I've been thinking about the way we look at a woman who moves her hips, shows her body, dances provocatively, or just seems very comfortable in her sensual nature. And how immediately, we make assumptions about what kind of woman she is. Especially when that woman also calls herself spiritual. HOW and WHY are we still being asked to choose?
Sacred vs. sensual. Conscious vs sexual. Respectable woman vs "hoe."
What if those categories were never opposites to begin with? I think part of the problem is that we combine sensuality, sexuality, and eroticism into the same thing. They are related, but different. I did 3 overlapping circles on a sheet of paper. Once circle representing sensuality, one sexuality and the other eroticism. Man, I love this shit! Ok so follow me…
Sensuality says “I can feel myself.”
It's our capacity to experience pleasure and sensation through the body.
Music moving through your hips. The smell of something that makes you close your eyes. Bare feet against the earth. Stretching and feeling your body open. Eating a perfect mango with the juice running down your fingers. Bringing your womb to meet the sun. Your shirt brushing past your chest during ovulation.
None of this requires sex. It doesn't even require another person forreal. A woman dancing naked, alone in her kitchen can be having an intensely sensual experience without having a sexual experience at all.
Sexuality says “I am a sexual being.”
Sexuality includes attraction, desire, arousal, intimacy, fantasy, sexual expression and our relationship with ourselves as sexual beings. And here's something I think men and women need to understand ‘Someone else's sexual response to my body does not automatically make my experience of my body sexual.’
I can move my hips because it feels good. You can find the movement sexually attractive. And BOTH can be true. But your experience of my body does not get to define my experience inside of it.
And then there is the erotic.
I just read Audre Lorde’s essay, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” She wrote about the erotic as something much larger than sex. She described it as a deeply felt source of power, knowledge, satisfaction and aliveness. (Highly recommend checking it out.)Anyway, that distinction was so powerful to me. Eroticism, understood this way, makes me reflect on what makes me feel deeply alive.
What gives me a standard for what fulfillment actually feels like?
And once a woman becomes intimately acquainted with THAT feeling, it becomes much harder to convince her that deprivation is fulfillment. Whether that’s in her work, relationships, creativity, spiritual life, and yes, in her sex life.
Which brings me to embodiment…
A sensually embodied woman may be completely covered or she may not. Embodiment has nothing to do with an aesthetic. It's a relationship. It's the difference between constantly asking, "How do I look?" and also being able to ask "How do I feel?"
Do I feel safe here? Do I feel open? Did my stomach tighten when he said that? Did my shoulders just relax? Do I actually want this touch? Does this position feel good? Am I enjoying myself or am I watching myself perform enjoyment?
Even sensuality can become another performance. You can wear the flowing dress, roll your hips, light the candles, take the sensual photos, speak softly, call yourself divine feminine... and STILL be experiencing your body through the imagined eyes of everyone watching you.
On the other hand, you can be deeply embodied while gardening in some sweatpants. The aesthetic doesn't tell us anything, presence does. A sensually embodied woman knows pleasure that has nothing to do with being sexually desired. She knows how to make her own life feel good. She knows the dance.
Movement.
Rest.
Touch.
Water.
Beauty.
Breath.
Food.
Nature.
Stillness.
For so long a woman’s body has been seen as something that attracts attention or provides pleasure to someone else. Her body is somewhere she lives. And because she lives there, she also begins to hear its NO. That's another piece of sensuality I wanna touch on. Sometimes embodiment makes a woman less available. Because now she can feel when she doesn't want something.
She notices contraction in her body, when she's performing, when she's saying yes intellectually while something inside her is saying no. She learns that access to pleasure also means access to boundaries.
So no, I don't believe the opposite of sexual repression is sexual performance. The opposite of sexual repression is ownership. A woman isn't automatically liberated because she takes her clothes off. And she isn't automatically respectable because she puts them on. A woman can choose modesty from deep alignment. Another can choose sensual expression from deep alignment. Another woman may move between both throughout her life.
Does this woman belong to herself?
Can she enjoy being desired without requiring desire to establish her worth?
Can she experience pleasure when nobody is watching?
Can she say yes without abandoning herself?
Can she say no without feeling guilty?
Can she distinguish being sexually wanted from being loved?
Can she inhabit her body instead of constantly observing it?
Can she experience God without having to leave her body behind?
Perhaps sacredness was never supposed to require us to become less embodied. Perhaps my sensuality does not compete with my spirituality. My hips do not make me less holy. My pleasure is not evidence that I lack depth. Showing my body doesn't automatically mean I've lost ownership of it and covering it doesn't automatically mean I've reclaimed it.
Maybe the deeper work is becoming so present inside ourselves that neither purity culture nor sexual culture gets to dictate what liberation is supposed to look like.
I can love God and love the body I experience God through. I can be discerning and sensual and sexual and erotic. I may be private in one season and super expressive in another.
I can pray, study, teach, be still. And yes, sometimes I can throw dat ass.
None of those things alone tell you whether I am embodied.
The question is whether, while doing them, I can still feel myself.
-Aiyana