Being Present in Our Authentic Sexual Selves
....June's guide with tips, somatic practices, journal prompts, a tarot spread, resource recommendations, and more to help us stop performing during sex and embody our authentic erotic expression
Two years ago, I was on my knees on the floor of a dance and witchcraft studio. Arching my back and sticking my butt out to the rhythm of a song, silver poles all around, I was imagining being watched and performing a version of sexiness that I’d been taught before I even knew that it was something I was being taught.
There in the dimmed lighting, surrounded by other folks exploring their magic and eroticism, I noticed that I was so focused on performing eroticism that I wasn’t even able to be in my body or experience pleasure from the way that movement felt to me.
I also realized that I didn’t have to be this person. That no one in this room was asking me to be this version of myself, that if I had asked them, every single one of them would have encouraged me to find my own style and movement that felt authentic to my eroticism. They would have wanted me to step into my own power. These movements and way of being as I danced were things that I was actively imposing on myself, that I had been imposing on myself for perhaps my entire life.
Leaving class that day, I realized that I didn’t know what being sexual meant to me anymore, but this person that I was performing on the dance floor and in my sex life wasn’t me.
My childhood, like that of all people who are socialized as women, was littered with images of women that were put on pedestals of being beautiful. These women were usually thin, able bodied, seemingly straight, cisgender, and white. They wore tight clothes that revealed their cleavage and were always immaculately made up. They were simultaneously available and at a distance – sexy, but not sexual themselves. It was as if these women existed to be admired and looked at, and I learned to see myself in this way.
The way we’re socialized enters into our intimate lives. You cannot spend your childhood and adolescence seeing things like Britney Spears in a schoolgirl outfit asking someone to hit her one more time and Usher talking about how he wants a lady in the streets but a freak in the bed and not pick up some of that.
I know for the first decade of my sexual life, I did a lot of bouncing and doe-eyed gazing and monitoring of my body jiggles and arching and bending and letting myself be pounded. I’d ignore the pain that I was experiencing in my body and focus on what would make my male partners feel pleasure. I wanted their orgasm, I wanted them to feel good. As my friend TL Amor talks about in the podcast we did together last year, to receive pleasure was enmeshed with giving pleasure. I focused all of my time during penis in vagina sex thinking about what would make my partner orgasm: what angle I would look sexiest in, whether he could see himself go inside of me, what sounds I was making, what pacing and placement of our bodies would feel best for him.
While my story is my own, with my own particular background and trauma, it’s also something that I hear often from folks who have been socialized as women.
We’ve given so many messages about being “nice”, about being ladylike, about how to please our men, about how we should and shouldn’t be one of the “girls gone wild” that of course we get into bed with our partners, whether or not they’re cis-men, and we have to grapple with the way we have or have not internalized these messages about who is sexy and what it means to be sexual.
So if we’re not trying to please, how do we move our bodies? If we’re not trying to fit into some standard that we’ve picked up from movies, TV shows, music, books, and porn, what do we actually like? How can we actually know this when we’ve been inundated with this messaging for so long? Can we ever be “authentic”? And how does trauma impact all of this? If we start feeling safer in our bodies, trusting ourselves, and trusting that our partner cares about our needs, who would we be sexually? If we’re not thinking about what others would think of us if they knew what we were doing, what would we like to explore? If we feel safe enough to be our queer selves, what kind of sex would we want to be having?
To contemplate these questions can be terrifying: it can bring up these body deep fears of not being loved, of being rejected and abandoned, of being alone. It can bring up traumatic memories that are easier to repress than to acknowledge. But what can happen in our sex lives when we take those kinds of risks? If we stop performing some version of what we think sex should be and instead we start being our authentic sexual selves?
This month in thecuriousclit, we’re doing a deep dive into finding our authentic sexual self: to move away from performing what we think we should be doing in sex and towards being present in our body and expressing our authentic selves, whether we’re being sexual with ourselves or with a partner.
This guide contains:
an oracle card for the collective
an everyday grounding practice to include in your routine
adult sex ed: performativity during sex
what this is
how to reduce its impact on your life
journal prompts
conversation starter to do with a partner or friend
poetry & fiction writing prompts
a tarot spread
suggestions for a book, poem, music, and podcast around this month’s theme
While these practices cannot completely cover all of our different experiences, my hope is that these can be an invitation to explore, to unlearn, and to expand our felt sense of safety and delight in our bodies so that when we are having sex by ourselves or with a partner we can more easily let pleasure emerge.
I invite you to take your time in moving through this guide. Feel free to follow the activities in order, jump around, or skip whatever activities you would like!
It’s your body, your practice, and your choices are always welcomed and celebrated in this space.