ADIDAS

(All Day I Dream About Sex)

Sex, sex, sex, sex, seeeeeexxxxxxxxx……

Girl, calm down – it’s just sex. 

And yet, it’s the hottest topic of endless songs on the radio, it’s the slick underbelly of many a romcom or romance novel, it’s a highly discussed and debated topic on the world stage – and has been for as long as we’ve been alive, sentient, and self-aware. We can’t stop thinking about it, talking about it, writing or singing about it. So why, even with its prominence in the global (sub)consciousness, is it still such a sensitive topic for so many people? Why are people not only squeamish upon discussing our reproductive organs, but also ashamed about experiencing the very feelings and desires which God bestowed upon us?

I will primarily speak about my perspective, as well as the experiences of my friends and peers on a surface level. To preface, I will delve a bit into my faith and how that is a significant factor in my experiences – or lack thereof – in this regard. My walk with Christ has been a winding, tumultuous road, for as long as I can remember. For the past few months, though, I’ve been praying regularly, started my journey to read the New Testament in a year, attending regular church services, and reading works from the old saints and mystics; I am truly changed and I’ve honestly never felt closer to God. Even so, I also have found myself…not necessarily confused, because that tends to have more of a negative connotation, but left with more questions than answers. I am someone who likes to read, to analyze, to learn; I’ve been a student my whole life, and I don’t know if this proclivity of mine is nature versus nurture. But even so, having multiple interests that I hone in on (almost obsessively) and trying to learn and apply different theories and ways of being to my life or to the world at large is – and has always been – part of who I am. 

That being said, one of my special interests is sex – and probably has been, again, for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, sex was the elusive, alluring mystery – the chest of treasure and gold hidden deep, deep inside a dark cave, completely obscured by the shadows and whatever threats laid within them. The type of teaching I received about sex was very limited, as a sort of mechanism to “protect” me from the ways of the world and how they wickedly preyed upon only the “innocent” girls like me, apparently. Sex was a way that men controlled, manipulated, used, abused, and discarded women and girls, and it was something that should be avoided at all costs. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got a little bit older and was exposed to different types of media that showed sex in a different light. I was in middle school when Pitch Perfect came out. During the iconic Riff-Off, the quietly charismatic Donald sauntered up to hypersexual, nubile Stacie and started crooning in her ear, “Sex, baby, let’s talk about you and me”...I was floored and intrigued. Even before that, right on (or off) the cusp of adolescence, I couldn’t quite figure out why, in the middle of Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, I started feeling a little funny in my stomach (yeah, let’s call it my stomach) when, after siren-esque gypsy Esmeralda claimed sanctuary to escape certain arrest, Frollo snuck up behind her and pinned her arms behind her back, pressing himself up against her and losing himself in the scent of her hair, “imagining a rope around [her] beautiful neck”. I feel no shame in saying that I wore that VCR out due to constantly rewinding that particular scene. Or when I saw Wicked live when I was eight or nine, and swore that something truly changed within me and was not the same (haha, get it?) when Fiyero and Elphaba sank to their knees and serenaded each other with “As Long As You’re Mine”...yeah, you get the picture. 

I’ve always believed that I’m a lil bit on the spectrum, at the very least, because my special interest was abundantly clear from a veeeery early age. Like I said before, it’s typical young person “logic” at its best – the more you’re made to listen to supposedly well-meaning yet insufferably over-protective adults wax poetic about how “bad” something is, the more you want – often badly – to do that very thing. 

Then I got even older, and as you age, your life and all that you believe in obviously get more complex. I was not nearly as solid in my relationship with God as I am now, but He was, I suppose, a [semi-]regular part of my life. Yet, imagine my surprise (and weirdly, an accompanying sense of betrayal) when my parents not only pushed back against any and all worldly media depictions of sex but actively attempted to dissuade me from it altogether. I must have been 15 or 16 when my parents “gifted” me a necklace with the letters “TLW” engraved on a silver plaque, an acronym for the phrase “True Love Waits”. The necklace was accompanied with a letter containing a request – wear the necklace at all times, and if I did not, the assumption would be made that I did not keep the promise to my parents of purity until marriage, a promise I was only made aware that I’d implicitly made after the fact. Again, a surprising onslaught of feelings of betrayal. Why did it feel like I was being punished for natural curiosity? About something I had yet to partake in, no less? I stopped wearing the necklace a year later. 

