AfroerotiK

Erotic provocateur, racially-influenced humanist, relentless champion for the oppressed, and facilitator for social change, Scottie Lowe is the brain child, creative genius and the blood, sweat, and tears behind AfroerotiK. Intended to be part academic, part educational, and part sensual, she, yes SHE gave birth to the website to provide people of African descent a place to escape the narrow-mined, stereotypical, limiting and oft-times degrading beliefs that abound about our sexuality. No, not all Black men are driven by lust by white flesh or to create babies and walk away. No, not all Black women are promiscuous welfare queens. And as hard as it may be to believe, no, not all gay Black men are feminine, down low, or HIV positive. Scottie is putting everything on the table to discuss, debate, and dismantle stereotypes in a healthy exchange of ideas. She hopes to provide a more holistic, informed, and enlightened discussion of Black sexuality and dreams of helping couples be more open, honest, and adventurous in their relationships.

Showing posts with label molestation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label molestation. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Sex: As Natural as Eating





Let’s imagine a world where all the world’s religious leaders decree tomorrow that eating is bad, sinful, and wrong, and moreover, that if you absolutely MUST eat, it can’t be enjoyable, it has to be bland, without taste, and you have to eat in secret and in shame, and if you enjoy eating that you are a bad person.  Almost immediately, your normal, healthy mind would scream at you to enjoy that lobster, that juicy mango or summer peach, that hot apple pie with ice cream at all costs.  Everyone would know in their hearts that eating is essential for life, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating, eating is essential for survival, even that eating a good meal with family and friends is one of the few joys in life that has no compare.  But the pressure from society telling you that eating is bad and wrong would set up a mental conflict, a dichotomy where you feel you would need to lie, cheat, and manipulate in order to eat, where you were shamed into feeling bad for enjoying a good meal.  Advertisers would use images of all sorts of delicious food to sell their products but they would make sure no one was eating in their commercials.  Eventually, after enough time, everyone would co-sign the concept that eating was sinful and wrong and they would publicly adopt a position of looking down their noses at anyone who said that they enjoyed eating while you nearly everyone was reading cookbooks, watching cooking shows in private, and people would be left trying to reconcile why something that they enjoy so much, something so positive and beneficial, is considered bad. 

Imagine for a moment, if you would, how eating would become this huge underground phenomenon.  If you tell people something that is natural and healthy is wrong, if you tell someone that their natural urges and desires are something they should be ashamed of and is bad, they will find a way to revel in it behind closed doors.  People would have secret food orgies, they would develop food fetishes, like they can’t eat unless it’s on a paper plate or they only eat donuts or they would only eat in the dark.  No one would have a concept of what a healthy meal even consisted of because there would be no honest discussion of nutrition or portion size, because the simple act of even talking about eating would be considered bad, and misinformation about eating would be rampant.  Children naturally would experience hunger and want to taste different things but adults would shame them into believing that eating was wrong and that they couldn’t enjoy it.  On message boards and forums all over the internet people would have a united voice of feigned moral indignation and outrage at anyone who said they loved to eat food but in the privacy of their own homes, they would be installing gourmet kitchens. 

After enough time, the government would step in and enact laws reinforcing that eating was bad and convincing the masses that bread and water was more than sufficient for survival and that anyone who liked anything more than that was a social leper and a freak. The politicians and loudest opponents of eating would secretly have private chefs making meals fit for a king while they were out proselytizing about how sinful eating is and the perils of food.  People wouldn’t be allowed to learn how to cook or feed themselves and using condiments and spices would bring down the wrath of the folks who insist that eating is only valid if it’s for survival.   

