Sexophobia - Fear of female power

We are a long way from the days when the Roman Apostolic Catholic Church only allowed sexual relations to married people, exclusively for procreation, and the ardent act was considered a serious sin of the flesh. Sex was feared like a plague. Sex was not talked about except by metaphors. We are also far from the first decades of the twentieth century, when teachers signed a strict contract that forced them to live monastic lives and forbade them to marry. The place of women was at home and married women should remain 'chaste' until marriage. Sexuality was tightly controlled. Little was said about sex.

Today is another time, and we are farther away from those dark times, when control over women was so rigidly exercised. Today, after decades of women's struggle, the advancement of women's freedom is a fact. In addition, sexuality and sex have become subjects for research, theses, books, lectures, discussions and the subject of conversation in the most “liberal” media, something unthinkable before the 60s, the decade of the counterculture, of free love, and a moment of advancement in the conquest of women's rights. If we look around, we will see many changes in relationships, and here and there, patriarchy has cracks in its foundations. With each generation, we experience more sexual freedom. Sex is the most discussed topic of the century.

Fear of female sexuality

Even in the face of undeniable advances, sexual repression continues to happen within our own homes, either in the silence on the subject, or in the strict containment of the spontaneity of children and in the prohibition of masturbation to women, as it is in the family that repression is based primal. We will also see schools banning teen dating on their premises; churches banning sex before marriage; sexual abstinence campaigns implemented by the government, and many other initiatives that seem to try to contain the territory of freedom achieved. From these institutions, repression expands, reaches the whole of society and also hurts men, but it is about women that they become heavier.

The fear of sex also continues to be widespread in all instances of phallic-patriarchal society: family, school, church, science, media, government and system. Although this fear of sex can be approached in many ways, the focus of this article is sexophobia as a fear of the woman's body and her sexuality, whose origin dates back to the early days of patriarchy, about ten thousand years ago, when man became control women's sexuality (before

goddess free to have sex with anyone she liked) as a way to guarantee the fidelity and paternity of legitimate children, heirs of their possessions.

Sexualization and objectification of women

We live in a world where pornography spreads and consolidates a model of genitalized, oppressive, violent, phallocentric, sexist and disconnected feelings and emotions. It is a model of animalistic sex, which annuls all power of freedom, pleasure and happiness, condemning humanity to dissatisfaction, anorgasmia and dysfunction.. In this porn world, women play a supporting role, submissive and humiliated, in the service of male pleasure, as if they were an inflatable doll, devoid of feelings and devoid of any power. This same society, which also sexualizes children's bodies and hypersensualizes the woman's body as an object of consumption, fears sex. For this very reason, it represses any expression of liberated sexuality, understood as energy that seeks freedom, love, contact, tenderness and intimacy.

We can perceive sexophobia to manifest itself in an institutionalized way, naturalizing behaviors such as repulsion for the female smell; contempt for the vagina, manifested in its pejorative names; the requirement for trichotomy; the standardization of small and pink genitalia; the horror of menstrual blood; the rejection of natural childbirth, although it shows without any ceremony, the blood spilled in violent deaths and wars for economic power. This demonstrates that there is a ban on the natural expression of women, as the censorship of breastfeeding and the exposure of nipples in the media proves, which, by the way, is naturally allowed to men.

Given this, one wonders, where does this fear come from? It is the fear of the feminine's power, fear that the woman may be free, may express her desires, and discover that her strength lies in loving herself, in knowing her own body and having pleasure without depending on others.. These women have always existed and, throughout history, have been called hysterics, libertines and witches. Many of them were punished with internment in asylums, house arrest, confinement in convents and death at the stake. Nowadays, those who enjoy sexual freedom, contrary to the moral norms of "good conduct", are insultingly adjectives as sluts, sluts, prostitutes, whores or crazy people.

Orgasm is power

Society fears that women will use their energy to promote a sexual revolution capable of shaking their rotten structures and their old institutions, overturning moral norms that ideologically serve to maintain patriarchy. Even so, we learn that the awakening of this sexual energy goes through the experience of orgasm; a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual phenomenon that makes women indomitable and powerful. The writer and scientist Mary Roach says that “female orgasm surprisingly also increases testosterone levels in women [in addition to dopamine among other hormones], so sex makes women even more difficult to manipulate, because testosterone more than any other hormone (...) influences the woman's libido and also makes them want to have more sex. So the fear that patriarchy has always had - that if women are allowed to have sex and they learn to like it, it will make them highly libidinous and ungovernable - is a biological truth. ”

Nature presented women not only with a specific organ for pleasure, the clitoris, “but placed her in a position of potentially greater biochemical authority than men through the satisfaction of sexual activity, being theoretically better able to obtain a certain level of activation of dopamine and opiates during sex, which has a specific effect on the brain and even on the personality (...) this dopamine will make the woman - if the woman and her vagina are not hurt, suppressed, injured or diminished - more confident, more euphoric, more creative and more determined - possibly more than a society dominated by the will of men would leave. Feminists are always trying to amplify the repressed female 'voice'. Serotonin (which is elevated with many antidepressants) literally overwhelms the female voice, and dopamine literally elevates it. "[Excerpt from the book,“ The Vagina ”, by Naomi Wolf].

The culture of rape

When Naomi Wolf speaks of bruised, injured, traumatized vaginas, it is impossible not to refer to rape, the ultimate expression of oppression and hatred for women, an extreme violence tolerated by society, which excuses the aggressor and blames the victims, alleging provocative clothing, sensuality, transit in remote places, absence of struggle and “promiscuous” or “modest” behavior that determines your acceptance or not as a victim. These elements that naturalize rape restrict the number of complaints and make it difficult to punish aggressors, and thus define “the culture of rape”. Although the term rape has a broad definition, I am referring here to the forced penetration of the vagina, which is the most effective and cruel way to subjugate women, as this is exactly the desire of those who practice it, often using objects, proof of that the aggressor is not always looking for sex, but, above all, he tries to impose his dominion and deprive her of power.

Freedom vs. repression on social media

Finally, I call attention to social networks, where information about sex abounds. It is impossible to deny that there is enough freedom to talk about sex, but there is a protocol to be followed, such as avoiding certain words, hiding nipples from women and spelling certain words like this: "sex". It is common for censorship to send a warning, delete a publication, suspend or delete an account, on the grounds that the posts violate community policy. On social media, there is a lot of pornography running, and several posts with macho content, offensive to women, but censored accounts generally present sexuality as the great potential for liberation, and sex as a source of pleasure and affective-loving involvement, in line with the view of Tantra and sexuality scholars such as psychoanalyst Wilhem Reich, the first to state that humanity is sick because of the repression of sex.

The same media that tolerates pornographic, misogynistic and prejudiced content, excludes accounts from tantric therapists and other professionals who talk about sexuality and, amazingly, a certain media had the nerve to remove a post from me, under the allegation of an inappropriate image: a single flower, of numerous pink and scarlet tones, in which nature beautifully reproduced Yoni, the female genitalia.

For all this, I see that women still have a long way to go, in the struggle to overcome the fetters of sexual control and repression with which patriarchal society tries to imprison our savage being. I may not live long enough that we can untie the heavy cloak of sexophobia that is still on female shoulders. But also I believe that the more women are touched by the ancestral knowledge of their orgasmic power, the more and more difficult it will be to prevent the serious disturbance of the order that our free bodies are able to create.

Prem Ragini is a tantric therapist and born again at Centro Metamorfose, with seven years of experience.