Tag Archives: embodiment

On Death, Gender, and the Orgasm as a Performance of Femininity

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I am now 44 years old. I am a mother and a head of household. I am past the age where people used to be generally considered “over the hill.” From a transition standpoint, this is significant for me personally because there’s only one generation remaining between me and mortality: the generation of my mother and her siblings. My next big generational shift will be to matriarch/crone. My mother’s will be to death.

My mother’s death isn’t imminent, but it is inevitable, and even though only in her early 60’s she has had a fair share of medical scares. Cancer. Stroke. Falls with broken bones. A choking incident that brought her dangerously close to asphyxiating if it hadn’t been for my stepfather finding and resuscitating her. All these events remind me of her mortality by keeping it in the peripheral vision of my mind’s eye. Watching. Waiting for each of us to advance another rung on the generational ladder.

On Day of the Dead, I set up an altar to the matriarchs in my family; I put my attention on my maternal great-grandmother, my maternal grandmother, and my mother. I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy the last four years talking about these women and the not-insignificant effects they had not only on me but each another. As an ancestral line, I can clearly see the traits handed down to me courtesy of them, some of which include strength, anxiety, determination, a high need for control, frugality, tenacity, and a deep sense of familial duty/sacrifice/obligation.

The altar is still intact and I continue to feel their presence, hear their voices. Even more strongly now than before—I think, because I’m calling out for their support and wisdom. Because I can feel myself beginning to prepare energetically and psychically for the death of my mother. Even if it’s only theoretical at this stage, as a planner who is finely attuned to transitions, doorways, and liminal spaces it’s a transformation that’s especially potent for me during this season of darkening.

What I’m feeling into right now is how the process of her dying will change the dynamic of our relatedness; how she will take on more child-like qualities and I will assume the more parental role. I see the possibility for me to support her more in the coming years; to take the skills I’ve learned through parenting Avery and re-parenting myself, and leveraging those to hold a more compassionate, patient space for her. After all, she has a high need for control just like I do and as she loses control over more of her self, I anticipate the need for a lot of patience on my end.

As if sitting with the impending death of my mother weren’t intense enough, it’s also bringing up older, deeper body memories for me. Because this isn’t the first time she and I have danced with power dynamics and leaned on one another for support.

Embodying the Masculine as a Girl Child

When I was 5 years old, my mother and I (and my 3-year-old sister) were in a pretty shitty situation. My sexually, physically, and emotionally abusive biological father had just left us for the last time because my mother stood up to him, and told him to get out and never come back. An act of strength and courage I have since thanked her for many times. An act that while freeing us from him, also left us in a position of needing to depend on one another more directly, more concretely.

Like many women who had been trapped by domestic abuse, she was literally at rock bottom; overwhelmed, exhausted, deeply wounded, and also needing to care for two small children. Even with the local support of her parents and brothers, it was still really hard at home. She needed me to be her “big girl,” to be strong and help her with baby Theresa when she got overwhelmed. She needed me to carry a lot more emotional and psychic weight than was appropriate given my age and equally vulnerable position.

I was naturally precocious in the ways of care-taking and helping; I was a sensitive, empathetic, deeply-feeling child from a long line of caretakers and emotional baggage handlers. And so, when my mother needed someone to be strong for her, someone she could count on to always be there and love her, I became a source of support, reliability, and certainty for her in a world that seemed bent on hurting her. She could talk to me, share her feelings, and cry about how much it hurt. She could count on me to be relatively independent, capable, and self reliant.

I believe that I embodied the masculine to protect her from falling deeper into dysfunction, to protect my primary source of security, safety, and love. And yet none of it could be acknowledged as such; it was an unconscious resonance between us. She wasn’t consciously awake enough to recognize what was happening and I was a little girl desperate to ensure Mommy wouldn’t abandon or stop loving me.

And so, in a sense, we became psychically married, she and I. Co-dependent. Enmeshed. Tied together because of the wounds the patriarchy and my father inflicted, and we jointly had to recover from. As a result, I have always felt responsible for her well-being; responsible to be a sturdy framework against which she could drape her tired, bruised limbs and cry.

