Of Mirrors and Men and the Power of Sex

"Can you take the pain and make it a journey?” — Lidia Yuknavitch

Hi, I’m Faye, welcome! Here, we get weird, and wonderful, and sometimes a little naughty on the path to personal empowerment. And we do it through the language of movement. We move from prescriptive to Expressive, From obedient to Deviant. From copied to Embodied. 

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I could tell you this essay isn’t about sex exclusively. Except it is. Because everything in life is. Sex, that is. Not about it. But IT. The thing itself.  Sex. A big cosmic fuck. 

The way I see it, Life is penetration, or at least a quest to penetrate and be penetrated. To get into it. The thing we’re after. A hand reaching toward the transcendent. A body shedding a mind’s walls. 

I found this dusty old note. A list of male characters in my life, the ones before Luke, who I had to go through to get to Luke; he’s the one I’ve been writing into my story for as long as I can remember. The others were obstacles, challenges, lessons in power that would prepare me for a man like him, one who knew his power and wielded it wisely. Which is really to say: all these challenges were to prepare me to harness my own power. To make it into something concrete. The greatest challenge of all? Creating a body of work from something unseen.

My own power is something I always wished to experience, but I couldn't name my wish —  couldn’t pinpoint it — until he was inside me, growling, “Yes, yes. Come for me, come for us. More. Please.” He is the mirror I was always searching for, reflecting my power right back to me. Refusing to take it away, even when I surrendered completely. 

It feels funny to write an essay about reclaiming the feminine — my wise, erotic, animal body — and begin by talking about men. But ever since I was 13 and that boy at my birthday party said to me, “damn, I didn’t know you could dance like that,” men are the mirrors I’ve been looking into. Trying relentlessly to find a reflection that fit. 

Reflections were everywhere, but I looked into men who had ideas of who I was supposed to be. It seemed easier, at first, to accept their visions, distorted as they were. For a while, I did everything I could to act the part of who I thought they thought I was. Which is what I thought they wanted.  But what I wanted? What made my heart beat? I had a dream that someday, I’d share transcendent magic. The magic I felt pulsing in my fingertips and sensed in the silence. The magic that slithered through my hips. The movement in the stillness.

What I kept finding was little boxes to shut Pandora in. Why was I expected to squeeze into them? Where did those expectations come from? I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. This world is rife with them. But who says that means anything?

Well, I thought it meant everything. 

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
— Carl Jung

There I was, year after year, pretending to be things I wasn’t and feel things I didn’t for the sake of being a good girl, or something like it. You know, an acceptable woman. A not too much woman. A woman settling. And there I was, year after year, dying a little more, becoming a little less.

I wanted overwhelming presence and emotional depth. I wanted puddles dripping between my legs. I wanted to be thrust onto the bed and taken beyond my edges. I wanted to be ravished, loved, softly and violently. I wanted my heart ripped out of my chest. I wanted it caressed so sweetly I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to be needed like oxygen. I wanted to be wildly independent. All my life, I told myself I couldn’t have these things.

It was frightening, feeling this power, letting my longing pierce straight to the center of me. Embracing that fear, flinging myself through it, was the portal to the liminal space. 

Here I was, knowing nothing for certain. 

Here I was, with a million questions.

Here I was, recognizing it was everyone’s fault and no one’s fault. All those broken mirrors of men reflected only what I had allowed to rule me: ideas of what I, what they, what a culture, decided was the right way to be. Concepts. Abstractions. Somehow, we were convinced dulling our power would make us happy, yet experience reveals quite the opposite. 

Here I was, reading Mary Oliver, understanding, finally, what she meant¹. All these reflections showed me that I should be good, but they didn’t know what “good” meant. They showed me I should walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. And for what? For wanting what the soft animal of my body wanted? Yes. That. Exactly that. 

A flame erupted in me. A fury I’d never felt. A need to be seen. A violence. A longing to burn it all to the ground.

I remember the time I sent an ex a photograph of my wanting. You know what his response was? “You’re too much.” Well, of course I was. Now it’s obvious. He wanted less. They all wanted less. What were they afraid of, I wonder. 

And what was I afraid of? Well like I said earlier, I always wanted to feel my own power, but I was also afraid of what that would mean. Where it would take me. How it would shape my being. 

Would I become too much again?

One day, Luke said to me, “Be too much. And then, a little more.” He said, “that’s what expansion is all about.” My body filled with prickly heat. My head was spinning. I could barely breathe at the notion of expanding. Yet it was everything I dreamed about. He wanted more of me? Really? The flame was growing. Softening me. An inner cauldron refining my heartbeat. 

I thought more of me was overwhelming. 

I thought overwhelming was a bad thing. 

But it’s not, is it? 

Here’s what I think. The only people who will tell you overwhelming is a bad thing are the ones who want less. Only those who think to be a good girl — to be a woman worthy of love — is to be small and meek and quiet and to do nothing that could cause a boat to rock. Which used to be me. 

But now? I feel the force overwhelming, right here as I am writing, eros pulsing through breath, through pussy, through fingertips.

•••••••••

In my early years of investigating these creatures called men, I hadn’t the first clue who I was. I didn’t know what I wanted. I just knew this longing filled me. It consumed my body. Drove me wild. Drove me reckless. Drove me to insanity and back more times than I’d care to admit.

My imagination got me into troublesome relationships. Creating bedtime stories of men who wanted me, the real me, the one I was alone in darkness at 3 am, writing poetry and dancing naked and painting on my body and they were asleep and not fucking this marvelous creature of me and I was wondering, “if I feel this longing, mustn’t they?” and so it was that I lived in delusional fantasies. 

Many men wanted me. I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, it’s just a fact. They saw my sexuality and wanted a piece. 

I wanted connection. Not just to be a hot piece of ass. Cause you know, that’s a box, too. “hot piece of ass, but no emotions, please.”

Eventually, I grew weary of it. At times, I resented my sex. I hid it away for a while. Until Luke, who helped me coax it out slowly, with depth, with presence. 

Of course, when I say sex, I mean so much more than sex in the ordinary sense. And that’s where the translation gets tricky. Because it’s about sex, but it isn’t, but it is. It absolutely is. It’s about power, and where else can we feel our power with such force as through our passion? Through our union with another being, blood pumping, limbs tangling, bodies throbbing, lusting, loving, heating, hungry. 

“I love you so much I want to eat you,” we say without speaking. 

Wanting. Sure sometimes you just want to scratch an itch. That’s where a lot of  us end things. Take care of that urge and be done with it.

Me? I could never stay on the surface. This longing… I feel it to the center of the earth of me, rippling out into the universe. I feel it in my breath, in my sex, in muscles expanding and contracting. I feel it in my bones. I feel it as an underwater volcano. A tether to fire and flow. Lingering for hours in the throes of sensation, the poetry of experience, the dance of things. Longing, that cavernous mystery… that’s my ground. Fucking. You know what I mean. It’s more than scratching an itch. It’s power incarnate.

•••••••••

You cannot take hold of it, nor can you get rid of it.
In not being able to get it, you get it
When you are silent, it speaks.
When you speak, it is silent.

—Zen Proverb

Thank you to Claire Venus Lauren Barber Lyndsay Kaldor Laurita Gorman | MSW SEP Tamzin Laura Oldfield Zoe Gardiner Lindsay Johnstone Charlie Swift Kerry Hinns for arranging this beautiful ripple for International Women’s Day.

Caroline I know you have a story (or fifty) to share ❤️‍🔥

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1. You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

— Mary Oliver
Wild Geese