Howl

Celebrate Your Inner Wolf

Be honest, nurturing, angry, raw, beautiful, sexy, and above all else: wild.

I was such a wild girl in my youth. I was so strong and brave. I spoke up for myself. I blatantly pursued pleasure of all kinds — even the kind of pleasure that I later came to understand was sexual, despite my mother screaming at me to “Stop it!” and “Be a lady, please!”

I just wanted to be free, roaming the woods, howling at the moon like a coyote or a wolf.

Unfortunately, life had other plans for me…being a “lady” and all.

I began to find my expression — sexual and otherwise — being curtailed by others. Don’t say that, don’t do that, don’t feel that.

By the time I was 10, I could barely see that howling wild child. And by 13, my inner wolf had been locked in a kennel somewhere deep inside of me.

I was ill-prepared to come of age in the hyper-sexualized world of the 80’s and 90’s. My parents were pretty liberal about sex, in some ways (there were no directives to protect our virginity or wait until marriage before having sex), but their silence about it was almost as repressive as conservative religious values would have been.

I didn’t know anything about sex except the most clinical explanation of how babies were made.

Everything I learned about sex, I learned from friends who spoke of finger banging and blow jobs with a Stepford smile on their faces, as if they knew they were supposed to participate in — and enjoy — these activities, but really, were just playing along and reciting whatever they had read about it from a teen magazine so they would sound mature and sophisticated.

I knew what sexual pleasure felt like by that point, thanks to my own explorations of my body, but I couldn’t imagine experiencing sex with another person. That seemed far too intimate for me.

Hearing my friends’ stories only further confirmed this. The idea of anyone putting their finger in my vagina or penis in my mouth was horrifying. I could barely handle the thought of the kind of sex I had learned about from our Where Do Babies Come From? book.

I didn’t realize until much later that this reticence to have an intimate encounter with another person’s body stemmed from the silence and shame I had picked up from my childhood. It seemed like everyone on TV and in the movies was talking about sex but the adults in my life were notably not discussing it. The silence made me feel like I couldn’t — shouldn’t — ask questions, feel curious, want to know more...

And so, God help me, I was learning about sex from Joe Eszterhas films, teen magazines, and my friends who didn’t know what they were doing, either.

It honestly surprises me that I was able to have a semi-successful sexual initiation at the age of 19. While that might be much later than many others would wait, for me, I still wasn’t sure that I was ready. I wanted to experience sex — quite badly, in fact — but I was drowning in shame by then, too embarrassed even to admit to myself that I wanted it. My inner wolf had all but disappeared.

Yes, the lights were out that night. No, I didn’t make a sound or barely move a muscle. In retrospect, I feel sorry for my first boyfriend, despite his later bad behavior. He had to work so damn hard that night. But I had an orgasm (that I tried to hide from him, so ashamed to be experiencing that kind of pleasure in front of someone else) and I felt such relief afterwards, as if I’d just gotten through a long speech in a roomful of people.

Thank god, it was over.

My inner wolf started rattling the door of her cage when I was 25. I was a student at an extremely liberal college, studying literature, and found myself daily having conversations with fellow students and faculty about pleasure, sex, and violence — the themes in the books and poems we were reading. There wasn’t a day that went by that I wasn’t surrounded by people talking about the rapture of orgasm, the necessity of female pleasure, and the beauty of the physical body.

What? How was this possible that daily conversations with other adults were suddenly about sex? And that it seemed totally normal to talk like that?

I got really worked up when we studied the Beat poets and our professor read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl aloud. I still remember one line so well:

…who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness…

I sat there with my mouth open. There was my Ph.D.-in-American-Literature professor talking about ecstatic copulation, cunts, and gyzyms. Holy shit.

I felt the cage door inside me swing open and my wolf took a tentative step toward freedom.

Throughout the years, I struggled so deeply with this inner wildness that could no longer be contained. I tried letting my wolf loose as freely as I was able, but ended up in situations that were not healthy for me.

After that, I’d try to keep her at least within a fenced enclosure — not fully caged, but contained.

I was thrilled when I settled into a long-term relationship in my thirties, feeling that I finally had a safe space in which to let my wolf roam free. But no. The shame I was still working through was like an invisible, electric fence, whose boundary I could not see, but always feared.

It didn’t help that my partner was an extremely conservative Christian who wanted animal sex in the bedroom that inevitably left him feeling ashamed of our pre-marital activities — a shame he was happy for me to carry. His arousal could so easily devolve into disgust and moral outrage about the supposed feminine proclivity toward corruption.

Again, I tried to curtail my wolf, only letting her out when I could manage my shame, and when my partner seemed to want my wildness, but hiding her away when he was looking for a sweet, virginal, wifely figure in other rooms of the house.

When he left me for a younger woman, I think my wolf started to die. I was so used to boxing up my sexuality, my wildness, that I didn’t even notice when I was doing it anymore. I put her away, convinced I would never need her again.

Thankfully, life is a powerful force. True wildness can never be killed or even genuinely suppressed.

My wolf was not dead, after all.

When the first rumblings of the #MeToo movement began rocking across our cultural landscape, my wolf stood up and howled. She howled so long, so hard, so plaintively.

Listen to me, she said. I matter. What I want matters. Who I am matters. Listen to me.

I want pleasure. I want love. I want passion. I want my voice to be heard.

She howled and howled and howled, determined that I should listen.

Finally, at 43, I heard her and am, at last, determined to let her roam free.

This column, Howl, is a celebration of my inner wolf.

It is my love letter to the women of my generation who may have similarly struggled to pursue pleasure with total abandon.

It is my attempt to finally engage in honest and loving conversation with the men of the world.

And it is, I hope, an affirmation for the young women coming of age so that they feel supported in speaking freely about their needs and pleasure.

I want it to be honest, nurturing, angry, raw, beautiful, sexy, and above all else: wild.

Because women are the wildest creatures on earth. We’ve just been made to forget that.

I want to keep howling so I never forget again.

Welcome to Howl by Yael Wolfe.

© Yael Wolfe 2019