Meditations to Help with Sexual Repression: Girlhood, Medusa and the Impact of Female Rage

Breaking the Narrative of the Good Girl 

It is no misconception that females are given trauma in life. If you’re a female, I would be hard pressed to believe you haven’t experienced some form of traumatic experiencing from sexual exploitation, harassment, the pressure to conform and an inability to form appropriate ego states due to narratives passed down from patriarchal pedagogies. Understanding the ways in which females construct our own internal narratives is important to voicing what we experience. For many girls, like myself, the narrative of the “good girl” is something that creeps into the thoughts and actions of my life. The personification of the “good girl” narrative is something that hinders my ability to live within a degree of wholeness. It is hard for me to admit that I experience – rage. Rage for the hurt and pain that was bestowed on me, but even more relatively, rage for my stolen identities. The powerlessness I’ve felt from the pressure to conform and the narratives of women who have come before me. Collectively, as a society, we participate in a scripting of mainstream female identities that limit our self-expression and ability to fully experience and embrace our true feminine power.

The Need for Wild Women and a History of Repression

Endangered are the wild women, full of spirit. They roam this earth ever so quietly waiting for the reciprocal judgment of stepping outside of the lines. Wild women are those who are spirited, connected to the earth, full of passion and in-tune with the rhythmic romance of humanity. The archetype of the wild woman is spun by, Clarisa Pincola Estes, who writes about the lost spirit of the archetypal wild woman in her novel, “Women Who Run With Wolves.” The existence of the matriarchy, where men and women lived in unison, on earth, in a peaceful stance was uprooted during the agriculture era. Although, the new invention of farming was a catalyst for a technological and industrial revolution and an enhancement of civilization. It created what Marxist contemporaries like Marcuse and Freud call ‘civilization and discontent.’  The premise behind the consequences of civilization, according to Marxist belief, was a need for the aggressive and animalistic drive of eros (the sexual nature of men) to be suppressed due to the dehumanization of labor. More so conceptualized by what is known as the reality and pleasure principle. The permanence of the reality and pleasure principle has manifested its way into counter-consequences that have superseded the male sex drive from naturally hunting and fighting for food to support small tribal villages. To a decreased ability to transmute their fundamental need to express aggressive tendencies in a healthy, adaptive way. Therefore, society has become in many ways a manifestation of this internalized aggression.

For women, the consequences have been a negotiation of self. It is no coincidence that as we’ve created buildings and walls to disconnect us from our natural outside world that women have lost touch with who they really are. As readily as the pristine and boisterous forest dwindles, so does the connected and empathic wild woman. The narrative of the modern woman is filled with pressured conformities that create a template for a ‘scattered,’ ‘disheveled’ and even ‘helpless’ illustration of feminine power. Even as we have gained independence and worked our way through corporations, we have sacrificed our ability to make valuable meaning of our own narratives. More so, there is no awareness into how the adoption of these environments has possibly disconnected us from our complex degree of empathy.  Women have the invaluable gift of feminine creativity. It is how we survived before the dawn of agriculture. Women were able to make do with the natural properties that surrounded them in the wilderness. Domestication has denied our inherent sense of creative power. And yet, even as feminism has progressed into contemporary society, traits that are assigned to be substantially feminine are demonized as ‘girly,’ ‘heteronormative’ and ‘symbols of the ‘patriarchy.’ When the truth is: they were our disciplines, practices, and rituals before the construction of patriarchal society.

It is my belief that our desire as females to cook, nurture, care and make things beautiful is something inherent to our evolutionary and anthropological development. However, as society has developed, the very nature of a woman’s soul has been boxed, compartmentalized and packaged for economic value. The power and the choice to align with our natural identities has been socially constructed as monetized products that we can buy.

Before the emergence of civilization, our female sapien ancestors participated in mating rituals that incorporated the power and ability to have sex with many men within the village tribes. The behavior behind these rituals can be dated back to our genealogical ancestors like the bonobos and the chimpanzees. And the theorized implications of the mating rituals were to ensure that the emergence of the new off-spring were endowed with traits from the tribe’s most attractive, intelligent, strong and sophisticated male sperm from multiple donors. A real progressive approach to Darwinian survival of the fittest.

Connection to Feminine Power 

The connection to our feminine power is sometimes seen during the very act that creates life: sex. However, even then we’ve had to renegotiate our identities in relation to how we express ourselves sexually. For our sexual power and magnitude has historically been described as sinful and even evil. My sexual identity has been compromised continuously through societal scripts of repressive systems concerning puritan notions of sexual purity, deviance and violence. So much so, that my sexuality has been turned off in fear of judgment, prosecution, and reenactment of violence. If sexuality and birth is the one thing connecting women to their feminine power: why is it that our society has made being a sexual human so painful for females? 

Our connection and wholeness to nature is not enough to reconstruct our feminine sexual energy. Our need for love and sex is inherent in the concept of the reality and pleasure principle. Female sexual repression is negotiated deep within our neural psyche and constructed through the narratives that align with the ‘good girl.’ When one sits down to actually deconstruct the narrative of the ‘virgin’ or the ‘good girl,’ the consequences are a history of shame, pain and unidentified rage. Breaking the cycle of the ‘good girl’ goes against every identity that represents mainstream femininity. More so, experiencing violence toward the expression of female sexuality has resulted in a collective fear. The fear of being powerful in a feminine way.

The dominance that has been continuously and violently perpetrated against females has disconnected us from being able to authentically connect to our sexual bodies. Love is a commercialized ideology that is sold and in many ways represents our unconscious need for sexual expression. However, love (as seen in Hollywood films and hopes of marriage) is a construct and not a formal embodiment of sexual agency and action.

We’ve – meaning I – have become dissociated from our ability to act in sex.

Connecting to the core identity of your heart will help relinquish the need to seek sexual validation outside of yourself.

A Meditation for Sexual Empowerment 

Meditating can be an empowering act that allows the individual to conceptualize elements of themselves through present-awareness and observation. We can reconnect to our soul, sexual and creative energy by disconnecting from the scripts that demonstrate illustrations of the feminine. This does not mean we have to stop being apart of society. In fact, the purpose is to construct an identity that is whole and meaningful within the confounds of society. That is the embodiment of empowerment.

Begin the meditation in your home or safe place. Ground and center yourself. Then take the time to close your eyes. There is no judgment in how you complete this. Think of a time in your life where you felt safe and like yourself. Where you didn’t have to impress anyone or be someone you were not.

1. Say your name to yourself – notice what you feel in your body when you speak your own name, and touch the part of your body where you feel the most somatic sensation. 
2. What image comes to mind when you are expressing these sensations? Keep that image in your present awareness. 
3. Is there a word or a phrase that comes to mind when you sit with yourself? 
4. Declare a word that aligns with who you are the most. 

For me, the word was the sun. And I felt vibrancy, love and exuding peace. This feeling is your core-self. It is the real you. Not the scripted you. The more we are able to tap into the center of our core-self, we can feel empowered to be that all of the time.

In sex – you’re wild, free, vibrant and enjoying every damn minute of it.