A Young Girl’s Sexual Grace?
A WholeBody session created the phrase Sex and Female Grace during a discussion with a male focusing partner of sex in general and the differences between how children may have different initial experiences of sexual sensations based on their sex. What emerged was a sense of Sex and Female Grace. We focused on the early recognition of sexual feelings. For people, especially for those of us born in the 1940s and 1950s and earlier, we experienced our early sexual sensations differently. After listening to my partner’s experience, I came to understand girls’ sexual awakenings were ignored in comparison to what boys experienced. The phrase that came to me was Sexual Grace because no one worried that girls would masturbate and did nothing to prevent it. Boys often suffered from a form of monitoring.
How Can Sexual Grace help You?
While girls at that time were frequently underserved, we often didn’t have a chance to play sports or ride bicycles for fear we would injure ourselves and inadvertently lose our virginity. Boys were usually provided with many more opportunities to be active, but they were also under scrutiny by family and Church to prevent them from “self-abuse.” No one ever mentioned masturbating to me or my female classmates. As part of the Wholebody session, the words Female Grace emerged to separate the differences. While girls tended to be ignored compared to boys, neither family nor Church seemed to be concerned about preventing girls from having experiences of sexual sensations. It was the opposite for boys.
When attention interferes with natual experimentation?
My Wholeboby partner described how his Irish Catholic family and his Church were very strict about preventing boys from masturbating. They tried to make sure their boys did not masturbate. This control was often very suble and communicated via a non-specific verbal code. My partner shared the impact of this prohibition on himself and other boys. They would continue to masturbate but go to confession every morning to ask forgiveness for their sin before taking communion. This information wasn’t the first time I heard this story. My experience was that I never experienced any guilt of fear from the Church or my family. Instead the lack of attention allowed me to feel sexual sensations with pleasure. This was my Female Grace.
My husband, also raised as an Irish Catholic, was taught to remember that he shouldn’t take Holy Communion unless he asked God’s forgiveness for “self-abuse.” This phrase was whispered to him by one of his Churche’s priests. My Husband also had difficulty meeting this high level of ignoring his body’s natural, pleasant feelings. He participated in the ritual: masturbate at night, go to 6:00 am confession with the sleepiest priest, and take communion at early Mass each day before school. The Catholic Church and families were highly engaged in this endeavor. The boys, however, were highly involved in finding an acceptable compromise between the power of the Church and the power of their biological sensations.
How diferent times in our lives are seen as Graceful or dangerous?
In those years, girls didn’t exist the way boys did. Holding space for this disparity brought something new. Instead of my normal anger at what I missed out on, Wholebody helped me see this lack of attention was a sense of Female Grace. No one was paying attention to how girls reacted to the natural feelings that emerged from our bodies until we were older. We had the opportunity to have this personal experience without all the condemnation. However, the prohibition would become to stay away from boys for fear of out-of-wedlock pregnancy. This prohibition came full force as we entered our teen years. We did, however, have this period in which we were free to invent our reality in regard to the sexual sensations and stimulation.
Children start to feel sexual bodily stimulation from the age of three. Many learn independently to find the pleasure areas through exploring their bodies. Families and religious entities in the mid-1900s were adamant about how boys responded to these natural sensations our bodies create. Adult attention started earlier in boys’ lives than girls. For boys, it started early in their lives and was about the prohibition of masturbation. For girls, it started after a girl started to menstruate and boys began to be attracted to girls in their teenage years. While Boys must not masturbate, Girls had a different set of rules that made them responsible for their “virginity.” These practices had a life-long impact on our relationship to our sexual selves.
First Memories
My first memories of sexual sensations started with television. I was in early grammar school. One night, I was lying on the floor, watching TV with my family. A Peter Sellers movie, A Shot in the Dark, was on TV, and the storyline was that the Sellers’ character happened upon a nudist colony. Most of the bodies in the scene were covered by bushes and trees. However, the concept that one would want to be naked in front of other people was exciting to me. As I watched the movie, I felt a familar stimulation in my pelvis. Then, I found that if I pressed my pelvis into the floor, the stimulation became stronger. I was lucky that the rest of the family also was intently watching the TV.