So, eventually, you would have a world where everyone believed that something beautiful, natural, and healthy was commonly and openly considered bad, wrong, and sinful.  People’s psyches would be at war within themselves.  The belief that eating was bad would seep into every aspect of life and culture to where eventually, no one even questioned that eating was wrong and anyone who said that eating was natural and healthy and could even be positive would be shunned.  Eating disorders would be the norm and no one would acknowledge it or seek help for their conditions because they would be ashamed of admitting that they liked eating.  The human mind can’t function in a healthy way under such turmoil so it shuts down in the face of such a conflict, it compensates with dysfunction.  Your inner being inherently knows that eating is right and good but it’s been convinced by society that it’s wrong so the human mind struggles.  It starts craving eating things that are barely edible, things that are toxic, things that aren’t even food in an effort to wage a war against what society tells them is wrong.  People would start eating rotted, moldy food in private, eating stuff that will hurt them; they start feeling entitled to violently take other people’s food by any means necessary.  Meanwhile EVERYONE would be eating.  A few people would conform and eat only the bare minimum to survive and society would INSIST that they are the normal ones and that anyone who enjoyed eating was a deviant.  MOST people would be eating and enjoying food in private and this entire underground eating frenzy would be taking place, in plain sight and under the radar, because no one is willing or brave enough to challenge the belief that eating is wrong. 

Now, substitute the word eating with fucking.

It is precisely this millennia-old belief that sex is taboo, the repression and compartmentalization of sex, it is the very false belief that sex is naughty, dirty, bad, and wrong that creates rapists, child molesters, sex addicts, sexual deviants, and a culture of casual, unsafe sex because the mind and spirit are at war with what is supposed to be positive and absolutely life-affirming.  Religious leaders convinced us long, long ago that sex was bad, dirty, shameful and wrong.  They needed the world to believe that if one were to have sex, that it was only to be missionary sex for procreation inside of marriage.  They were wrong.  They lied.  Sex is normal, healthy, We have been convinced that sex is bad, shameful, sinful, and wrong when it’s healthy, beautiful, and right.  No one, not one of us comes into this world except through sex.  Pleasure is our birthright.  Ecstatic orgasm is a form of meditation, a form of prayer.  There is such a thing as healthy sexuality and it consists of far more than missionary position on a Friday night with the lights out between two married, white, mildly unattractive and boring, financially stable heterosexuals.  But humanity is so cut off from what should be healthy sexuality that we can’t even have a conversation about it.  People assume that healthy sexuality is boring and bland and that’s simply not the case.  Sex should be a beautiful buffet of different sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and experiences that stimulate us on different levels but it’s become something we do that we think is nasty and wrong and we need to get off on degradation and humiliation and pain and whatever else they feel is bad and wrong to compensate for feeling ashamed about their own natural desires. 

“But, that’s crazy,” you say, “That’s a silly comparison.  Everyone HAS to eat, you need it to live.  Sex isn’t a necessity.”  Oh, but you are so very wrong.  Sex is essential for our healthy existence.  We can live without it but we are damaged without it as well.  Touch is essential for life, intimacy is essential, hot, sweaty orgasms with another human being are essential for our survival.  I’m not just talking about the fact that sex for procreation is essential, obviously, civilization dies if we don’t have babies.  I’m not talking about sex for recreation when people go on craigslist and they screw the first person who sends a face picture.  People have been CONVINCED that everyone else in the world is sexually conservative, that no one else could possibly have different, complex, or even unhealthy fantasies.  Society tells us that the only acceptable way to have sex is with soft music playing in the background and candles lit and three minutes of vigorous humping.  In reality, people are doing things sexually that are extreme, dangerous, and even hurtful and there’s evidence everywhere you turn that people are into all sorts of extreme sexual behaviors in every corner of this not so great nation.  Think of a sexual fetish, no matter how obscure, and there are hundreds of websites catered to exactly that.  Yet for centuries, society has implied that everyone on the planet is having sex only for procreation and anyone doing anything more than that is a degenerate.  So, the mind, unsure of how to deal with these contradictory messages, copes by compartmentalizing sex, shutting it off until it becomes an urge and a drive that have dire consequences when approached from an emotionally and sexually immature vantage point. 

Your subconscious minds tells you that it’s perfectly natural to enjoy oral and anal sex because it feels delicious and yummy but since childhood, you’ve been told that anything you feel “down there” is rooted in evil.  Your subconscious minds knows that sex with the same gender doesn’t define you, make you evil, or make you a freak, it’s simply another way to experience pleasure.  But thousands of years of denial and lies tells you that if you experience pleasure with someone of the same gender, you are in the minority, a freak of nature, that you are weird.  You aren’t weird.  Everyone else is a freak for actually believing the lie that gender has anything to do with how you experience pleasure.  Experiencing pleasure with someone of the same gender doesn’t alter your identity, it doesn’t make you less of a person, you aren’t even in the minority.  That’s just another lie society has told us.  EVERYONE can experience pleasure with someone of the same gender it’s just that they have been socialized to believe it’s wrong.  Nothing more. 

