Sexual Awakening #

Loss of innocence also applies to our sexual awakening; coming to terms with our sexuality and its function in life. Our sexual needs are a significant aspect of our human development. Darkness invites us into a mysterious world of heightened sensory perceptions beyond the constraints of human experience.

Until the 1960’s we were raised in a state of Victorian ignorance about the human body. Practical information about sexual matters was sketchy. Masturbation was considered illegal with some committed to mental asylums. Sex was simply not talked about.

The high point of sexual permissiveness was the liberated 1960’s, similar to when libertines of the mid 19th century were dampened by the prudish Victorian era. This time it was the Aids epidemic that simultaneously stemmed the performance, yet prompted more public discussion about “practising safe sex”. I recall a year 12 student profusely thanking a presenter, promising “we plan to practice as much as we possibly could”.

While transgressive sex is tantalising, the #MeTwo movement has stymied most coercive, power based or predatory sexual indiscretions. Most sexual acts are imaginary or fantasies that most of us would seldom put into practice. Yet most good sex begins with animalistic lust, morphing into emotional and physical intimacy and then transcending into spiritual ecstasy.

Coming to accept our sexuality can be the most traumatising yet humanising experience we encounter. Most religions treat it as a taboo which can create psychological problems throughout life.

As part of Maslow’s five interdependent levels of basic human needs the fulfillment of our sexual urges is vital for a well balanced life. It is an integral part of each of these:

Physiological needs for survival (to stay alive and reproduce) and security (to feel safe) are the most fundamental and most pressing needs.
Social needs (for love and belonging) and self-esteem needs (to feel worthy, respected, and have status). —
Personal - the highest level needs are self-actualization needs (self-fulfillment and achievement).

Its underlying theme is that human beings are ‘wanting’ beings: as they satisfy one need the next emerges on its own and demands satisfaction … and so on until the need for self-actualization that, by its very nature, cannot be fully satisfied and thus does not generate more needs. This theory contends that once a need is satisfied, it stops being a motivator of human beings. In personnel management, it is used in design of incentive schemes. In marketing, it is used in design of promotional campaigns based on the perceived needs of a market segment a product satisfies. Sex sells.

A major concern is the ‘‘adultification’’ of children, where sexualising messages combine with the commercialisation of childhood to influence the childhood years.

Sxual needs and urges, biological, instinctive and imperative, emerge during puberty causing confusion and misunderstanding. In many Aboriginal initiation rituals older women introduce young men to the act of love. Other societies attempt to repress sxuality only to cause serious psychological problems. Since the 1960’s, western civilisation has become “liberated”, at the risk of creating a hypersexualised world through the casual sexualisation of billboards, television programs and advertisements er-ticising children.

We all want to be valued and appreciated. As a teacher I was having extreme difficulty with an out of control year eight class. I asked a colleague who seemed to manage them better what his strategies were.

His reply went:

“The worst thing you can do to someone is to take away your approval of them; if you have never given them that approval; how can you take it away”?

Once I began to find things to praise, discipline and control became a lot easier.

Girls and Sexuality #

As all aspects of life, Sex can be personally fulfilling or damaging to us. Good experiences are transcendent; enhancing our self-esteem but bad sex through manipulative, exploitive, self-indulgent, self-gratifying or coercive experiences can lead to self loathing.

Paradoxically, while trying to recreate ourselves, we simultaneously attempt to lose ourselves. The novels of Philip Roth or John Updike often depict sexual desire as a sad, annihilating thing,

Loss of innocence also applies to our sexual awakening; coming to terms with our sexuality and its function in life. There are many links between sex and thinking. The mind can be both slave and master of the body’s appetites, but it is an absurd and terrifying task of stabilizing that dynamic, in theory and in practice.

Sexual needs and urges, biological, instinctive and imperative, emerge during puberty causing confusion and misunderstanding. In many Aboriginal initiation rituals older women introduce young men to the act of love.

Other societies attempt to repress sexuality only to cause serious psychological problems. Since the 1960’s, western civilisation has become “liberated”, at the risk of creating a hypersexualised world or a sex soaked culture, through the casual sexualisation of billboards, television programs and advertisements er-ticising children.

The Catholic Church has had problems with sexuality ever since the policy of celibacy was introduced to protect the assets of the Church from the 11th Century. With the increased sexuality of the sixties, it appears many priests could no longer repress their sexual drives and developed an attitude of entitlement as compensation.

Pornography #

Barbara Ellen writing in The Guardian: Far from porn being the great inspirer of sexual play, could too much early exposure contribute to erectile dysfunction and male performance anxiety?

Porn has been shown to alter the brain too, and not in a good way.

Just as young women might feel intimidated by how sexuality is depicted in porn, likewise young men. Moreover, sustained exposure to porn from a young age would give boys clear instructions on how they’re expected to “perform” as mythical “real men”. In a twisted way, male porn stars almost become role models, with impressionable young minds going away with the feeling that porn doesn’t just portray a certain kind of sex (an option), but, rather the only kind of sex worth having. To add to the confusion, the hypersexual, perma-impressed porn actresses are not the kind of women they’re likely to meet in real life.