Being Told to Put on the Girl Suit

At the same time, despite how masculine and grown-up I felt in the relationship with my mother, I was obviously in the body of a young girl. I knew I was a girl and I’ve never felt any confusion or disgust about that fact; it’s just that I’ve never been comfortable or confident in my ability to perform femininity. The world was telling me to put on the pink suit and its myriad complicated accouterments, but at home I was clearly wearing something that approximated the blue suit, at least in function. Thus began my internal dissonance around gender and society’s expectations in regard to it.

As a cis-female born in 1971 America and raised by a traditionally-valued family, I’ve been handed a lot of narrowly-defined programming about how I’m supposed to look, what I’m allowed to do, and how I should conduct myself. As an androgynous, 6-foot-tall, anxious, suspicious woman with an advanced case of “Resting Bitch Face,” I’ve had a damn hard time manifesting those programs in ways that convince people.

Aside from the fact I live in a rape culture as a second-class citizen—which means I’ve been raped, get paid less than my male co-workers, and still have a hard time getting people to take me seriously—living in a female body has been pretty cool. I actually like being a woman, especially now that I’m in my 40’s. What I find so distasteful is trying to embody and perform femininity. Lace. Mini skirts. High heels. Makeup. Push-up bras. Smooth legs. An hourglass hip-to-waist ratio. An inviting smile. A willingness to be told what to think.

I worked hard to adopt the mannerisms and affectations of Society’s Desirable Feminine, or at least someone whose appearance shouted I’M READY TO GET FUCKED, which is essentially the same thing. These attributes and the dogged pursuit of them are what I hate about the mainstream definition of culturally-acceptable femininity. Because every single one of them is about oppression. Getting smaller. More contained. More malleable. Hobbled. Agreeable. Compliant. Tortured. Objectified.

What about the Christina suit? It’s contains an entire spectrum of colors and would allow me fluid movement. Does anyone want to see me wearing it? No?

Finding my Authentic Orgasmic Rhythm

One of the things they don’t tell you straight-away about performing femininity is the fact it’s arbitrary, often conflicting, and designed to keep you off balance. Embarrassed. Competitive. Ashamed. Inadequate. Because horizontal violence and oppression. For example, let’s look at the female orgasm.

Over the last few months I’ve discovered that my body doesn’t want to climax every time Brendan and I have sex. She actually prefers to do so every 2-3 times; a rhythm that allows Her to be literally fed by both our combined sexual energy and His semen. She wants to hold that energy inside her and use it to fuel all manner of erotic undertakings like blogging, cooking, and remembering how amazing it is to live inside this beautiful body. To fuel the remembering that Her pleasure is worth building and worth waiting for.

I’m standing in the shower one morning, seeing the truth of this newly-discovered rhythm, and wondering why it feels so revolutionary. I asked my body, “Body, why do you feel so amazed, relieved, and empowered to have discovered this?” The answer came, “Because I’ve been expected to have an orgasm every time we have sex.” Oh. Why? Because that’s a crucial part of performing femininity. According to popular media/porn, we all “know” when a woman has an orgasm because she’s loud and makes a big deal out of it, yelling and flailing around because the pleasure is just so epic.

The pleasure that the man is generating with his amazing, big, fat cock. OBVIOUSLY. So, once she has been thoroughly pleasured, that’s his signal—the sign that he’s “done a good job,” that he’s “earned” his release. That he can now cum, secure in the fact his penis is desirable, he’s an amazing lover, and he is worthy of further love and attention. His ego is intact. For the time being.

As the woman, what if I can’t or don’t want to have an orgasm? Well, now I’m coming dangerously close to bruising, crushing, or invalidating his ego and suffering the consequences. Because there will certainly be consequences and I’m the one who gets to clean up the emotional/psychological fallout. In this construct, preserving/protecting the male ego is MY responsibility and ensuring that ego feels secure all hinges on my ability to perform a convincing orgasm. Every time. Or else.

That’s a lot of pressure and my body has decades of it tamped down inside. Like I said, I’ve never been confident in my ability to perform femininity convincingly enough to ensure my safety.

