Howl

There’s Only One Person Who Can Grant Us Sexual Fulfillment

She’s fierce, she’s feral, and she’s free…

I recently had to turn off my Instagram DMs. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Every visit there started to feel like an oversexualized rerun of the Hunger Games. Messages about how much someone wants to fuck me. Requests for sex. Deeply detailed, erotic descriptions of my body or what someone would like to do with it.

Sure, I have a lot of sexy photographs on my Instagram feed. But you would think I was advertising for clients with the amount of propositions and inappropriate messages I was receiving.

Honestly, this pisses me off. While I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who think the definition of sex-positive is someone who always wants sex and always says YES when it is proposed, that’s actually not what it means, at all.

Just to be clear, here is an actual dictionary definition of the term: having or promoting an open, tolerant, or progressive attitude towards sex and sexuality. Nowhere in there mentions anything about a woman walking around with her WAP, knees perpetually open, hoping as much dick will slide in as possible as she goes about her day.

That’s the story, though. Our patriarchy loves to tell the story that a woman who expresses her sexuality does it because she’s a slut, or in tamer, more politically correct terms, she wants it.

So when people see an Instagram feed that happens to include a handful of sexy photos (along with nature photography, random moments, selfies, and photos of my beloved little nieces and nephews) many men go crazy and slide, all lubed up, right into my DMs where they can say all kinds of things that they don’t want to get caught saying in public.

What on earth is going on here that turns an average woman who expresses her sexual desire into a coveted drug that a man just has to get a hit of?

There’s another phenomenon, too. While some men might respond to sexually liberated women like a starving bee who sniffs a little nectar in the air, there are women who respond in opposite ways — shaming, condemning, judging.

A social media feed with even a few sexy photographs might inspire men to slip n’ slide into her DMs to see if she wants to suck their dicks, and it also happens to inspire some women to shake their heads and sarcastically thank the woman in question for setting feminism back a few decades.

“You can be sexy in a classy way that demands respect for women, or, I guess you can just be an attention-seeking skank.”

“Wow. Thanks for continuing to promote the objectification of women’s bodies.”

“Nice try with the feminist camouflage. Obviously, you want to play into the story that the only thing women have to offer the world is sex.”

It’s another kind of knee-jerk response, something like a high that leaves these women shaking, vibrating, needing to direct that energy…somewhere.

And all because a woman dared to express her sexuality without worrying about who was looking.

We want her.

We hate her.

We want to be her.

We want to fuck her.

We want to control her.

We want her to please us.

We want her to save us.

We are desperate for her.

I suspect a lot of men don’t know what to do with a sexually liberated woman. They’re used to playing the role they were given: to try to find sexual fulfillment from human beings who were specifically taught not to pursue that for themselves.

Some men play so hard into this cultural plotline that they come to believe it. They drink the Kool-Aid. They become absolutely certain that women don’t really like sex. They start to feel cockblocked from every direction, with little hope for fulfillment.

And then…they encounter the sexually liberated woman. Wow. There’s a woman who likes sex. What an incredible anomaly. What a miracle.

I would imagine most men dream of this — of the sexually liberated woman. Even those who are terrified of her.

And let’s be very clear: They should dream of her. They should want to encounter women who want sexual fulfillment as much as they do. They should want to see women as free as they are and to celebrate and enjoy that freedom together.

But because our culture teaches people to believe that women hate or are, at least, indifferent to sex, this encounter with a wild woman sets some men into a paroxysm of titillation and desire. It can inspire anger, inappropriate behavior, and even sexual aggression.

On the other hand, as women, we’ve been taught to police ourselves and other women’s behavior when it comes to sexuality. We don’t want to risk being written off entirely just because some people might consider something we wore or said or did slutty or sexually permissive. We don’t want to contribute to the over-sexualization of the female body, even while we struggle to own and express ourselves in our bodies in the way that we choose. And we know how easy it is for people in our culture to use the exception of one woman as an excuse to judge us all.

And maybe, just maybe, some women feel like they’ll never have the audacity to express themselves fully and therefore, perhaps, might find themselves feeling jealous of the sexually liberated woman.

What would it be like to live in a world that didn’t judge women for expressing their sexuality any more than men are judged for doing the same thing? What would it be like to live in a world in which the sexually liberated woman was not just celebrated, but protected? What would it be like to live in a world in which female sexual fulfillment was a neutral topic considered a normal function of human life?

I won’t stray into utopian fantasies here, but I will say that I think we’d see a lot fewer issues with sexually inappropriate or aggressive behavior perpetrated against women by men. I think women would have an easier time having each other’s backs. And best of all, I think we’d all be having a hell of a lot more truly fulfilling sex.

We all have a part to play in this. We know that so much of what we’ve been handed about human sexuality is deeply dysfunctional and largely untrue.

It’s our job now to look within and figure out what parts of these stories we have bought into and are perpetuating. It’s up to us to decide whether or not we want sexual fulfillment for ourselves and our fellow humans.

And if we do, we have one huge task to accomplish: to free and protect the sexually liberated woman.

This article was written for Howl by Yael Wolfe, a weekly column. © Yael Wolfe 2020

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