The truth of the matter is that when it comes to your sexuality, you were meant to be free.
Looooong before the rise of the patriarchy, women enjoyed sexual freedom. Goddess was voluptuous, fecund, and sensual. She made love with delight to her consort, which allowed the earth to be fertile and to provide for its children (all of us, not just the humans).
Juices flowed from her, likened to honey, and she was revered as fruit and nectar. She reveled in her lover’s embrace, which was holy.
And for the humans, sexuality was an expression of the body coming into connection with the divine. Priestesses made love in honor of the Goddess and to support the fertility of Gaia. They joined in the sacred hieros gamos, in which lovemaking was to know and experience the Goddess more deeply through this holy exchange.
But during these times, succession was matrilineal because the only partner provable in the birth of a child was the female. And so property and name rights were handed down the mother’s line.
With the rise of the patriarchy, this began to change. As the thunder god worshiping Aryan invaders from the north descended upon the Goddess societies, they began to dominate women, killing off large portions of the usurped societies, raping women and marrying those who held wealth in order to subjugate them.
Eventually, invading Hebrews and in particular the Levites, who were eradicating the Goddess religions (as documented in the Old Testament), began to sanctify male domination in an attempt to further dominate those who followed the Goddess traditions, which were proving tenacious in their ability to subsist.
Old Testament scripture lays out the laws governing women’s sexuality, in which women were always considered the property of man, either their father or their husband. It was law that they remain virgins until marriage. And if they were raped, they were given/sold to the rapist as wife. And if a married woman was raped, she was punished and/or killed for the transgression. She was also to be killed if she had an extra-marital affair, though a man was allowed to have as many wives as he desired and could have sex with as many women as he wanted, punishment free.
To be fair, we can see reflections of this same system in other areas, such as in Greece. There, Zeus is portrayed as a philanderer who rapes and subjugates at will while Hera remains at home seething at the women for what they done.
Within the context of the Old Testament, however, which is still perceived as a “holy” text and which also serves as the foundation for Christianity, these laws have become sanctified and while we don’t have strict adherence to them anymore, they still shape the general attitude that exists around a woman’s sexual morality.
Sexual shame and the incapacity to experience full pleasure are some of our deepest woundings as women and it is still reinforced through the way women are talked about sexually, from: “She’s a slut/whore” to “She’s a prude.” We are expected to play the role that the man wants and it’s an inescapable trap in many cases. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
And this is by design. We are pressured to be “pure” and yet within us we have the genetic/ancestral programming that if we don’t obey we can be hurt, exiled and even killed.
But when we know that these programs were created in order to subjugate us, to intentionally deconstruct our power, we can begin the process of reclamation.
For thousands and thousands of years, a woman’s sexual expression was divine. It was celebrated and holy. Pleasure was encouraged and men and women explored it together as a sacred sexual rite.
Our reclamation of this truth of being – as we heal into our sexually empowered expression – shifts the dynamics of power. If sex is used against us – to exert power “over” us – then our reclamation allows for our power to be re-experienced right back where it lives: in our wombs and in our yonis.
Lots of love,
Janet