Fortunately for me, I now have a partner whose aware of all that programming; both sides of it. He knows exactly what it’s like to have a fragile masculine ego that depends on near-constant feminine reassurance for its survival. And because he’s also committed to deep, bilateral healing in our relationship, he has given me a lot of space, time, and reassurance to find my rhythm. He doesn’t ask me to perform feminine sexuality for him unless I choose to do so. He wants to see pure, unadulterated, androgynous Christina and to discover what kind of sex SHE wants. What a fucking relief!

Loving Her as Loving Myself

So, my mother is going to die and with her will go the physical connection that my masculine has to her. How do I want to experience her in the time we have left? Over the years I have shared with her some of my childhood experience; how I’ve felt wounded by her inadequacies, how I’ve felt oppressed by and responsible for her pain, how it felt to be her daughter. Those were anxious, gut-churning encounters for me because holding up a mirror so my mother can see how she inadvertently wounded me took a lot of courage for me to do and for her to look.

It also hurt her. Because she knows she wasn’t the mother we both needed her to be. She couldn’t be. This world ensured she was broken by the time I came into her life. And I no longer feel the need to punish her for that, to try and get her to take responsibility for all the ways she let me down. For the ways she leaned on, squished, and controlled me. If she had the skill to be more respectful, validating, and supportive she would have been. I believe that with all that I am.

I’m a mother; I know how hard it is. And because we both know, it feels like I can now begin the final stages of individuating from her and claim my full identity. Every time I share space with her, feel her love for me, and feel my love for her, I can also step away from her with compassion, with respect. I can complete the process that allows me to transition past, through and with her.

Your Arousal is Not My Fault

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Brendan and I have spent a lot of time the past couple months speaking frankly, authentically, and sometimes awkwardly about our sex life and identities. About how patriarchy and our society have patterned/programmed us into doing some seriously unconscious shit because of wounding and adaptations. We’ve been using Holistic Peer Counseling tools to uncover and feel into how the wounds and adaptations we developed as children have been/are running the sex show.

There are many powerful and frankly amazing stories I could tell about our journey; however, most of them have primarily to do with embodied erotic experiences and so they don’t translate very well to writing. They’re hard to describe because Mind doesn’t grok what Body is doing, doesn’t even speak the same language, and so there are myriad translation errors.

One thing that IS coming out very clearly relates to Brendan tapping into and feeling his internalized misogyny, and how that has played out in our relationship. How entitlement to attention and sex have damaged my ability to trust him and his intentions. That I have felt his entitlement is not new within the context of my experiencing men; what’s wholly new is the fact he not only acknowledges it, but openly discusses it with me.

His courageous internal work is affording me a greater understanding of my own experience. Over and over, things he says to me are having the effect of me feeling less “crazy,” less like I’ve been making this shit up my whole life. Because—suddenly and for the very first time—a MAN is saying them to me. He is corroborating and reinforcing my body’s belief around what I’ve always known to be true about patriarchy and entitlement, but was never brave enough to speak out loud.

This morning, over text message, we had what I felt was an incredibly powerful exchange that illustrates our growing understanding. I started my moon phase this morning, and so for the past few days I haven’t wanted sex, which is edgy for both of us in our own ways. The conversation was generally about what happens when our sexual appetites aren’t in sync and specifically about my internalized guilt in that regard.

Christina: It sucks that I “make it harder for you” (when you’re aroused and I’m not available); I don’t want to do that. I just wanna be alive and around you, without forcing your body into an erotic tailspin. I mean, it’s awesome being in the yummy with you and I love our chemistry; what we create is far and beyond what I ever thought possible. And there’s this aspect of being female-bodied that I don’t love: the potent effect I have on you (and men in general) just by walking around.

Brendan: I think a large portion of the effect erotically-present women have on men (if any) has more to do with the pain that men feel when their disowned/wounded erotic feminine arises. I’m SUPPOSED to feel this painful longing.

C: I’m hearing you say that part of the longing/difficulty for you/men that arises around sexually-potent women is that you feel the loss of your disowned erotic or feminine attributes/energy. Yes? Like you resonate with mine and can feel that deep sadness/rage at what you gave up. And so—the mainstream story goes—you can then punish or take from me to quench that sadness.