But we can’t just blame porn here. Performance anxiety has to be linked to the wider phenomenon of social media, Instagram et al, and the fake perfection it imbues on young people.

Young girls are increasingly conditioned into seeing themselves as mere sexualised products and develop early anxieties over body image and rejection. Unfortunately, according to Nikki Gemmell, Porn can normalise deviant sexual practices. Recently a young 16 year old was forced to get a colonoscopy bag after being injured during rough group sex, and she will have to wear it for the rest of her life. Why? Because her porn - addicted boy friends thought it was a normal part of the sexual experience.

Here is film director Lynn Sheldon on her experience:

Adolescence “squashed” me; it was about coming of age sexually. I felt betrayed by my body, which became very womanly. It screwed up my head and my friendships.

*From being on a par with boys, suddenly you are objectified. It was very much,

“you’re looking at me, don’t look at me, look at me!”
I have visceral memories of that time.

Today’s young women need to learn how they can resist the sexual pressure they feel from a very young age to be “hot”, to “hook up” and to be able to “perform” and essentially satisfy a commodified version of male desire - without considering how they really feel about what is happening to them. Many teenagers become sexually vulnerable and active merely because they are starved of other forms of affection.

Sex just isn’t worth it if it doesn’t have much meaning, and isn’t even that enjoyable. The most important thing is to take control, examine one’s motivations and feelings rather than just “doing it” unthinkingly.

This is a whole new approach to sexuality that has little to do with the virgin pledges of the US moral majority kids or the abstinence campaigns of the Reagan and Bush administrations. It has a lot to do with women, and men, of all ages being truthful with themselves.

Younger women in Australia and elsewhere are pressured way too young into sexual relationships and into porn role-playing which can be a negative in their overall development. This world of a toxic raunch culture; drug and alcohol-fuelled “precocious sexual debut”, as the experts term it, was explored in titillating detail in the teen-TV series Skins, and earlier in films such as Larry Clark’s Kids.

Teenage girls under attack #

Steve Biddulph, June 2, 2007

Teenage depression has doubled in the past decade, eating disorders affect one girl in eight, self-harm, binge drinking and unhappy sexual experiences stalk even the average teenage girl.*

Psychologists (here and overseas) believe the attack on girls is coming on two fronts. The first is an erosion of self-image by the corporate media sector - the creation of anxiety about physical appearance and sexuality in pre-teen and mid-teen girls….. the casual sexualisation of billboards, television programs and advertisements seen even by small children going about their day.

Adolescence is all about finding who you are. To explore potential life partners, to find a meaningful educational and career path. You do this among forces internal and external - neither too compliant with one’s parents, nor with a fickle and demanding peer group.

Sexuality is powerful in this. It can bring the most intense, positive and tender rewards of new-found young adulthood, or it can be a rushed and empty disappointment. Today scores of 16- and 17-year-old girls are already bored with the selfish fumblings of a series of boy partners and the disappointing lack of intimacy, meaning or real enjoyment. They have lost the energetic charge that comes from unfolding this aspect at their own pace. The media says sex will get you loved, and the reality is for about five minutes. Mall culture turns girls into a product, used and discarded.*

Women should celebrate their sexuality: #

In Colour Purple, ironically it is Shug Avery, Mister’s mistress, who ultimately rouses Celie’s self worth by her approval. Theirs is a bizarre but mutual relationship; Celie accepts Shug into her home, baths her, feeds her, combs her hair and encourages her to start singing again. In turn Shug gives Celie her self-respect by singing for her, dressing her, stopping Albert’s beatings, helps her achieve financial independence and teaches her to enjoy her own body.

Despite her initial comment of:

“God, you’re ugly”,

Shug and Celie develop a mutual rapport after Shug’s realisation of Celie’s inner beauty when she sees Celie’s smile. This develops into a wholesome, esteem building, lesbian s-xual relationship and Celie first becomes aware of sex as a positive morale boosting force.

“Sexual pleasure in a woman is a kind of magic spell” according to Simone de Beauvoir, it commands complete abandon; if the moment opposes the magic of caresses the spell is broken."

Nikki Gemmell continues:

“How easy it is to dissolve that spell. The female path to organism is such a fragile, delicate one, so easily lost. Our organisms are shy little things to coax out, insisting on concentration and focus and then of course complete abandonment; such a tricky combination.

As Alice Munro said,“Sex seems to me all surrender - not the woman’s to the man, but to the person - to the body.”

It takes time to surrender; to enter the sacred, exhilarating zone when we’re jolted into life, combusted into light. The best sex involves a sense of connecting on the deepest level, with two people who are utterly in the moment.

All good sex aids self-esteem for both parties.

Thank you, God, for giving us the only organ on the human body devoted purely to exquisite sensation: the clitoris. That tiny little pleasure dome has 8000 nerve endings crammed into it (twice as many as the penis).