Every sexual dysfunction can be traced back to this belief that sex is bad.  People molest children because they have been brainwashed to believe in this erroneous concept that people are sexless, so being sexual with a child becomes the ultimate arousal.  Their innocence, or the act of taking it, making children into something dirty and naughty, becomes a point of arousal for individuals who can’t reconcile the fact that sex is natural and that they shouldn’t be trying to coerce or manipulate children into being sexual.  Sex with children is taboo and anything that is wrong, taboo, kinky, different, or unspoken becomes more arousing sexually for people who don’t have a healthy concept of what intimacy, passion,  love, connection, or what it takes to maintain an adult relationship.  If we taught people that sex was natural, and had discussions about the psychological, social, physical, mental, and emotional ramifications of having sex, if we taught people how to be sexually mature rather than convince them that they are the only people in the world who have sexual desires beyond missionary sex, we could eliminate childhood sexual abuse in one generation.  Men rape because they have been socialized in a society that tells them that sex is wrong and bad but they have urges that tells them that sex is natural.  They rationalize the use of violence and force to rape in order to feel like they are taking back what is their right, because rape becomes synonymous with pleasure.  People have sex with animals rather than humans because animals don’t judge, they don’t tell secrets, they don’t have to emotionally connect to a dog or a horse the same way they need to invest in a relationship with another person.  A human being has the ability to judge and shame, an animal will only love you more and more unconditionally and satisfy their sexual desires without complaint.  Every sexual fetish, the act having one’s sexual aroused tied to a non-sexual object or situation, stems from someone being shamed for a normal expression of their sexuality when they were in a heightened state of arousal.  They were told that sex was shameful and bad, the feelings that they experienced were normal and natural, and then they made a subconscious connection with that object and sex and shame, BAM, their sexuality is intricately tied to that thing. 

Porn addiction is at pandemic proportions.  Men in their 20s need Viagra because they suffer from erectile dysfunction.  I have no clue why HIV isn’t more rampant in this country because people are having unprotected sex and they are not getting tested or having their partners tested in numbers that are staggering.  I strongly believe that the molestation of children, both boys and girls, is so widespread and commonplace, I dare not think about it too much or it will make me sick to my stomach.  All of these things are to be expected when sex is deemed taboo and dirty by the powers that be.  If you tell people that something that is inherent to their nature, a drive as natural as eating is wrong and bad, their psyches rebel.

I think that when children, especially girls, who have sex before the age of puberty, (meaning who are touched, molested and raped in childhood) they grow up to be more sexually addicted than those who have sex at a more "normal" age, like mid teens. I'm not condemning anyone with my comment, I'm simply looking at the origins of the behaviors. I've found that the women who had sexual experiences with adults in early childhood become hardwired for sexual addiction and crave more experiences like slapping, choking, humiliation, degradation, etc. when they become adults, they need sex for validation, they need abuse for validation. I've found the same for men as well, they simply tend to be hardwired to subjugate and oppress when they become adults if the sexual abuse was from a female. They tend, and the key word is tend, to be sexually submissive and masochistic if the abuser was male but they display the same level of sexual need and addiction as women. Again, I'm not judging anyone. I'm simply trying to figure out the origins of our sexuality in an effort to create a healthier dialogue about sex. So, while I am not putting anyone down for what they like sexually, I really am suggesting that the need to be humiliated and degraded is one not a natural one that comes from an healthy place. I acknowledge that some people want and need to be degraded and made to feel humiliated during sex to experience arousal and that is a very valid desire but I'm going to say that in an alternate, parallel world, sex would not be about degradation and shame but merely pleasure and connection. I think it would be a wonderful world if people were to experience exaltation, celebration, and validation while getting the bejesus fucked out of them.  If we eliminate this entire belief that sex is bad and sinful, we eliminate the sexual compulsion and dysfunction that surrounds it, we heal ourselves. 

