Who benefits when women are encouraged to understand their sexual boundaries as especially open to revision?Women have spent a great deal of histo
Who benefits when women are encouraged to understand their sexual boundaries as especially open to revision?
Women have spent a great deal of history being told that their own sexual judgment was not quite sufficient. Too hard. Too complicated to understand.
Their families selected husbands. Marriage limited sexual refusal. Economic dependence constrained choices. Women who rejected men could be characterized as prudish, selfish, frigid, unnatural, too particular, or destined to regret it.
Even some supposedly liberating sexual cultures created new expectations that women should become more sexually available in order to demonstrate that they were liberated.
Different language. Familiar pressure.
Sexual freedom includes the freedom to remain exactly as sexually selective, particular, unchanging, and unavailable as you choose.
Power
Control over the terms of change is where power enters the picture.
Here is something about power we do not talk about enough:
Power can become remarkably durable when the rules beneath everyone else keep moving.
If you are always adjusting to the newest rule, somebody else gets to keep writing the rules.
Definitions change. Expectations shift. Yesterday’s boundary becomes today’s question. What was once considered a perfectly ordinary personal decision suddenly requires an explanation.
And ordinary people spend enormous amounts of energy trying to keep up.
This is how abusive partners exhaust the person they are in relationship with. Shifting and chaos.
Women know something about this.
There has never been just one permanent instruction for how women are supposed to handle sexuality.
The instructions change.
The expectation that women listen to the instructions does not.
“Keep changing. You are doing wrong. Keep changing”
Be sexually innocent.
But don’t be sexually inexperienced.
Don’t desire too much.
But don’t be inhibited.
Save yourself.
But loosen up.
Be selective.
But not too selective.
Don’t be easy.
Don’t be prudish.
Know what you want.
But examine what you want.
Have standards.
But make sure your standards don’t exclude someone who believes they deserve consideration.
Be independent.
But don’t become so independent that you stop accommodating other people’s needs.
Look closely.
Those instructions contradict one another.
Yet they can still perform the same function:
keeping women’s choices available for outside review.
Making sure that she understands that she is never “right.”
A boundary does not become suspicious because you’ve had it for twenty years.
A preference does not become morally inferior because somebody wishes you would reconsider it.
And a woman’s refusal does not acquire an expiration date because society developed newer language for questioning it.
Micro management
We should pay attention whenever one direction is called “growth,” “openness,” “exploration,” or “evolution” while remaining where you are requires explanation.
Because then we have to ask:
Are all choices actually being respected?
There is a difference between:
“You are free to change.”
and
“A good, enlightened, compassionate person should be willing to change.”
One protects autonomy.
The other can quietly establish a preferred destination.
And here is the principle I keep coming back to:
If only your openness is celebrated, but your permanence requires explanation, you haven’t been offered complete freedom. You’ve been given a preferred direction.
Women’s autonomy includes movement.
It also includes stillness.
“I thought about it. I listened. I examined myself. I understand your argument. My answer is still no.”
Both require the same thing. The decision remains hers.
Some of the younger women are giving me so much hope. Here’s another account that I truly enjoy.
@bunmisupremeI don’t feel liberated by any of these movements♬ original sound – ITS BUNMI BITCH (Boo-mi)