B: Yes. You become an external focal point; a potent one. If I’m fully present, I feel a draw. You don’t cause that. I experience it. It’s not your willful doing. The longing in me is for what I/we gave up to survive, what was taken violently, and what we’re expected to keep hidden out of shame. Plus all the stringent limitations around conditioned masculinity, and how it’s supposed to look. It’s like my body is screaming I WANNA DO THAT TOO! And we fear being attacked or banished. At least I do.

So, the punishment is projection. Men can’t fully own their _____. So they attack it when they see it in others (women, gay people, transgendered individuals, etc.). As I see it, projection as punishment generally includes these elements:*

  • Disturbance
  • Disapproval (what we see is not consistent with our own self image in some core way)
  • Segregation/banishment
  • Expulsion (because it’s easier to demonize in absentia)
  • Demonization
  • Persecution
  • Annihilation

(*We can’t recall exactly where Brendan heard this and Google didn’t help; perhaps in relation to the witch hunts? Or perhaps it’s a part of oppression theory? If anyone could help find a source that would be much appreciated.)

C: OH RIGHT! I don’t cause your arousal or your difficulty in finding balance with it. It isn’t willful on my part or “my fault” that you want to have sex. You know, I’ve lived so long being told/feeling like masculine arousal was somehow my doing (because vagina is a force of nature duh) when actually it’s post hoc ergo propter hoc! I’m just amazed and so fucking grateful you can describe and understand this. Also—that projection list neatly describes what I imagine St. Augustine was feeling when he decided to canonize the property/demon status of women.

B: We’ve worked this process together and you’ve felt me blaming you. Now I’m emerging through to the other side, where we can feel the tension and also sit in the Balance of Attention with it. Lovingly.

And so, here we sit: loving one another, seeing one another, and holding space for ancestral sexual wounds. I can’t even describe to you how amazing this feels and how grateful I am to finally be here. Thank you, Brendan, for being the man who finally made space for Me.

Listening to My Body’s Songs

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The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who—still whole in spirit—will accept no compromises or excuses. And it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth. –Alice Miller

A few nights ago, Brendan and I were discussing how I feel whenever I’m given the chance to discuss my childhood wounding with my mother. As you might imagine, my feelings are complex and it hasn’t always been easy for me to distinguish which of those feelings are for ME and which are for HER. Which ones are about how I’m currently feeling and which are about how she will feel in the future as a reaction to what I might say or do. Because, as a co-dependent child, it was often important to my safety and well-being that I consider her feelings before mine. In the hierarchy of emotions, hers were more important because she controlled the resources.

Let me be clear: I say this not to blame her personally. If I’m leveling any blame at all, it’s at the violent patriarchal structure that created her and all the women who came before her. The oppressed and ultimately sadistic women who contributed to who she was as a woman and a parent.

Historically, one of the most prominent feelings I’ve had when thinking about my childhood and my mother’s role in it, is anxiety. Because I’m not sure if what I remember experiencing was true. I’m not confident in my ability to justify my position or powerfully back up what I’m saying. And if I can’t prove it, then I shouldn’t even say it in the first place, according to my patterns and programming.

Because I was thoroughly indoctrinated to not believe Me. My body was appropriated for the release and satisfaction of adult males. My mind was appropriated by the public schools that told me I should only learn what I’m instructed to, not what I’m driven to discover on my own. My spirit was appropriated by the church that told me, as a human—and especially as a female—I was born evil and could only find redemption by surrendering to male authority.

So how, exactly, was I going to prove my experience when I had difficulty believing it myself? How was I going to offer The Truth of my life when presented with the chance to plead my case to my mother? How could I stand up for my self and its experience when she couldn’t do that for her self? When she crumbled in front of me because my accusatory words hurt her? When she was herself a victim of the very same structures as I?

You can hear all the judgmental language in this, right? Proof. Truth. Blame. These are all concepts of oppression and minimization, meant to annihilate the inconvenience of personal experience and expression.

And then, on a Tuesday evening in February, my body finally Got It, to use that famous Landmark phrase. This isn’t about me telling The Truth. It’s about me telling My Truth.

