Saturday, April 02, 2005

EOTM: Female Sexuality

It should go without saying that a man's experience of encountering female sexuality is nothing like a woman's experience of female sexuality as an aspect of herself. Men have been being steadily flogged for years over some ill-advised comments about female sexuality which Sigmund Freud made decades ago. The most unfortunate aspect of Freud's theories has been that, as a "founding" theorist in a fledgling science, his theories have been far more influential to the science than they merit.

A far different, and in my male experience a far more accurate, picture is given in Rufus Camphausen's work, ”The Yoni: sacred symbol of female power” His wife, Christina Camphausen, produces some of the most subtle and beautful images of the gateway to life for all human beings. In many ways, the awe, wonder, and mystery which a man feels towards the female power to create new life is in directly proportion to how he experiences those emtions towards his own life. Norman Mailer put it beautifully in his 1971 "Prisoner of sex".

"If he began this remedial reading with the firmest male prejudice of them all, which is that women might possess the better half of life already, he was never to encounter any comprehension among female writers that a firm erection on a delicate fellow was the adventurous juncture of ego and courage. One attitude in Women's Lib remained therefore repellant: precisely the dull assumption that the sexual force of a man was the luck of his birth, rather that his finest moral product, or if not his - here, full blast, came genuine conservatism - then a local gift passed along by something well achieved in his mother, his father, or farther back down the line."

Sexual desire, in the male side of the human race, is a reflection of the degree to which a man feels alive. In a field of food grains, the most vital, the most vigorous, the most full of life themselves, produce the most offspring. Sexual drive, that overwhelming desire to engage in the act that creates new life, is the ultimate expression of life itself: both the meaning and the definition of life are the same - life is what creates new life out of itself.

The feelings that men have in response to this creative potential in women is like the experience called in some christian faiths by the name "the Rapture." It is a total experience which integrates mind, body, emotion, and spirit. It is no accident that many people have been known to cry "Oh God!" at the moment of sexual release, because the notion of god the creator imbues the act of creation itself as an act of Godliness, and the experience is as close to a direct encounter with the creative force as most people get in their lifetimes.

Many of the ancient religions treated the sexual union of man and woman in just this way: as a holy act of creation. The earth itself was seen as female, and the ability to generate life out of one's own body as the most distilled essence of uniquely female energy. Male energy was seen as complementary to female energy, and they joined for the purpose of creating life. Both were essential, and essentially different.

The notion of these energies as pure and perfect complements of each other is expressed in the Chinese symbol of yin and yang, also called the Tai Chi, or "Grand Ultimate."
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Female Sexuality is such a powerful force that most cultures either celebrate it or suppress it, or sometimes both.

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Amidst the constant bashing of men with accusations of sexual harassment and all types of "rape"- marital-rape, date-rape, even "mind-rape" and "symbolic rapes" - there has been a subtle and complete disconnect between male and female sexuality. As a male, I simply cannot understand why women in general allow the sex-haters to speak for them. Unless, of course, it is because that women generally do hate sex and their own sexuality.

The brutal suppression of female sexuality by other women is generally very subtle and covert in western cultures. Throughout Africa and the Middle-East, however, the female hatred of female sexuality is proven to millions of girls each year when trusted older women take them away, often without telling them what is about to happen to them, and chop off these little girls' genitals in the most brutal and callous manner possible. When women from these cultures immigrate to others where these assaults on little girls, collectively referred to as FGM or "Female Genital Mutilation", are not generally practiced, they still carry the grisly tradition with them. Somewhere on the web, ( I lost the link when my bookmarks file became corrupt ) there is a story of 3 women who could not bear to perform this horrible act on their own daughters, so they did it to each other's daughters while the mother went outside so she could not hear the little girls' screams.

I cannot adequately describe the rage I feel when such practices are blamed on the desires and preferences of "MEN" in general.

The Worship of the Yoni

The Destruction of Little Girls’ Sexuality

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