In our home, there was a severe prohibition to expose part of one’s body to another family member, so the thought that people might want to be naked in front of others was highly stimulating. That experience led to masturbating most nights before I fell asleep using the idea of wanting to be nude. I This was a private experience that connected me to my body though Female Grace. I sometimses feared that these sensations might not be what “good girls” do, but, like my male counterparts, the sensations were too pleasurable to stop. Also, no one ever told me to confess this practice. Raw Desire Awakens to It’s Own Power
The Impact of Church and Family
Neither Church nor family imagined that young girls experienced these feelings. It wasn’t until I entered high school that my mother gave me a book written by the Catholic Church about the dangers of sexual feelings. She spiced up her attempts to dissuade me from considering any interaction with boys. One of my favorites was to tell me that “kissing a boy was like kissing a wall”. Girls don’t experience any sensations from kissing.” I felt sorry for my mother and father if they believed that. National Center on Sexual behavior of Youth
Many years later, I started to watch Italian films and heard one of the characters say those exact words in Italian. It was a cultural practice to keep young girls away from boys. I wasn’t particularly attracted to boys nor they to me until I was a sophomore in high school.A popular boy started to pay attention to me. It was the first time that I experienced that kind of attention. He invited me to be his date for the school play. My parents were not particularly happy about that.
My father told me I couldn’t date boys until I was eighteen years old. We argued, and I won. I went to the school to play with this new friend. We sat down in the auditorium and waited for the play to start. The young man reached for my hand and held it. That immediately instigated a recognizable sensation in my pelvis. It was the first time another person sexually stimulated me. I couldn’t believe that having someone’s hand in mine could produce that sensation. I was delighted that it was so easy!
The lack of Abortion Rights is the Loss of Female Sexual Grace
When New York State legalized abortions 1970, I remember sitting in the bleachers in the school’s gymnasium with other girls, talking about how that law changed our lives. Up until then, I was so terrified of any sexual contact. The life-changing possibility of pregnancy terrified me. Now, there was a safety net. It was a momentous change. I had agency and was no longer ruled by the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. I had already seen the impact of an unwanted pregnancy on a classmate. While I wouldn’t have unprotected sex, I felt like the threat of a pregnancy was gone.
The removal of abortion rights in the USA is a profound loss for women and girls. It changes their relationship to their sexuality and right to control their bodies. There is no justification of this loss other than the STATE’s need to control female bodies.
We have all just been liberated from our secrets of that natural, self loving and self pleasuring that awakens has sense of life at our core. Life is very nature, sensual, and pleasurable. It is the awakening of our very soul coming alive as a sensing experience that nature is loving, the Holy Spirit experiences a very similar experience as it creates an atmosphere inside our cell of our living nature! One comment I would like to add that the word self abuse doesn’t fit for me, as a boy self pleasuring is what I belong for, and what my imagination creates to awaken that capacity to feel aroused by life itself amen
Thanks for your response to this blog. The love you shared helps the rest of us to join you in these pleasant experiences. It is essential to talk about how the initial sensations that our body sent us were loving and delightful. We were sometimes taught that these sensations were terrible. I used the phrase “self-abuse” because it was how a priest described them to my husband when he was a child, and he used that phrase to name them in his thoughts. The irony is that masturbation is so connected to masculinity that no rituals were created to prevent girls from enjoying their bodies’ gifts. Instead, this Female Grace helped us peacefully enjoy our bodies’ gifts.
A really interesting reflexion Diana on the messages we received as children and particularly as adolescents. I am curious as to how these messages have played out over our lives. I think I was given the message that females do not have sexual feelings, only males!!