches young girls that there worth as a woman is defined by how sexually desirable they are to men. Once again, Higginbotham attests to this fact when she declares, “I thought I was god’s gift to men because I could play glam, sweetheart and harlot all in one shot” (12). She continues to speak of the distaste she felt towards her own sexuality. It was an onion skin she had to continuously pull away, eyes tearing, until she finally reached the hard, shiny center. She hits the nail on the head when she writes, “[The problem] was simply that I was born a girl in a society that devalues women and girls” (13). When Higginbotham finally matures sexually and is able to find her happy medium between promiscuity and the virginal ideal projected upon women, she faces a new challenge, defining her sexuality once she realizes she is not heterosexual. Although she has no qualms with loving women, she struggles with the idea that she is “sleeping with her politics” when she writes, “… I worried (and still do occasionally) that I was taking on lesbianism out of loyalty to a cause, fearful that my capacity to sleep with the bad guys was bad for PR” (16). Higginbotham makes a valid point: is being a bi-lesbian feminist just molding into the stereotype? Does the fact that she can’t commit to being an “all-out-lesbian” make her indecisive? Does it show deep-rooted, unconscious homophobia? Although she expresses these fears, she realizes, “If being called a lesbian is an insult to me, then I am an insult to lesbians. Any feminist who fears being called lesbian, or who fears association with a movement demanding civil rights for gays, lesbians and bisexuals, is not worthy of being called feminist” (17).

In the essay Lusting for Freedom, Rebecca Walker describes a very different experience of coming to terms with her own sexuality. Although, like Higginbotham, she learns through experience, Walker is able to find more comfort in her sexual exploration. She writes, “I was able to carry that pleasure and confidence [that came from sex] into my everyday life working at the hair salon, flirting with boys. I never felt any great loss of innocence, only great rushes of the kind of power that comes with self-knowledge and shared intimacy” (19). Her words become the credo of any sexually active young woman. She speaks out against legislation specifically created for the sole purpose of oppressing women’s sexuality. “The way we experience, speak about and envision sex and sexuality can either kill us or help us to know and protect ourselves better.… Unfortunately, moral codes and legal demarcations complicate rather than regulate desire. And judgments like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ only build barriers between people and encourage shame within individual” (19). These laws are instruments used intersectionally to slowly strip women of their right to sexual freedom, a right that men have always had. Judgment and guilt are used to create a bird cage, as it is elegantly described by Marilyn Frye in her essay Oppression, that are made up of seemingly harmless wires, but together are able to enslave women to be the domesticated pets of patriarchy. Walker reiterates this sentiment when she writes, “It is obvious that the suppression of sexual agency and exploration, from within or from without, is often used as a method of social control and domination” (22-23).

You’re Not the Type by Laurel Gilbert also describes one young woman’s exploration of her own sexual identity. Gilbert learns that she slowly comes to terms with the fact that she is a lesbian in the midst of being a teenage mother. Because of society’s stigma toward homosexual relationships (what she would have had with her high school crush, Kim), Gilbert inadvertently became vulnerable to another social stigma. She writes “[Kim and I] both eventually slept with the same high-school senior and told ourselves and each other that he was the only link between us, that if we could (and no one in southern Utah had words for what we might have been, then), we would erase his presence between us and love only each other” (75). She, like Higginbotham and Walker, expresses the same disdain for a patriarchy that oppress women when she writes, “I felt cheated by the culture of our fathers, the culture that promised to take care of us, keep us safe, somehow, from the other men who might ‘ruin’ us. Instead, that culture ruined our sense of our selves” (76). Here again, she is defined by men; she is the protected and the threatened but only in relation to men. Being a woman, loving a woman, bearing a child that will grow up to be a woman, Gilbert has little room in her life for close relationships with men, and yet that is how society defines her. She continues this point further: “I’ve since found… words that classify difference in a patriarchal world, define me and other women in terms of relationships—or lack of them— with men” (79). Single mothers had a man but lost them, whereas lesbians can’t get a man and feminists hate them. Despite whether any of these accusations hold true, Gilbert, like so many others has struggled because of our male-centric society. It is our right as women to love how we wish. Whether that means loving other women, loving our bodies and our own sensuality, or loving surpassing expectations of our own capabilities; how we proceed should not be dictated to us. We don’t need men to protect us from lust or other indecencies we would fall prey to if it weren’t for them. As Rebecca Walkers declares, “We need ‘protection’ only from poverty and violence” (24). We’ve got rest covered.

These essays make wonderful connections to our CAP project because they are real life narratives of female sexuality. They are not overtly sexualized for thrill factor, nor are they censored. They are true tales of female sexuality that reflects the lives of real women. I think that there should be more testimonials of this kind available to women who aren’t taking a women’s studies class. I wish celebrities, especially those who are marketed toward young women, were more truthful about these issues. Until then, it is our duty to have open and honest conversations about our perceptions and experiences of sexuality with our friends and family so stereotypes and misconceptions no longer perpetuate our society.

~Katie Frye