Then, undergrad. Being thrust from my cloistered, sheltered, religious academic and home life into modern day Sodom and Gomorrah for young, horny coeds (otherwise known as, a small liberal arts college). Suddenly, everyone was having sex…well, almost everyone. In those days, I spent hours reading the likes of Erich Fromm, Carl Jung, and Clarice Lispector among others – inside and outside of class – and was desperate to find answers to questions I have only just now been able to formulate: How do people even know when it’s the “right time” to have sex, especially if they’re not following the Christian way of doing things? Are there even “right times” to be having sex if you’re not married (seems like there must be; everyone can’t stop talking about how great it is)? What are the physical, psychological, and philosophical elements of sexual desire? What is the wordless “dance” between men and women that everyone’s always talking about, constructed of millions of unspoken gestures and glances, and how do you learn it when you haven’t been taught? And, the most asked one of all: if everyone around me is having all this sex, why am I not having any? 

Now, don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t necessarily for lack of opportunity. I can only half-LARP as a femcel, because the number of men (people in general, actually) who’ve wanted to experience me on an intimate level isn’t exactly small; this was no exception during college. But every single time I came close to finally coming over that last remaining threshold of virginity loss, panic ensued and I retreated. More questions followed: why am I not feeling how I thought I would in this moment? Why do I feel somewhat ashamed and guilty – even somewhat scared – for wanting to do this, even when I fought during the entirety of my teenage years to not have this perception of sex? 

I didn’t find the answers to any of these questions, at least not directly. And a half-decade and three “relationships” later, the “obsession” with sex (if I can even call it that?) has both waned and expanded. The pulsing fire of ovulation has become a nearly untameable beast as I rapidly approach my mid-20s, and the media these days are filled to the brim with “sexual expression”, all claiming to be the “right” way. Sex impossible to both escape and ignore. There are seemingly a million different ways to exist as a (XX chromosome/adult human female) woman these days, and the component of sexuality is obviously intertwined with every depiction. There are the (self-described?) “trad wives”, whose husbands are, strangely, nonexistent despite their name. They express their sexuality (when they’re not expressing feigned shame about it) through “poasts” about yearning to get pregnant and have babies by the Omniscient Alpha Male Husband. Then you have the “feminists” – specifically, the “libfems” – who seemingly derive a sense of power from having casual sex with a wide variety of “bodies”, even up to the hundreds and thousands. And it doesn’t matter if you humiliate yourself by filming it for all the world to see, or if you break down in tears afterwards – it’s sexy! It’s empowering! 

Both of those perspectives and interpretations of female sexuality are extreme, and there are many others that exist either somewhere in the middle or on the outskirts of the two entirely. Even so, I think we can all agree on the fact that there are things that are equal parts revered and reviled as much as female sexuality – regardless of how, when, and why it is expressed. 

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

-Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

My virginity is still in tact (I know for a fact that some of y’all have been wondering), and this world will only continue to get more confusing as far as this topic is concerned. As a result, some of the questions I’ve asked myself and others about sex simply continue to go unanswered (I guess a lot of it is just a “when/if you know, you know” type of thing…haha). But here’s what I can say for certain: 

• I think when it comes to balance, in terms of sexuality, we’ve lost the plot. We should always have standards and practice discernment for who gets access to our temples, for it really is my belief that they are given to us by God, but I also believe that sex positivity (to a degree) is a good thing, actually! Not to be some degenerate, body- and soul-eating succubus, but to know and love our bodies fully for ourselves and for no one else’s approval or satisfaction. 

• Churches do women a GRAVE disservice when they tell women to guiltily suppress their (God-given!) sexual urges their entire lives yet go on to pull a complete 180 when these same women get married, and all of a sudden they’re told that sex is just amaaazing and you should be giving it to your husband when he wants it (note the deliberate language here). The human mind rarely works well in absolutes, and it certainly doesn’t work at all in the midst of guilt or shame. That type of mentality set so many of us back in life, both in matters of the faith and matters of the body. There’s a reason why women with religious trauma or who have experienced repressive teachings about sex through religion experience among the highest rates of vaginismus. 

• For so long, I viewed the strength of my libido and the height of my innate passion as liabilities – namely because they often exist inside of me without a “proper” outlet, to be plain – now, though, I have gratitude for those things. I fully accept Christ’s presence and love, and part of His love is choosing to live day to day without shame. I know with substantial certainty – or at least, I try to make myself know – that my questions will one day be answered, my curiosity will one day be fully sated, and I will share in the God-given gift of divine intimacy with someone I love. 

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