Yes, You Do Have a Right to . . .

(Young, twenty and thirty something women won’t read this, they will reject it immediately.  It is my prayer that mothers and fathers of young girls and boys will read this.  It is my hope that parents of young girls and boys will grasp my intent and teach their children about the consent and rape from a more enlightened perspective.)

As a car owner, you have a right to leave your car running with the keys in the ignition, the doors unlocked and wide open, in the middle of a huge mall parking lot while you run in to grab a few items.  It’s your right.  It’s your car.  You bought it and paid for it and it’s yours to do with what you want.  You worked hard for that car and if you feel like you don’t want to have to turn the ignition off and on, and if you feel like you should be able to leave the keys in the ignition and unlocked simply because your name is on the title and it belongs to you, yes, you have that right.    If you did that, you would be clowned as the biggest, most delusional idiot to walk the face of the earth though.  The story of your stupidity would go viral around the world and you would break the internet.    Twitter would create a hashtag just for you. 

When you go on vacation, you have a right to leave the door of your house or apartment wide open, with all the lights on, with the mail and the newspapers piling up letting everyone know that you are out of town.  You certainly have that right to leave your TV, furniture, electronics, jewelry, and clothes in plain view of everyone to see while you enjoy yourself without a care in the world.  It’s your right.  You own that home.  You shouldn’t have to have a security system, you shouldn’t have to lock your doors if you don’t want to.  Everyone should know that it’s your home, your sanctuary, and that they should respect your rights and not violate them.  The police might even be able to muster up the pretense that you aren’t the biggest moron on the planet . . . for a few minutes when they arrive at the scene when you return home to find that every single thing that you own has been moved out and there is nothing left in your house but the nails in the wall where your once beautiful artwork used to hang.  

There can be no question or debate about whether or not you have the right to go to a coffee shop and do your personal banking on an open, unsecure WIFI account and leave your screen open, with your financial information in plain sight while you decide to go buy a double vanilla soy latte half caff with an extra espresso shot and foam, without having your identity stolen and every penny you own being embezzled.  Forget the designer drink and obscene stupidity of that scenario.  If you are in a free WIFI hotspot, you have the right to ask a total stranger to watch your laptop while you go to the bathroom.  I’ve done it.  You’ve done it.  We’ll all done it at one point.  If we’re lucky, the person will be honest and when we return from the rest room our things will still be there and we will not have been violated.

You have a right to have unprotected sex, you have a right to get drunk every night of the week, and you have a right to leave a loaded gun with the safety off in your home with children.  You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, don’t you?  You can do whatever floats your little boat as long as it doesn’t violate another person’s rights.  There shouldn’t be any consequences to your actions, right?  You should be able to do anything you want and people have to respect that you have a right to do it.  It’s in the Constitution, isn’t it?  And while we would like to think that the person sitting next to us in Starbucks is honest and will not steal our stuff, that’s just wishful thinking because we know that in our society, people steal.  They lie.  They cheat.  They often times take what doesn’t belong to them. 

Just as all these examples of legitimate rights that people have are valid, they have committed no crimes, they have not broken any laws, there is NOTHING in the world that prevents anyone from doing each and every one of these things, there are foreseeable outcomes to each and every situation where a criminal will disregard a person’s right to be stupid and will violate them.  It’s like, for example, a young lady has a right to go to a fraternity party, dressed in what amounts to denim panties and a tube top, get drunk off her ass, and play strip poker while drinking out of strange cups.  She has a right to expect not to be raped, right?  But is that a smart thing to do?  Oh dear Goddess in heaven, if I suggest that it’s misguided for a young woman to do that, I’m slut shaming.  It’s respectability politics.  “How dare you!  Take two seats.  Shut the fuck up you ankh nigga bitch!” 

We as a society would make an artform of clowning, degrading, humiliating, and ridiculing anyone who could think that they had a right to leave their personal property readily available to criminals to steal but if I suggest that women should apply common sense measures to protect their bodies from being raped, I’m oppressing women’s rights.  Check it.  A gazelle has a right to wander freely throughout the savannah, enjoying the sun and the birds and all the pretty flowers.  That does not mean that a lion is not going to make dinner out of it, though. 

There is this pervasive, widespread, and delusional notion that women do not have to use common sense in order to protect themselves from being raped.  Is your need to get drunk and pass out so great that you cannot comprehend that you are putting yourself in harm’s way if you do it around men who will not respect your rights?  No one deserves to be raped.  Let me say that again.  NO ONE DESERVES TO BE RAPED.  But that is not to suggest that there aren’t some basic, common sense measures that young women can take to prevent being raped.  No one should be shamed for their sexuality.  But that’s not at all the same thing as suggesting that you should go out and play chicken at high speeds on a curvy road at midnight when you are under the influence of alcohol and that you can’t expect there to be fatal consequences either. 

We live in a society of rape culture.  Men see women as objects.  Men see women as things to be used, slapped, choked, beaten, ejaculated on, and thrown away like trash.  We don’t teach our boys to understand that no means no, we don’t teach them about consent.  Males are socialized to view sex as power and that taking it, stabbing it, killing it, and that every other violent metaphor for sex makes them “real men”.  So, the solution can’t be to tell women that they have a right to wear clothing that has no other objective than to arouse lust in men, and then feign outrage and disgust when a man wants to violate them.  You lock your car.  You lock your house.  You don’t give your laptop to the homeless person on the street to watch while you go to the bathroom.  But you’ll scream at the top of your lungs that you have a right to be naked and walk down the street and no one should say anything to you.  It’s deluded logic. 

