Generally speaking…

I’m realizing more and more that most people speak in hyper-generalizations based on our beliefs. The premises for most of our assertions are based on our worldview. I was watching a video earlier of a woman asserting, as many people do, that women who are “hypersexual” are that way because of sexual trauma. My immediate thought was why can’t some women just really like to have sex? Why does it have to be a trauma response?

I’ll give you that engaging in unsafe sexual practices may be rooted in the fact that the initial sexual encounters were not based in health or safety, but I do not think it is good to assume that women cannot just simply be sexual, especially during these times. There are a lot of women who have completely moved away from the insistence that women all want to be wives and mothers. As such, even if those women are still engaging with people it may mostly just be sexual because that’s genuinely all that they want from the interaction. I’m not even so sure anymore that everybody longs for romantic love in the way that people claim. It’s not as if most of this stuff comes to us naturally. We are working off of what we see, that is why we do a lot of the same things. That’s what culture and systems is about: the development of particular ways of doing things that continue to be perpetuated from family, friends, religious beliefs, cultural norms, and greater society. How many of us really decided on how we wanted to go about life based on our own inclinations versus what we see or are told is “normal” to want? Girls and women are not given the opportunity to explore our sexuality in the ways that boys and men are. It is taken for granted that boys are sexual. It is accepted and girls are governed accordingly. If girls were left to their own devices, would they be more sexual from the start? Probably, considering that a lot of times we are anyway.

Sexual predation is rampant, we know. The odd thing, though, is that when people think of predation on children it is deflected primarily to girls. I believe that we can’t know the number of boys who suffer sexual abuse early because, 1. Boys are told to be tough and will not want to be seen as victims (especially if they are preyed on by men and now have to deal with homophobia) and 2. Because a lot of young boys are preyed on by women and view it not as predation, but just losing their virginity. Considering the amount of men who describe their first sexual encounter as some older woman taking advantage of them, it is obviously a far more common thing than we know. However, sexism paints men as more likely to be predators, which is backed by data, but that also means that women are not seen as predators and are seemingly able to avoid detection as a result. People don’t seem to associate hypersexuality in boys and men as indicators of sexual trauma. It’s just taken for granted that males are sexual deviants and society is governed accordingly. This goes for things like daddy issues and a lot of things associated with girls and women. People are less likely to perceive boys as victims, while also somehow using the occasions when they are as excuses for why they victimize others. What a weird and ridiculous society we live in!

How do we speak to societal ills without hyper-generalizing? I feel like there are plenty of ways to set rules and boundaries without specifying who we suspect will engage in those behaviors. We do not have to make rules specific to who we believe will break them. If we can just hold that some things are harmful and that as a society we should work to prevent them, we don’t have to defer to prejudice. Anybody who does it is wrong. We can hold that it is inappropriate for adults to have certain kinds of relationships with children. That does not have to result in teaching one gender certain things and not the other. That does not have to mean only keeping girls from doing things or only feeling boys are going to do things. We could just condemn certain behaviors. We can be mindful of harmful dynamics and warning signs that indicate something is not right. We do not have to say, “If a person does this, it’s because of this”, particularly because it’s not as if we really use that to change things. Ironically, the ways in which we engage with things is clearly why they continue to be this way. If we were to address things differently, it’s only logical to believe those things will change.  Society is stubborn and completely illogical in asserting that it’s because everybody isn’t doing things in certain ways that problems persist and not that the ways things are being done are a part of the problem.

My contemplations of my own freedom and the life that I want to live have lead me to question everything. It is important to me to develop my own systems of belief based off not only may own experiences, but what seems logical to me. However, I remain conscious of using my beliefs to govern myself without using those beliefs to judge other people. Harm is harm and I will always condemn it, but I am opening up my mind to the fact that our lives are our own and we should be dictating them for ourselves. We spend far too much time trying to interpret and project onto other people. We should be able to simply live our lives. I have to work for my living. I have to live with the consequences of my actions. Yes, I can effect other people, but nobody is ever going to suffer me more than I will, even if I delude myself that it is other people’s fault. We need to stop assuming, stop projecting, and spend much more time and energy doing what we can to change our own lives into what we want and need them to be. No, that’s not easy. None of this is. But I’d rather spend the rest of my days fighting for the life I want than spending them damn near impatient for when it’s going to end. That is what I have decided for myself. I am continuously unraveling the many concepts of life I have picked up through my time. It is so much and yet that is all the more reason to keep at it. I’ll tell you more about it next time…