From slut shaming (Partying late with those guys?! Told ya, she’s a little slut.) to rape culture (Remember “Boys will be boys”?) to victim blaming (“With that skimpy skirt of hers, wasn’t she totally asking for it”?) to FGM (“When you are cut you will not be a slut”), women sexuality has been repressed, controlled and attributed a nonexistent status despite its palpable presence through ages. Mainstream cultural perceptions about female libido (Which are outrageous!), my guy friends arguing over whether girls masturbate, my mother’s constant preaching on being a “good girl” propelled me to write this article and I will take liberty to speak for my Sex.
Yes, I’m also endowed with the heirloom of my fair progenitors, the elastic organ small enough to hold a tampon in place and large enough to let a child pass through- the wonderful vagina. The little hole with its marveling physiognomy and the composite structure. A majestic passageway to the life producing incredible pouch. The penile rival encompassing of a zillion supersensitive nerve endings which reverberate with pleasure when rubbed (Yes! I mean the magical clitoris.)
Now the menacing questions, Do women go down on all fours (or some other artistic, athletic posture!) and explore the heretic zones with all those fantastic knights looking on? Or to put it straight, do we masturbate? Yes, we do. Do we let our hair down and gorge on the “sinful content”? Do we watch porn? Yes, we do (If not regularly we all have, at some time in our lives). Do we, with our ingenuous faces, also get horny? Yes, we do. We have sexual urges, insatiable ones, as strong as our male counterparts’, if not stronger. We don’t have sex only to procreate and help cells pass on their legacy to the future generations (Sorry Freud! We are not as passive as you assumed.). We have it because we like to. Contrary to the popular beliefs, we don’t need emotional connection or established intimacy to be turned on (Remember Meredith Chivers’ famous study?). And unlike the girl in Fifty shades of Grey, we don’t have deep seated neurotic desires to submit to strong and dominant men in our lives and beds.
Talking about their sexuality unabashedly or with any ounce of pride might still be a taboo with majority of women but emerging science, never ending debates and ascending tide of common sense seems to be changing perceptions. So, all the guilt- ridden ladies out there, we are not whores for wanting pleasure or exercising our faculties (physical or mental) to achieve the same. And think, why would we born with such unappeasable appetites if they were unnatural? Then why all this uproar, moralizing and policing? Because female sexuality is, as I read somewhere, “so powerful that it’s intimidating- why else would there be such a war on it?”
