Amazing. (You are amazing -- and your blog is amazing.) This is essentially Promiscuities (by Naomi Wolf) in concise essay form. It's crazy that in this day and age women are still faced with condemnation for openly practicing their sexuality, and especially if women act as the pursuers. When a woman acts as an "aggressive" initiator of the sexual song and dance, she is a ribald wench. But if a man does exactly the same thing, no one blinks an eye. Thankfully, I think our generation will improve things on this front. No offense to our parents' and grandparents' generations, but the ultimate quality for women back then was purity / chastity. I remember getting the talk from my mom telling me I should never just give myself away to any man unless he gave me his last name. I know, I knowwww. I still have lingering insecurities from it. I definitely would've been more well-adjusted and satisfied had I known that I didn't have to deny myself these (natural and normal) longings and urges. Should've just done IT. (I was still a virgin when I joined SG in 2003.) I will tell my children that their virginity or lack thereof has nothing whatsoever to do with their personal worth. What someone does or does not do in the bedroom should NOT be the deciding factor in whether a person is seen as valuable, lovable, unsullied. In many ways, sexual innocence is a liability, not a prized possession. // I definitely agree that phallocentric sex needs to go the way of the dinosaur. And once again, you've shown that men are stuck between a rock and a hard spot just as women are...except (as you've said) women still have it worse.
I quite enjoyed this. I wanted to comment yesterday, but honestly had to read this a couple of times. I wanted to make sure my thoughts were well formed. I will say first off that my mother taught me starting at age two that Sex was something that happenned before marriage...,that I should have lots of sex with someone before we decided to get married. She told me I should wait til I was old enough and cared about someone, but that I should sleep with more than one person to know what it was like. She tried to put me on birth control two years before I started having sex. I have always enjoyed sex. And have typically wanted more of it than my partners. I feel the crowd I hung out with in college was the antithesis of the stereotypical male culture you describe above. All of my male friends were engineers, philosophers, or computer people. They were not über masculine types. They were nerds. I keep expecting to see a few of them lurking in corners around here somewhere. :) I will say that on an individual level, it is hard for me to have a partner that is less experienced or less kinky than myself. It makes me self conscious because I feel like he or she will judge me in some way. I have had experiences to prove this and to completely disprove it.
On another note, my grandfather died when I was young. My grandmother was around sixty ish....and she had a string of thirty to forty yearold lovers while I was growing up. My frat grandmother remarried at eighty because she wasn't done having sex--her words. Not mine. I was reminded often that I come from a long line of horny women.
I'm glad you came from such an open family. Most of the women I've known (my mom and wife included) weren't quite so fortunate and have had a rough road to travel. I'm not sure if you noticed or not but pretty much all of my negative personal experiences have come from my shipmates in the Navy. Since I got out I've been able to surround myself with more like minded and tolerant people and it's made a huge difference in my life. @chefbethrogers
