Alright I’m gonna do a bit of a sex/dating braindump. I’ve had some things turning around in my mind lately.

First of all let me say that my faith in men, love, relationships, the planet, and indeed the universe grows every day. After what I have seen these past four years, I know what is possible, I see things getting better, I see men stepping up and softening -

- and I have every bit of faith that amazing, life-changing, ecstatic, transcendent love and sex are in my future. I’m not even worried about it. I know I’m worthy of it and I’ve fixed the internal algorithms within me so that I’m aligned to receiving it.

So when I talk about my past as I’m about to do, know that I already know it doesn’t define me. We’re past that. I’ve already planted seeds in the garden and if I have faith in anything at all it’s my ability to harvest.

I’m speaking about the terrain I was given to create in.

Many know that prior to my current self I was a dating coach, pickup artist, & kink/sex educator. I was also a lifestyle submissive masochist. And as became clear during my awakening/repatterning, I was operating from a deep abandonment wound and a need to be chosen to feel safe.

In fact, I was drawn to submission because it had felt unsafe for me to have needs and draw boundaries, and because I wanted clear and explicit instructions on how to behave in order to keep from being abandoned.

I was drawn to masochism because I had already learned to dissociate from my body during an abusive upbringing.

And I was drawn to sex because the experience of it temporarily quelled my fear of aloneness, of having to protect my own existence in an unsafe world.

In the past four years I’ve been mostly single, living alone, healing that core wound and undoing all the patterning that spurred from it, and learning to build a life I’m in love with that supports me in pursuing my dreams so I don’t have to wait for anyone else to rescue me.

(And when I did engage in partnership, I had some truly spectacular experiences, and a beautiful reacquaintance with sex, which is part of why I have faith and how I know things are only getting better as I get more aligned.)

In this last stretch of quarantine, I’ve been not only alone but remarkably untouched.

And you know what?

I don’t miss it.

Something that occurred to me when I first began awakening to the patterns underlying my sexuality was the idea that perhaps I had inadvertently identified as a submissive masochist as a coping mechanism for having sex with straight men.

From the understanding of pattern formation that I have today, I can say I definitely did. Because sex hurt, and because the men I was with didn’t listen to my needs. And even in that terrain, I still found a way to eroticize it and enjoy it.

Since then we’ve had #MeToo , shared countless articles and statistics about the female price of male pleasure and the degree to which women are likely to experience pain during sex, educated ourselves about the husband stitch and non-consensual pelvic exams in hospital settings

...and all the other ways that our society insists that women’s bodies are for men and not for themselves.

And I’m glad we’re finally discussing these things.

I want to make a note of how much I invested in catering to male pleasure.

Not only did I write a book on how to create attractio, write articles on how to give better blowjobs, and pose for endless lingerie photos, but I also worked in both the sex industry and in pickup artistry long enough to master the art of empathic and entertaining conversation -

- becoming the quintessential safe space for masculine unwinding. I was versed in the five love languages, the five erotic blueprints, I could perform most kink fantasies to professional standards.

I had to stop using dating apps even long before my awakening because they depressed me. I would agree to a date with someone who looked nice enough, and we’d meet up, and by the time the date was over they’d be convinced they were in love with me and I’d be exhausted:

- they’d had a marvelous time talking about themselves, and I’d held up the conversation. If they’d asked about me, they were in disbelief about the weird history I shared, especially the intersection of pro kink/trauma, and I’d end up feeling like a bizarre entertainment.

I would sometimes get messages on the apps asking if my profile was even real. Dating apps made me feel lonelier than being alone.

When I want to be with someone, I already know. Or at least I know that I want more information. I’m a full-bodied yes to the people I fall for, sometimes immediately. I have never gone on multiple dates with someone who has grown on me over time.

So I know that sometime in the future there will be another fully unexpected occasion of alignment with another person, something I couldn’t possibly orchestrate by looking for it, and I trust that when that happens I’ll be aligned to what’s meant for me and ready to receive it.

And when that happens, sex will be an expression of intimacy, of creativity, of play, of pleasure, of exploration and world-building. It will be because I know that it’s possible and that’s what I’m aligning myself to.

My only job is to open myself up to the channels by which the universe wants to bring it to me, and to that end, I continue to pursue my passions, follow my soul calling, and listen to my body.

But in the meantime?

It turns out that without the core wound underlying my sexuality, I am really not moved by sex.

The idea of my body being touched or stimulated in some way to provide me with pleasure is just absolutely not on my radar. I don’t want to be touched at all. Touch has historically not been pleasurable for me. My body is tired.

Sex as it has been practiced in this culture is not designed for my pleasure, and being versed in its fundamentals is not anywhere near enough to make it worthwhile for me.

I don’t see any experiences around me that have anything to offer me. The 10K hours that a man would have had to put into developing the expertise of appealing to the female gaze in order to be a match to me and what I’ve developed is frankly unrealistic in this culture -

- and while I know that attentive and skillful men exist, I really don’t feel like it’s a good use of my time going on a dating app during a pandemic expecting to find one there.

For the first time in a long time I have no one touching me, no gropes in the crowds, no nightclubs, no subway cars, no foot fetishists, nothing.

Just me and my body.

From this space, I get to create what I want. I get to let the imprints of my past drift away, and I get to decide from here how I want to be touched when one day I’m touched again, what sex gets to look like, what arises out of the nothing.

I get to dream up what it looks and feels like for sex to be even worth doing for me when I’m already capable of creating my own safety. As I sit here in quarantine, imagining what that looks like, I’m learning it has to be pretty remarkable.

And in the meantime, I don’t want anything out there that’s not that.

No sex at all is better than the sex that’s been available to me as a woman living in contemporary American society.

If you’re surprised, do better.

(If you wanna know just how bad it is, I posted this thread in paragraph form on Facebook and had men in my comments telling me they could relate! And then dirty deleting when I suggested that no in fact they could not and linking them to this article: https://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure)