The Greatest Sexual Lie Ever Told
I am continually amazed at the negativity people carry about their sexuality and at how much they will disconnect and defect from this part of themselves, as if it is outside of us.
Your sexuality is the core of who you are. It is the place where you came from, when there was a conception, a vibrant meeting of two cells that wanted to bloom you. There is no way that humble and profound beginning could not be an intrinsic part of who you are.
Yet we have been sold a pack of cultural lies about who we are. We have been shamed and told we are “above” this life force, this core power, that we must transcend it. We have been told not to listen to it, for it is shameful, dirty or ungodly. We have been told it is a problem connected to everything in life we must avoid, rather than being told that it is the lifeblood of all our life’s creation. We have been told that there is a “right” way to express it and that to deviate from that way is to go against life and love itself.
These lies about sexuality are the greatest lies ever told. They have destroyed us from the inside, kept us in agony over our desire and worthiness, kept us in pain and alienated from our intrinsic desire for pleasure and joy. We have left our sexuality cold in the face of these lies, like a bastard child we could not accept. We have abandoned this core part of ourselves as if we could ever live apart from it as a whole, fulfilled human being. We have created so much pain for young people whose sexuality bubbles to the surface in feeling, fantasy, discovery and newness as we shamed them and told them that to be “good” was to disown it.
The lies have to stop. We cannot control or choose the sexuality of others. To do so is to commit a deep violence against another human being, whether they are a confused teenager, or a woman enjoying a party, a man who wants to explore tenderness and sexiness with other men, or a woman who wants to control her reproductive destiny apart from her pursuit of pleasure and joy.
We attempt these controls to the point where we create internal divisions inside human beings that are outwardly expressed through violence and strained relationships, repression that gurgles up and outward in unhealthy expressions of sexuality. We justify our actions because deep down, we feel how hurtful this divide is. We use our gods and our beliefs to tell others what to do and who to be, rather than focusing on living our own lives based on the values we have for ourselves.
What lies are you telling yourself right now about sexuality? What lies are you teaching your children and your loved ones? What guilts and shamings are you displacing onto others who simply want to discover who they really are? What boxes are you fitting yourself into? Who is in those boxes with you? Who are you colluding with?
What would it look like to break the bonds to your family or history or religion that tell you you cannot be who you really are? What would it mean to demand true sexual freedom?
We cannot afford to continue to use a person’s gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, attraction, desire, body, fantasy, reproduction or agency against them as a means of control. We must actually stand for the freedom we all want to be wholly who we are as sexual beings – who came from sexual energy and have it inside, to be different, to express authentically, to create the fullest vision of our lives possible. That is the true power of sexual energy.
