SEXUALITY
Sometimes Sex is Just That — Sex
It’s hard to talk about sex. At least in this country. A country of Baptists, Catholics, and Evangelicals. I grew up with it all. The guilt, the shaming, the endless rules. The constant media titillation, sex sells and the constant “good girls say no.”
Sometimes sex is just that — sex. An itch you need to scratch. You are not a bar of soap, you will not melt. A short interlude of fun, of desire, of lust, of companionship. One day that may change. One day you may meet someone that satisfies it all. You will feel you have come home. You have been fed. You are satiated and satisfied…or not.
I graduated in 1972. The year of hippies, free love, drugs, civil protest. Women’s rights were front and center. We burned our bras, applied for jobs previously held only by men, we entered colleges and we had sex just because we liked it. Birth control — the pill — had set us free. Free from unwanted pregnancy, free to enjoy sex without worry. Free from back door abortions. Free to love, to explore, to have all that men had always had. The pill was the most influential change in my lifetime.
I remember my mother’s generation where the word “pregnancy” was never said out loud. She was “PG” and that was whispered. At 18 I had no idea what gay or lesbian meant. It was a time where married couples on TV and in movies slept in separate beds. It was all naughty, sinful, wrong but we were never quite sure of what “it” exactly was.
My mother talked about the pill and the freedom it granted. She talked of the woman with seven kids and one more on the way. The woman hurling herself down the children’s slide at the park, dropping hard at the bottom. Hoping to save herself from one more child she could not afford to support, could not give all that they would need. Another child to tie her to home, drudgery, and little else to look forward to but one more mouth to feed. A life of endless pregnancies.
My mother made sure my sisters and I would enter our adult years armed, prepared, and open-minded. That we would accept our sexuality and enjoy it. She gave us the freedom to be women in control of our lives and choices.
So we entered the 70s and early 80s. Open to it all. We did not judge. We did not hold back. We wanted it all and we took it. It was a magical time between birth control and AIDS. It was a time of innocence and ignorance. Our society had left us uneducated about so much concerning sex and so lessons were learned the hard way. The bad came along with the good but society had changed and I thought there was no going back.
That time is gone but so far our power remains. We have the power, at least in this nation, to control our reproduction. We control the act of sex as far as a “yes” or a “no.” We women own it. Some men have a hard time dealing with that. There is rape, child marriages, and abuse. All products of some men’s desire and anger in not having control. We women must not give up our power, our choices. We must fight to legally defend this power. Forces are trying to turn back the clock, to take our control away, to rob us of how we choose to live our lives. Don’t let them. We are the gatekeepers in defense of our daughters' futures.
© Vicki Price 2021