I get that the right to party and get drunk is an inalienable right.  If men do it, women should be able to also.  I get that if you wear more than a bikini, you are going to suffer the consequences of spontaneous combustion and be consumed with flames because anything that covers more than you labia and areola is simply too uncomfortable to wear.  I get that you can’t possibly wear modest clothing because that is somehow infringing on your sexuality and you have a right to be sexual without being shamed.  I get it!  You have a right to cover your naked body in honey and chain yourself to a tree in the woods too, but you better expect to be eaten up by insects or worse. 

It’s tragic that we aren’t teaching our sons not to rape.  It’s reprehensible.  But it’s equally as tragic, no more or less so, that we aren’t teaching our daughters to pair up, protect one another, to have a safety net when they meet with a man for the first time, or the second or third time for that matter.  We should be teaching our girls that they shouldn’t be alone with a guy until they know him well enough to know that he is not going to violate them.  Of course, some men will earn a woman’s trust and violate her any way.  It’s going to happen for sure because we live in a society where sociopaths and sexual predators abound.  But let’s not give an engraved invitation for men to violate us and then call it empowering or our right either.  Young girls should be saying to men, “I have texted my whereabouts to my network of girlfriends.  They know where I am and who I’m with and you should know that I’m committed to protecting my safety at all costs.”  

Just as we should be teaching our boys from before the onset of puberty that they should not be violating girls, in school, at home, and in the media, we should be teaching young girls that if they are going to a party, that the D.C.B., the designated cock blocker has to stay sober, someone has to make sure that in a drunken state that the other girls won’t go off and make unsafe choices, or to call the police immediately if they see some creep trying to violate a woman, and they should have a rotation so that everyone has to be said cock blocker when it is their turn.   We need to start teaching our girls that they don’t have to be hot and sexy all the time, that they have more value than showing off every possible inch of skin, that conforming to sexist definitions of womanhood is NOT empowering.  In my dream world, we teach young women that their intellect, their integrity, and their activism are their most attractive traits and that they can be as sexual as they want to be with individuals who have EARNED the right to their intimacy and that their value is not in the size of their ass. 

Young girls are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that if they aren’t being sexy and attractive 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that they are somehow being confined in an oppressive prison that tells that they have to be asexual and virgin in order to have value as women.  I’m not saying that.  I’m saying that your sexuality shouldn’t be defined by how much skin you expose to men who aren’t going to value you as a person any god damn way.   

The women who have responded in outrage to this posting, the ones who are sending messages to their friends to read this and unfollow me, didn’t read past the word “raped.”  This youthful arrogance that has been promoted, this denial of logic, reason, and common sense, has been perpetuated for so long and is so wide spread that it passes as sanity.  But I’m telling you from what I know because I have been raped.  I’ve been raped more than once.  Once, by a friend in college.  Once, by an acquaintance because I rejected his romantic advances and he thought he would pay me back by raping me.  The first two instances were completely beyond my control.  I could have done nothing to stop them.  The third time, I  was raped by a young man who saw me as sexual prey and stalked me until he could get the opportunity to be alone with me.  I let him into my apartment.  I felt uncomfortable with him being there because I wasn’t attracted to him and I knew he had a crush on me.  I shouldn’t have let him in my home.  I should have trusted my gut that his intentions weren’t pure.  What I did or didn’t do does not mean that I deserved to be raped.  It means my judgement was off.  It means I didn’t value myself enough, that being polite to him should not have been as important as my personal safety.  I’m not saying that any of my rapes were more valid or that my victimization was better or worse than the young woman who gets drunk at a party.  I can’t say it enough, no person, woman or man, deserves to be raped.  I am suggesting that as long as we hold on to this delusional notion that young women can do and wear anything they want, and that they can willfully put themselves in harm’s way and that there aren’t “supposed” to be consequences because in Utopialand, women can do and wear what they want, we are teaching young women to play Russian roulette with their safety and possibly their lives. 

Copyright 2016 AfroerotiK All Rights Reserved

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

Forgiving Our Abusers

We are spiritual beings having a human experience.  We, you and I, are made up of the exact same energy of the Creator; we are made up of the same stuff that animates the entire Universe.  We choose our life’s mission before we are born.  We come to this earth plane to experience joy, love, and abundance in excess.  If we don’t live abundantly, if we don’t experience the peace that passeth understanding, it is not because we chose to live in poverty and pain, it’s because we have forgotten that we are the God source, we are disconnected from the energy that is Divine Love.  When others inflict pain on us, when others choose to harm and abuse us, it’s not because we have chosen that experience for this lifetime, it is because they chose evil and darkness rather than Love and Light, it is because they feel pain and want to inflict pain on others in order to try to make themselves feel better.  They are made of the same energy that we are, the same God source, but they are more disconnected from source.  It does not mean that they are evil, it simply means that their vibrations are not in tune with Source.  When we leave our bodies, when we are reunited with Pure Consciousness, our slate is wiped clean and there is no sin, no pain, there is only love.  Once we re-member our Divinity, we vibrate at the consciousness of Love again and we are Whole.