Your Body is not a Temple, It’s an Amusement Park
Sexual guilt is human, it’s not just you
Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park, enjoy the ride. Anthony Bourdain.
So many of the feelings and anxiety that swoops us whenever the time to express our sexuality comes knocking again for the 1000th time are usually alien to us. The thoughts weigh heavy on our minds and even heart, and because our sexuality has a way of overwhelming us with emotions, it gets way too difficult to discern which of these thoughts are how we truly feel.
Sexuality is like a roller coaster, you scream all through the ride, but when the thrill fades away, you’re abandoned with emotions and left to figure out how to handle your soberness. Sometimes, the clouds that fill our minds aren’t even directly related to the sexual experience we had, but they grow powerful as a result of the societal conditioning we have endured in the past.
If you have had a really careless sexual adventure before, making the right decisions after might still leave you filled with the same anxiety. The anxiety you feel could be related to the previous trauma you faced before as a result of the poor decisions you made, and not necessarily about the one-night stand you just had.
Culture has a way of locking away our sexuality, and any mistakes we make along the way gets labeled as a shameful act we should have avoided. One way to see things, is to understand that as humans we make a ton of mistakes on almost every thing, and sex shouldn’t be any different. There’s this cultural expectation on sex, and how it should be a perfect experience. This idea is really toxic and has no place in our current reality.
Till today, I still experience guilt whenever I masturbate, not because the self pleasure didn’t go well, but as a result of a plethora of reasons, most of which are invalid. I think to myself, why did I just masturbate, was I supposed to do it now, shouldn’t I have waited a bit? I tell myself so many ridiculous things, and it’s funny thinking about it right now.
The society I grew up in, a very religious and conservative Nigerian one, had a way of making us ashamed to feel like sexual humans, it was always as if we had committed some sort of atrocity by merely entertaining the idea of erotica. I remember vividly a time in high school, when we all asked one of our friends who was very reserved, how he never really talks about girls and sex.
His reply was wowing, he insisted that he never even thinks of the idea of sex, and he was really serious. For some reason he felt the need to seek validation by exempting himself as a sexual being. This makes one wonder how far sexual guilt could take us to, and also realize that a good part of this shame is a ripple effect of our wandering emotions.
Regardless of the sexual liberation era we live in, there is still so much guilt, but we need to always evaluate its validity. Is worrying about self pleasure that necessary, especially when you’re fully aware of your sexuality?
Do we need to always feel down whenever we have sex with someone whom we’re no longer attracted to? Do we need to feel shame for not looking glamorous during intercourse? Do we even need to always playback every bit of our ‘sex tapes’ in our minds?
Understanding that sex isn’t a perfect experience, would help us chase ‘good positive sex’, instead of remain sensitive to the brutal expectations of culture and people around us. Why do the same sexual acts get praise when its a celebrity, but the moment we tell our own experience, all of a sudden we should’ve ‘done better’ or ‘we’re lost’ and ‘need help’.
A celebrity ‘whoring’ just has a bad habit, but the rest of us who open up about our sexual kinks, all of a sudden ‘need to seek help’.
It’s time we realize that context would always be a burden we’d have to bear with our sexuality for a long time. So, when next you feel overwhelmed with emotions after a sexual or erotic experience, don’t forget you’re human, and every thought you have doesn’t have to be valid.
Listen to yourself, block any expectations, and take time to understand your sexuality and what makes you happy, healthy and sensually sane. Are you wild and genuinely love being ‘slutty’, if yes, then make the best out of it. Are you more reserved, and on the celibacy squad, please do you, and don’t feel you aren’t ‘living enough’.
Being ‘good sex positive’ has to do with enjoying sex the way you know how to, and not how everyone else defines it. Sexual guilt is not always you, and there is no scale that defines how sexuality should be expressed, much less yours.
Sexual guilt is simply an experience we as humans go through from time to time, for being both sexually liberated and sexually conscious.
Your body is not a temple where everything is always serene and goes as planned, it’s an amusement park full of so many rides, and taking any of the rides doesn’t make you any less of the beautiful creature you already are.
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