I've been thinking... About me. But not really about me. About females. About female sexuality. I posted to a discussion board at a feminist website. The thread was to discuss what we women wished we knew as we were growing up. I wish I knew that it was okay to be sexual.

I think that too often--even in this day and age--young women are afraid to be female and sexual. It's like we believe one negates the other; we can't be both. I'm sure this isn't the case with every woman, but I know it has certainly been the case with me and I don't know why. No one explicitly told me that as a female I couldn't be a sexual being. So why was I so afraid?

It's always easiest to blame the media and its representation of women. I did read my fair share of Seventeen, Teen and YM magazines growing up. The thing is, those magazines had articles about sex, but none of them wrote about sexuality--the emotional, identity-forming factors of the physical drive. Those were things that remained unspoken and perhaps that was the problem. Those factors were buried. And when you don't talk about things like that, its very easy to start feeling like you're deviant--dirty--for being aware of your desire and how your sexuality helps to form you.

But I don't think the media is wholly the problem.

In her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," Helene Cixous talks about women's fear/loathing of their bodies and hence their sexuality:

As soon as they [women] begin to speak, at the same time as they're taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: [...]. Your continent is Dark. Dark is dangerous. You can't see anything in the dark, you're afraid. Don't move, you might fall. Most of all, don't go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark.

But, like I said, no one directly taught me this. Maybe this is systemic?

It would also be easy to blame Men (yes, men with a capital "m") for this fear, but I refuse to entertain the idea. Men are not the enemy. When we binarize relations between the sexes, when we turn one gender into the victim, we victimize everyone, as we force the other gender into the role of oppressor (a role that is often just as uncomfortable for them to undertake as it is for me to play the victim.) I want know part of this victimization. I have not been victimized by the media or by Men's perceptions of heterosexual female sexuality.

So why was I so afraid of my femininity for so long? Why did I set at odds being female and being sexual? Why did I fall victim to myself all those years?