So hungry have we been for permission to be wild and free after the shaming and miserable confines of conditioning around our sexuality, that a new industry of ‘sex-positive’ gatherings, festivals and workshops is booming… a plethora of options available to those seeking a ‘conscious’ path to move beyond shame and embrace their desires. And quite rightly so. To be brazen in our claiming of pleasure as a birthright, to enjoy the freedom to follow what feels right to us – rather than the society around us, to taste the sweet honey of polyamory and multiple partners and fucking our way out of shame…
Don’t get me wrong. I think all this is awesome. And I am really curious what would happen if we paused for a moment to see what is the driving force behind all our pleasure and connection seeking… and whether our strategies for coping with shame are really serving us?
I wonder if on our quest for transcending shame, our unconscious goal is often to reduce sex to a meaningless interaction – a very pleasurable and win-win one – but something we feel like we can wrap our heads around and have power over rather than the other way around. We allow ourselves to forget that we are toying with the most powerful force in the universe, the very spearhead of life’s creative expression. But our pesky hearts often have other ideas and sometimes wake up and remind us of sex’s ability to strip us bare, to poke at the deepest, squishiest and tenderest parts of us.
What is it we are really looking for through our erotic pursuits? What if underneath the flirtations and fumbling foreplay and pleasure-seeking lies something entirely different? To be transported back and enveloped into the loving safety of the womb? To be vulnerable and messy and crack open and be met in our most seemingly unlovable places? I wonder how much we are compensating and actually just want to be loved…
// I realise I say ‘we’ and that my ramblings wont speak to everyone and are geared towards people in ‘sex-positive’ scenes and communities. And beyond this, that hiding behind the ‘we’ is actually an ‘I’ that feels rather shy at being exposed //