In Greek mythology, when Zeus and Hera visited the hermaphrodite Tiresias to determine whether it was men or women who experienced more pleasure from sex, Tiresias replied:

“If the sum of love’s pleasure adds up to 10, nine parts go to women, only one to men.” Nikki Gemmell

Or as Sister Margaret Farley expresses it in Just Love

“Many women have found great good in self-pleasuring – especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure – something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers.”

Fragments from 60 lines of The Rose Thorn (Der Rosendorn) discovered on a strip of parchment in the library of Melk Abbey, Austria, dating from 1300, has been called the earliest form of the Vagina Monologues – an argument in verse between a woman and her vulva, originating in the Middle Ages.

In the poem, a virgin woman (junkfrouwe) argues in a free-flowing, often witty dialogue, with her speaking vulva (fud) about which of them is held in the higher regard by men.

The virgin argues that it is by her looks that men are won over, whilst the vulva, accusing the virgin of putting too much stress on her appearance, says it is she who provides the true pleasure. The two decide to part company, but find themselves deeply unhappy and so reunite to allay their suffering. They conclude that they are better together, as a person and their sex are quite simply inseparable. (Kate Connolly in Berlin – The Guardian 27 Jul. 2019)

Boys and Sexuality #

Boys too can have great difficulties comprehending the changes to their bodies, urges and developing testosterone. At first they may sublimate their energies in other areas such as sport to assert their manhood but ultimately their sexual needs will manifest themselves an irresistible physical attraction to others. Freud contended that all human activity is ultimately sub-consciously motivated by our sexuality.

Society, our Super-ego, guides us in satisfying those needs in a socially acceptable manner.

Boys too can have traumatic experiences that affect their self esteem and well-being. Repeated rejection by others can be soul-destroying and can result in anti-social behavior.

It is imperative that young men in their early formative years be “educated” properly on how to satisfy their sexual needs in healthy acceptable ways. The ubiquitous availability of all kinds of pornography provides the seedbed for a distorted view of women as mere objects of sexual gratification for degrading servile images of domination and exploitation. Instead of inducing tenderness, intimacy and empathy, pornography instils false expectations of fulfilment through the release of sexual urges by the use of raw power. The false images of female degradation and submission may foster arrogance and aggression towards women resulting in a young man’s ultimate social rejection leading to increasing isolation and dependence or addiction to further pornography deadening real relationships. This perverts the true meaning, value, understanding and fulfilment of the sexual aspect of a full life.

Barbara Ellenwriting in The Guardian: Far from porn being the great inspirer of sexual play, could too much early exposure contribute to erectile dysfunction and male performance anxiety?

Porn has been shown to alter the brain too, and not in a good way.

Unfortunately, according to Nikki Gemmell, Porn can normalise deviant sexual practices. Recently a young 16 year old was forced to get a colonoscopy bag after being injured during rough group sex, and she will have to wear it for the rest of her life. Why? Because her porn - addicted boy friends thought it was a normal part of the sexual experience.

Australian author, Tim Winton writes with great insight into problems and support for young boys - on side bar menu.

Star-crossed Lovers #

Among the most famous lovers of Medieval times, Abelard and Heloise, celebrated their love making by experimenting with unconventional methods. Abelard detailed their irresistible passionate relationship:

“Our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it. We entered on each joy the more because of our previous inexperience and were all the less easily sated”.

Because he was her tutor and twenty years her senior, her father, took exception when she became pregnant and sought revenge by having Abelard brutally beaten with castration.

Humiliated by the loss of his manhood, the lovers take religious vows as monk and nun; are separated for twenty years, and when they meet again though the physical aspect of their relationship is no longer possible declare their eternal love and oneness.

Heloise writing 12 years after the separation admits:

“Even in sleep I find no respite”.

Though brief, the lovers found eternal true love

Other great tragic love stories include:

Romeo and Juliet

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“The Orgasmic Mind” by Martin Porter. Unravelling the mysteries of the orgasm:

“The relative weights of sensory and emotional influences on orgasm may differ between the sexes, perhaps because of its diverging evolutionary origins. Orgasm in men is directly tied to reproduction through ejaculation, whereas female orgasm has a less obvious role. Orgasm in a woman might physically aid in the retention of sperm, or it may play a subtler social function, such as facilitating bonding with her mate. If female orgasm evolved primarily for social reasons, it might elicit more complex thoughts and feelings in women than it does in men.

In men, during ejaculation, the researchers saw extraordinary activation of the ventral tegmental area, a major hub of the brain’s reward circuitry; the intensity of this response is comparable to that induced by heroin. ‘Because ejaculation introduces sperm into the female reproductive tract, it would be critical for reproduction of the species to favor ejaculation as a most rewarding behavior,’.

“But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment – a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.

“Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a reduction of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. ‘Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm,’ Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: ‘At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.’

**"The Orgasmic Mind”, **Martin Porter Publisher: Scientific American Mind, Date: 2016 Special Edition, Pages: 8-9