The Sacredness of Women

This blogpost is dedicated to all women everywhere. The past and present Mothers of the world!

Every day, my POSA clients tell me horror stories about the myriad, ever-increasing ways that men act out their anger and feelings of powerlessness against women through their sexual exploitations. I hear stories that through and through, ring to me of the debasement of self and others.

And today I received an e-mail from a POSA client saying that the fact that it was Mother's Day only highlighted all the ways her sexually-compulsive husband has transmogrified her sexuality, that part of her that she had always kept sacred for him.

This makes me really angry for her! And sad too, that any man would superimpose onto our sacred sexuality a means, a method for his madness, reducing us to a disjointed object on which to act out his own discomfort, his own disconnection, his own dis-whatever! And in so doing, casually and thoughtlessly severing himself and her from the source of that sacred connection, their conjoint sexuality.

I fully realize that we live in a society poised over a cliff, sexually speaking, compulsively speaking. I see how it's never been easier to unilaterally decide to disregard one's commitments, easily writing oneself a free pass for one's utter lack of sexual integrity.

But today I am taking what I would call that righteous outrage and setting it aside, to rest alongside an important work for today:
the reclaiming of all of that is honorable and sacred in females.

Can we take it back? Can we reclaim our venerability from those who would debase us and un-invite them from the party, so to speak?
I say we can. And should. Today.

To honor Mother's Day and to celebrate the most feminine of all rites, giving birth, I decided this morning to look up Motherhood in my dog-eared copy of the brilliant Women's Enyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker.

Sidenote: If you never get around to taking a Women's Studies course, these fourteen pages would serve as a crash course in the history of motherhood specifically, and more generally, on the societal perspective of the female gender from prehistory till Freud. I found myself completely astounded and absorbed in what I read and when I finished, I immediately reread it. You might want to check it out for yourself.

I'm sharing here my favorite excerpt from that chapter on Motherhood with my faithful POSA readers on Mother's Day as I think it so beautifully articulates the irreducible sacredness of women in one succinct paragraph:

George Gilder, in Naked Nomads (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1974) theorizes that few men can attain psychological maturity at all without a vital connection with the sense of futurity through intimate association with a woman. She has, "as part of her very sexuality, a sense of the future: a sense of evolution and growth, a notion of deferring pleasures for future gains, a sense of the phases and seasons of life, a devotion to the value of the individual human being. These sentiments are the very source of human morality". Indeed, these are precisely the sentiments embodied in matriarchal religions' cyclic, future-oriented view of life. Such religions were free of the neurotic quest for indefinable "meaning" in life, since they never assumed that life would be required to justify itself. They were also generally free of the anxiety, guilt, and sense of sin imposed by patriarchal religions, evolved by males made insecure from earliest childhood by a social order based on male intimidation and dominance.

Today I honor our history as women who until only a few thousand years ago lived in overwhelmingly peaceful societies under matriarchal rule.

I honor the women who have always given birth and who always will, who would never create wars that we send our children to die in and who would never debase what is sacred about our sexuality in the form of pornography and all of its misogynistic spawn.

It is up to us to restore the impressive power inherent in our formidable female Selves.
It is up to us to consecrate our own amazing, life-giving bodies back to ourselves, to treat ourselves with respect and awe.
It is entirely up to us to share our gifts only with those who would respect us and venerate our life-giving bodies.

What has brought you healing from sex-addiction-induced-trauma (SAIT)? Please share with our readers in the Comment box below.

May you honor yourself today in your femaleness absolutely independent of however anyone else has related to it. May you give yourself that gift today. Happy Woman's Day!