Let's Get It On ...

For as long as I can remember, the idea of going away to college has been linked with the notion that there was going to be sex, everywhere- all the time. It is one of the main reasons in which my Hispanic mother, hated the idea of me moving into a dorm on campus, when in her mind: I could just commute and live at home. “Why do you need to live there, when you can live here?” She assumed that I just wanted to run off and do all the things that I couldn’t do at home. Why shouldn’t she, when according to TV and movies, that’s all a college student ever did? Thanks to my father who went away to college and understood what it meant, he encouraged her to let me go and grow, getting the full experience of being on my own and making my own “adult-decisions”.

So, the question follows, did I go and “do what I couldn’t do at home”? Absolutely. But I didn’t seize the moment as quick as you’d think. Growing up, my father kept things very real with me. He normalized sex and took away the stigma that I should feel ashamed when talking about it. Our first talk consisted of him saying, “Don’t have sex until you’re at least 16 and remember that a boy will tell you anything you want to hear to get in your pants.” Because my father took the time to speak to me and encouraged honest conversation, I felt no need to run out and do things on anyone else’s time but my own. However, because of that, I noticed the amount of pressure placed upon girls to lose their virginity after or at a certain age, even by your own friends.

As the saying goes, misery loves company; your friend could’ve had such a bad/mediocre first experience, yet still chose to clown you for waiting -- in efforts to ensure your experience is the same. With that being said, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t let that pressure get to me but I’m also proud to say that I did what I wanted when I wanted and because of that, I have no regrets. Engaging in that kind of experience with someone is to open a door for yourself that you didn’t know you were about to open. You begin to learn about yourself in ways that you’d only be able to learn upon sharing yourself with someone else. Most people find themselves based off of these experiences, these sacred interactions that they have with other people.

Women, specifically become more confident and dare I say it, more of a “woman”. We grow into who we aim to be because with sex comes a sense of maturity. To understand someone else also helps you understand yourself. These are the things that as kids, we could never learn. It is also why it is encouraged at an older age because it brings a deeper understanding to certain aspects of life. Some people go off to college and enter their first real relationship and through these relationships, they learn so much about life.

Which often times is the reason why we’re told not to just share our bodies with anyone. The transfer of energies experienced during sex can be beautiful or can be super detrimental and it’s something that we never talk about. While I encourage the idea to do with your body as you please, I also think it’s important that we treat our bodies like the temples that they are. Do not grant entry to anyone, and make sure that they hold you and your body in the same respect as you do. In my humble opinion, as long as the mutual respect is there, the amount of people with whom you choose to share that experience should hold no importance. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t though.

While this time creates a learning ground, it also introduces to us a reality that most of us won’t ever understand. The double-standard. This standard takes us all the way back to our days as kids where our genders are policed in terms like “girls shouldn’t do that” and “it’s because he’s a boy that he can …” Men are encouraged to bask in their sexuality, it is what makes them men. Being “the man” is based off of how many women he can get to lay with him. Whereas, a woman is judged based off of how many men she’s slept with and if it’s too many well then she’s not suitable to be a proper partner, wife or mother.

Icons like Cher and Janet Jackson and even Rihanna have created songs in which they openly celebrate their sexuality without any shame or apology. They aide in creating the narrative that a woman can be a sexual being on her own accord without doing so solely for the purpose of her male counterpart. She can be so simply because she chooses. Sex is power. It’s empowering when you do it because you want to do it.

While we’ve come a long way with trying to dissolve the stereotypes of a sexual woman and what it means, we still have a long ways to go. In this day and age, we’ve decided to create our own narrative. It is becoming slightly more acknowledged that women are much more dimensional with events like Amber Rose’s “SlutWalk” which aims to impact and uplift while raising awareness about sexual injustice and gender equality. With women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan and so on, we’re learning that an active sex life breeds some of the hardest-working women you’ll ever meet. While intimidating, it crushes the idea that women are less than and forces the respect that is given to a man doing the same exact thing. Okurrrt.