Schools teach that sex is bad.  The church teaches that sex is bad.  Our parents spank, shame, and punish us for our normal childhood expressions of sexuality.  Politicians try to regulate our sexuality so that we are criminalized for our own natural desires.  The entire world is convinced that we need to be ashamed of our sexuality and it’s created more pain and dysfunction that can be imagined.  Sex is as natural as eating and we need to restore a sense of beauty and reverence to our sexuality in order for us to collectively heal from the abuses that have left us fragmented and dysfunctional. 

Copyright 2013 AfroerotiK All Rights Reserved


Friday, April 05, 2013

Our Abuse





I had a disturbing conversation with a young lady recently.  She was distraught over the fact that she caught her boyfriend of three years cheating on her with a transsexual.  Sounds like something from Jerry Springer, right?  Turns out she was depressed, quit her job, gave up her apartment, and was going to move back to her hometown to be with her family.  While it seems that her entire identity was wrapped up in this man, and she was having homicidal thoughts because he had the nerve to change his password to prevent her from snooping in his e-mail account any longer, I found out that she and her boyfriend of three years had never had sex.  Interesting, you may say?  But wait, it gets curiouser and curiouser.  Not only had she and her boyfriend of three years never had sex, he was her Dom, meaning their interaction was based on him beating and controlling her and her being “sexually” submissive to him.  Strange you say?  But wait, there's more. 

When I inquired why they had never had sex in three years of their relationship, she said it was because she had been a lesbian all her life and she didn't know how relationships with men worked.  Like any reasonably sane person would do, I sort of asked her if she thought her life and her choices were just a tad bit out of control.  She told me without a doubt that she was just fine.  It was obvious to me without even asking that she had been the victim of abuse when she was a child, so much so that her choices as an adult were extremely dysfunctional.  Without needing validation of my suspicions, I asked her if she had ever gotten any counseling for the sexual abuse she had been subjected to as a child.  She told me of being raped at 10 years old and how she had gotten counseling once or twice back then but she didn't need it any more because she was fine now, that she didn't have any problems at all.  When I made the decision that I couldn't help her and I politely ended the conversation with her, she became incensed that I was doing something to her and I somehow became the enemy and she verbally attacked me.

Black women are so used to abuse, so accustomed to it, so conditioned to swallowing our pain that we don’t even understand how damaged we are from it.  We pass down our abuse to our children and justify it because we think abuse is normal.  I had a conversation with a young lady once who told me her mother let her get raped by her uncles and her mother’s boyfriend.  Her reaction, as an adult, was to defend her mother’s actions and blame herself.  She was suffering from extreme depression and all she could do was blame herself for seducing these men when she was nothing more than a child. 

It seems inconceivable in this day and age when you can turn on the TV and see Dr. Phil and a host of other shows that discuss mental health that a grown woman would not be able to grasp the concept that being raped at 10 years old had some sort of negative effect on her life.  She doesn’t grasp the concept because we as a community can’t even face our own demons.  We rape, abuse, and molest our girl children and tell them that it is natural and normal.  We socialize our sons to use women for sex, we tell them that women are nothing more than objects to be screwed and thrown away like garbage in search of the next woman who looks better.  We validate our pain by holding on to some ridiculous Christian notion that it’s noble to suffer and that when we die we won’t have any more pain.  We sexually abuse our children and sweep it under the rug while pretending that it’s no big deal at all. 

Well, I'm not going to be quiet about it.  I'm going to keep bringing it up until we can discuss our molestation, rape, and abuse without shame.  I'm going to keep working with the abused to help them heal and I'm going to be all up in the faces of the abusers in order to stop this pain.  I'm going to fight for the man that was raped as a boy and who is so afraid of feeling powerless and emasculated again that he forms strings of empty and abusive relationships with women in an effort to suppress the pain.  I'm going to fight for the woman that thinks that she has to dress sexy every day because the only attention she gets is from men that want to fuck her when she shows off her body, a little bit of knowledge she learned at an early age from older men that tried to steal her innocence.  I'm going to fight for the spirit of the young girl that was raped at 10 years old that has no touch with reality and thinks that pain is normal.  You can stand in silence if you want but I will scream and fight and I will not let it go.