I don’t have to *prove* anything. I’m not standing before God, offering up my life as evidence of my worthiness or rightness or blamelessness. This isn’t about me earning my way into Heaven or Harvard by getting all the right answers. This isn’t about me having to convince my mother that my feelings do, in fact, count just as much as hers.

It’s about me sharing my experience as I remember it. I’m telling my stories. I’m not telling The Truth because I can’t. I don’t have that omniscient perspective and never will.

This may seem straightforward and obvious to you, but it has never been obvious to me. Not ever. So, to suddenly find myself free of the expectation that everything I say must be the provable, incontrovertible truth was awesome in the literal sense of the word.

Excited and a little dizzy, I shared my new-found insight with Brendan, and he offered me a wonderful perspective about what a person’s stories are. He said “Those stories are your body’s songs, Baby; they are the sound of Life as it’s filtered through you. Your songs are beautiful and are worth hearing. As are everyone’s.”

As a person whose body has been locked down, tight, and armored for as long as I can remember, what he said struck me as rather revolutionary. Because I’ve spent my life ignoring my body, its signals, and its needs—either because someone else found them inconvenient or because I did. Until I gave birth to Avery and his head stretched me wide open, destroying everything I thought I knew about embodiment, I hadn’t been IN my body at all. Everything below-the-neck was something my brain found inconvenient or ugly, something that occasionally hijacked my experience because it needed immediate care or consideration.

I had internalized the message that my body was for other people, not for me; so why would I listen to what it was telling me if I couldn’t, wouldn’t, or didn’t want to listen anyway?

The more time I spent really listening to my body, decoding her strange yet beautiful language and signals, the more clearly I could hear her stories. After a while, I couldn’t hold those stories in any longer. Because as my bodily intuition developed, my voice also became more capable, stronger, more clear. My voice wanted to speak, to sing. I began to believe that my story was worth telling, that I had something worth sharing with other people who maybe had experienced some of the things I had.

These stories are my experience; my unique experience of the world as it’s played through me. They are my songs, my perspectives, my feelings. Which is why I started the blog: because my voice was ready to tell the stories that my body was sharing with me.

This started for me as a way to heal my wounds; to free myself from the oppressive ideology I was handed; to become a sovereign woman in a world that hates women, and seeks to keep them hobbled and in service. It has since evolved into an exercise in community healing. A community built of women who want to know both themselves and one another, intimately. Deeply. All the way down to the core. All the way back to the 4-year-olds. Because for many women living in this world, that’s when we were first wounded. Maybe even earlier.

The world we live in forces us to wound one another to survive. I want us to heal those wounds by loving one another and listening to the stories. By singing our songs.

I’m not trying to tell The Truth because that would be impossible. I’m telling My Truth because that’s the only perspective I have. I believe that by doing this I’m setting an example for other women. I believe that by sharing my experience I’m essentially giving you permission to know your body, to tell your stories, to sing your songs. You have a wonderfully beautiful body that’s dying to be heard. It’s time to let her sing.

Dedicated to Louise, Theresa, Gladys, Phyllis, Stella, Helen, Vicki, Lynnette, and Michelle.

Devoted to Intimate Parenting

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Even though sexism has always decreed that boy children have more status than girls, status and even the rewards of privilege are not the same as being loved. –The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

In·ti·ma·cy (noun):  (1) the state of being intimate. (2) a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group. (3) a close association with or detailed knowledge or deep understanding of a place, subject, period of history, etc. (4) an act or expression serving as a token of familiarity, affection, or the like. (5) sexual intercourse.

Our world, and particularly its children, suffers from a chronic and debilitating lack of intimacy. Now, before you get triggered and label my intentions criminal, I don’t mean intimacy as its usually marketed and understood by western culture; that is, conflated with sexual intercourse. I mean the vulnerable space that exists between two people who are bonded through choice and intention. The example I’m going to use throughout this post is #2 from the above definition: a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group. So, when I use the term intimate parenting, you will come to know what I mean even as you may struggle with your reaction to what I’m describing.

