Screw your spiritual awakening, I want a sexual awakening
I cannot tell you how many times someone has told me that I won’t ever get a boyfriend because of the photos I post on Instagram.
From the direct such as friends sitting me down hand on my shoulder gentling mentioning if I would consider changing my content. To the less direct like exceptionally distant friends of friends reaching out to my mother to check to see if I was ok or parents questioning her over pre-dinner drinks. Perhaps the most confronting was when I was nineteen and working in retail. A neighbouring menswear store manager came into my work and described my photos as “pornographic” to my boss. She sat me down and told me what had happened, it felt like my heart was beating in my skull and my stomach was somersaulting around my throat. Of course, he had liked every photo and DM’d me ten times.
“There is one obtusely obvious theme to what they were all saying - had I put any thought into how other people might perceive me?”
Whenever we are faced with a decision, or whenever we see/hear anyone embarking on something different our first thought is to examine the risk involved. This is no one’s fault or conditioning, this is science. Our brain is quite literally a record of the past and it is so in order to protect us. If our mighty brain is able to survey the situation and pull up all the reasons we might get hurt we are then able to make an informed decision as to how we would like to proceed.
Think of it like this, if you are looking at a fire you intrinsically know that it is hot and subsequently that you will be burnt if you touch it. There are two types of people in the world, those that can look at the stovetop and know that it is in their best interest not to touch it and then there are those of us that need to learn from experience and get burnt.
It didn’t matter exactly what they judged in me, maybe that I was too provocative, asking for it, unauthentic, out there, eccentric or too much but all of it circled back to the most obvious comment - I should show less of my body. That I was too naked.
Bikini photos seemed to hold hands with my love life. I remember once someone asked me, “What would your future in-laws think?” at nineteen my brain only processed the word law when I watched Suits. From what I seemed to gather; a good future wife needed to wear high neck tops, not push the boundaries nor do anything different. I took inventory of the women before me and around me, alive and dead from my friends to those who protested for the vote or endured the war.
If this was true what people were really saying about what men wanted, I had to ask myself – did I want men?
Truth be told, they might all be right. My love-life-track-record is anything but glowing, I’ve got stories about the crazy, the heartbreaking, the devastating and the mind-boggling. I’ve got enough love stories to write a book about (and I wrote two!) I’ve always felt like some bizarre guinea pig who goes out in the world to test all the sample pots and come back and tell everyone how they tasted.
So, I asked my boss, who I looked up to immensely, after the conversation she had had with the neighbouring manager, “Anna, give it to me straight – do you think I should stop doing this?” With an espresso martini in one hand, she looked me dead in the eye and said “Cass, I think you should do anything that makes you feel good, and if this makes you feel good so be it”. The decision was made, I would run headfirst into the online world for the next five years.
“I decided to touch the fire.”
Now I’ve got the chance, I flip the question to you - what feels good and have you ever put any thought into how you make yourself feel good?
Sex has always fascinated me. Every single part of it from the skin, to lingerie, the initiation of the act, how it feels, how it looks, how it tastes, why it exists, how we can do it differently, what it means, how harmful it can be but most of all why for the love of God is it such a big deal?
At least where I live, I feel like sex is kept hush hush and yet it is silently screamed across every interaction.
Walking past the dairy to get an ice cream at 16, all I could see plastered on the magazines were; “Hilary Duff drops weight to keep the husband happy!”, “How to drive him MAD, we’ve got 10 tips!” and “SEXY Valentine’s date ideas to rub him the right way!” Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to put effort into your relationship and do nice things for your partner but one fatal flaw was missing, since I was expected as a woman to do all this for my man, what’s in it for me?
Within the last year, I clicked on the main difference between my perspective to a certain selection of others. I have always loved feeling sexy for myself and I truly don’t really give a damn if that offends you. I have always been fascinated by learning about sex for myself, whereas the world seemed to be interested in teaching me about sex to please my partner. I like showing my body because I am proud of it, not to decipher whether someone else deems it worthy of their attention. I am content with exactly who I am and I don’t need anyone else to prove that.
Socially, we are so far from where we need to be. Whilst we are quick to jump on the “self-love” train and promote bubble baths and face masks, I ask us to really look at how we love ourselves. It is time to put time into finding out what intimate experiences you want to have with someone or with yourself. When was the last time you truly looked at yourself naked and enjoyed yourself naked? That doesn’t mean simply getting yourself off but I mean being able to put your hands on your body and love what you feel and I mean ALL of it. Being able to embrace every curve and see yourself as a whole being instead of as broken pieces that you need to fix.
Yes, we manifest our life and we also manifest our sex life. Personally, I was using myself sexually and therefore I found people who mirrored this back to me. There was no time or effort put into how I loved myself, I would bring myself to orgasm in order to fall asleep or relieve stress as quickly as I could. A pleasure to me was a tool to distract from the pain. It is unsurprising that past partners treated me in this exact same way.
Personally, my sexual experiences in the past used to feel like a stage performance in which I was trying to impress a critic. Over the last year, I considered the fact that if I was going on stage it was not to impress my partner, no he was getting on stage, too. We were creating something together and I was allowed to pause the routine and direct the production for it to suit my needs better. In order to do this with confidence, I had to find the confidence in myself to know what I wanted by exploring my own body. By giving myself time and care, by slowing down and laying in my own arms instead of rolling over and turning on my phone right away. To put down sex toys that speed the process up and to get skin to skin with ourselves (PSA I love vibrators no hate but you get what I’m saying). The deeper I went in my journey inwards I learnt how to turn myself on without relying on anyone else to do it for me. It felt like my power had been returned.
I guess it is true you have to love yourself before anyone else can, after all, you can’t draw a map without experiencing the terrain.
Five years later, the opinions have stopped coming in on my Instagram photos. Others started to recognize that what I was doing wasn’t for anyone else, I was doing it simply because it felt good and it was part of my journey. So maybe I will never get a boyfriend and I will always be too much, too intense, too naked, too loud, too obvious, I will post too many photos and kiss too many boys, I will be too charming, too successful, too educated, too much of an entrepreneur, too risky and I will be too wrapped up on loving every minute of it to give a damn. My choices might not please you but at least I know how to please myself.
“In a world that tells you to dim your switch or even better turn yourself off, flick the switch. Turn on. Light up the whole universe and become everything they tell you not to be simply because it feels good.”
I encourage you to touch the fire and better yet – become it.
Words — Cassandra Grodd
Image — Kit Agar via Pinterest
