when agony killed the ecstasy–mini 1000 - 03

You know what happens to children if major developmental stages get blocked or interrupted? They don’t learn that thing well or ever. For example, if a child is not held or given affection they may grow up to have attachment issues or difficulty navigating social encounters. If they aren’t interacted with verbally, their speech and cognitive abilities may be delayed or permanently stunted.

So what happens when a child’s hand is figuratively or literally slapped every time they try to explore their sexual selves? What happens if the words dirty, naughty and sinful are repeated about their genitalia or breasts or anuses? What happens if sexual urges are made taboo and painted as disgusting? Well, look around you. We are a nation of sexually repressed, sexually deviant and sexually maladjusted humans.

Religion is fucking hateful. Some of you might say, C’mon, Epiphenita, this isn’t just religion’s fault. Really? How about the generations of religious doctrine that have cemented themselves into our culture’s structure about virginity? How about all the modern ways religion hijacks a woman’s right to control her body? The anti-trans, anti-LGBTQIA legislation that we see today? Moral judgments that dehumanized Black Lives were pounded into minds of stupid (and not-so-stupid) people openly from the pulpit for centuries. Hard-wired into most of our psyches are knee-jerk responses to the immutability of gender and sexual orientation. We are damaged by generational ignorance cloaked in religious dogma.

I am damaged. The neural pathways to pleasure were roadblocked/choked off by righteousness. Attempts at self-discovery were slapped and scolded into atrophy. Exploration in early relationships were taboo or awash in so much shame that any pleasure was poisoned by regret and fear.

One of my many memories about how I should see myself, my body and the mysterious “down there,” was from a church lesson. An old Sunday School teacher offered us a stick of gum and when we accepted it, she first unwrapped the gum and chewed it, substituting the new gum for a chewed up wad. Which, of course, was a not-at-all-veiled lesson about our purity. If we fooled around, we would be offering our future husbands a used piece of gum instead of a fresh, unbroken hymen. Let me count all the ways that that is a clusterfuck…

Another trip down Shitty Self-Worth Lane was when the bishop (lay minister) asked me in a private interview if I was “morally clean.” I was 13 and clueless. I didn’t know what that meant so, naturally, he began to list all the ways one became “unclean.” I was mortified. Worse than that, I began to scour my innocent little head for any infraction I had committed when I was younger. Perhaps as a little kid I had accidentally befouled my modesty and touched myself while taking a bath. I spent years sewing extra layers onto the hair shirt gifted to me by puritanical teachings, in the name of atonement.

Don’t get me wrong, long before we became Mormons, the taboo about not touching (or acknowledging) “down there” was clearly communicated. And it was rooted in cultural morality, a direct offshoot of religion. Mormonism just codified the fucking thing in my life.

Among the deeply fucked up ideas here was that all this was wrong and carnal UNTIL you got married (to a man, of course). In one “I do” moment that carefully crafted, meticulously riveted modesty belt was to be shucked and sex was suddenly okay. Not just okay, sex was necessary and righteous (for procreation, of course).

The upshot of it all was that even a married woman didn’t need to explore her sexual pleasure because A.) women weren’t sexual and B.) the man would know what to do and/or C.) the missionary position would be sufficient. Godknows you couldn’t tell your husband what to do to give you pleasure because you didn’t know yourself...unless you did, in which case you would implicate yourself as less than virginal before marriage. This is a formula for lifelong frustration.

I remember the first time I felt sexual arousal. I was probably 12 or 13, reading a “dirty” book at the home of one of the couples I babysat for. The pulsing sensation in my crotch was unexpected and frightening. More frightening because the shame was threaded with pleasure. (That’s a whole lifetime of therapy right there.) I squeezed my legs together, not because it might feel good but because I needed to kill the sensation. I never touched myself. I never got close enough to anything to even enjoy pressure on my genitalia. It was forbidden.

If it hadn’t been for decent pre-internet research skills, I might have entered marriage in a fog of ignorance. But I knew had to read and I learned a lot about sex and pleasure. Book learning. After a couple of years of marriage and reading Penthouse Forum, my ex gifted me with a vibrator and for the first time in my life, I finally understood what all the fuss was about. But it didn’t come easily, pun intended.

“Getting there” required an enormous effort to silence the self-righteous voices of authority in my head. The static was loud and interruptive. The moral judgments deafening. The resulting failures were damning and damming. I began to think of myself as Broken. Unfixable. Damaged goods. (Basically the same adjectives I was told would apply to a non-virgin before marriage.) This, of course, did not help. I also wondered if I had a physical condition that hobbled me. While pleasure short of orgasm was plentiful, it was also frustrating. To complicate things, I was gifted with a strong and thrumming sex drive. It all seemed a terrible cosmic joke at my expense.

Over the past few years I was introduced to/discovered two things. One was The Vulva Gallery. (Eternal thanks to my youngest for this recommendation.) What a treasure. Seriously. Pages and pages of unique, gorgeous vulvas. As a young woman, I could see pictures of dicks without much trouble. They were everywhere. But an image of women’s genitalia? Non-existent outside of the few over-shaved and mostly homogeneous vulvas belonging to thin white women in pornography. But here was a rainbow of shapes and sizes. Here were prominent inner or outer labia, frilled or smooth. Clits of every size and shape. Some barely peeking out from the clitorial hood, some out and proud. Fuschia pink and deep brown and every shade in between. Vulvas covered in hair, vulvas sporting a thin line only. How wonderful. How comforting.

The second thing is this site. OMGYes (such a great name) is basically a how-to for women’s pleasure. It is mind-blowing to me. It is what I might have discovered had those purity manacles not been slapped on me so young.

I don’t know if I can undo the damage. I hope so. I really hope so.