What has been all but impossible to change is widespread cultural patriarchal propaganda. Yet we begin to protect the emotional well-being of boys and of all males when we call this propaganda by its true name, when we acknowledge that patriarchal culture requires that boys deny, suppress, and if all goes well, shut down their emotional awareness and their capacity to feel. –The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

My husband, Brendan, and I parent our 4-1/2-year-old son, Avery, intimately. For us this means we choose to feel into the edgy, energetically-charged moments that occur as a natural course of interacting with a young child, and then model what healthy intimacy looks and feels like. Intimacy that isn’t conditional and doesn’t cross personal boundaries. Intimacy that isn’t filtered through the lens of patriarchy, which equates to disembodiment and disowning his feelings.

I would categorize our approach as a subset of peaceful or gentle parenting, which one source via Google search defines as: regulating our own emotions when dealing with our children and responding to problems with compassion. Based on that, I would define intimate parenting as:

Choosing to regulate my emotions when dealing with my son and responding to problems that arise with compassion instead of fear, shame, or punishment, always remembering that he is a human being worthy of love and respect.

During a late-night discussion with Brendan last week, I asked him what intimate parenting meant to him. His response was so good that I ended up recording the remainder of our conversation, and I’m going to include a condensed version of the portion that’s directly applicable to this topic since it beautifully explains our motivations and the container we seek to create as parents:

Parenting is a calling. Since what you’re called to is greater than you, you’re also called to develop skills you don’t have, to develop ways of being you don’t possess or yet have facility with. The process of becoming a better parent isn’t (or shouldn’t be) goal oriented; it’s context oriented and it’s ongoing. You won’t complete this task in an executive fashion and then stop because the experience goes beyond its immediate object (the child).

As part of our being committed to intimate parenting, we choose to devote our attention and express our calling in a way that recognizes there are parts of Avery that are eternally wise and divine. Those parts we’re speaking to in him can receive the love we’re giving, but they can’t return it in kind because they’re filtered through a 4-year-old’s understanding of the world. In essence, he can’t—without being trained and abused in traditional patriarchal ways—reciprocate our devotion.

By staying aware of our shame triggers and seeking balance, we can offer our love and attention from a position of devotion that recognizes his divinity without compromising his humanity. The devotion we’re offering him is appropriate to its object, which is a critical part of keeping the interaction both psychically clean and physically respectful. For example, fetishism is devotion inappropriate to its object, like making shoes into a god. In our case, Avery himself isn’t the object; it’s his divinity, which is the part we can relate to, can resonate with. That’s the part of him that we are nurturing and stimulating.

When we’re close to him, when we are lovingly intimate with him, and we can feel that humming in our chest? That’s resonance between his divinity and ours. As we attune to that, our divinity aligns with and comes into resonance with his divinity. So his becomes stronger, clearer, and develops more depth as we stimulate it in him. If we don’t, and it remains dormant for long enough, it will be disowned. He’ll have to reclaim it and endure the grief and loss process like we’ve both had to do.

What we’re trying to do is contradict the deeply damaging effects of patriarchy, to cultivate an alternative version of masculinity for Avery to embody—one that’s grounded in his body and his intuition. One that nurtures and cares, one that listens and understands, one that believes in its own worth and has a clear sense of identity. One that has no need to dominate or belittle or bully or rape anyone.

One of the tremendous failings of feminist theory and practice has been the lack of a concentrated study of boyhood, one that offers guidelines and strategies for alternative masculinity and ways of thinking about maleness. Indeed, the feminist rhetoric that insisted on identifying males as the enemy often closed down the space where boys could be considered, where they could be deemed as worthy of rescue from patriarchal exploitation and oppression as were their female counterparts. –The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

So, intimacy and the direct modeling of it. Because if Brendan and I don’t model healthy intimacy, how is Avery supposed to know what it feels like when he encounters it in the adult world? If his child’s body is directed to deny its feelings, to suppress its need for love and affection, to react awkwardly and fearfully when someone tries to connect with him, then how can I possibly expect him to choose wisely? How can I entertain the hope that he will respect someone else’s boundaries; will consent to their wishes? How could he know what that looks and feels like if he’s never experienced it for himself?