Hey Gorgeous!
Have you seen the Netflix show Bridgerton yet?! We all know how much I absolutely love history, historical dramas, and any and all documentaries - so of course I just HAD to watch Bridgerton. Now i know there are a lot of mixed reviews of this show for a lot of reasons, and let’s be real there are ALWAYS going to be people that criticize everything, and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
But I LOVED it! I loved it for so many reasons, and of course the sex scenes were very steamy…..
As I watched it and fell in love with Daphne - I realized something about her, and about you, and me in the past. We all have something in common - along with at least 90% of women.
Unfortunately the thing in common is NOT a sexy scene with the Duke……as much as we alllllll may want that! ;).
You see Daphne, and around 90% of women have NO idea about their bodies, sex, reproduction let alone their own pleasure and orgasm.
I recently read a statistic that in a recent study 9 out of 10 women could NOT name their reproductive anatomy. Almost half of the women couldn’t locate their cervix and almost 60% couldn’t correctly label their uterus.
As we see with Daphne she has NO idea about her body, pleasure, or how reproduction even works - and her mother is no help at all! Now this isn’t her mother’s fault the truth is that most women had NO idea, and it wasn’t appropriate to teach their daughters.
The BIGGEST form of oppression that we as women have faced, and still face is our disconnection from our bodies, our pleasure and our sexuality!
Our connection to our sexual power is our connection to our personal power - which is EXACTLY why it was so “inappropriate” for women to know anything about their bodies for THOUSANDS of years!
If we know our bodies, our pleasure, our sexual power we can not and will not be controlled. It is the shame of our desires and the fear of our own bodies and pleasure that the Patriarchy built itself on.
Think about the scene where Daphne and the Duke are caught making out in the garden - her “honor” aka virginity is “ruined” and her reputation is threatened - because she kissed him.
Women HAD to be made to believe that their sexuality was so wrong, so dangerous, so shameful in order for the whole system to work!
The system hat wouldn’t let women be educated, that sold us into marraiges, that wouldn’t let us own our own lands or have our own money. The system that DEPENDED on us producing children as our sole purpose. The system that carved women to be either the “Madonna - aka virginal” or the “Whore- aka NOT wife material”. It is this dichotomy that forced women to disconnect from their sexual power in order to survive as in marry “well”, and if that wasn’t an option for them - use their sexuality to make money but never have any status. Of course there were the Courtesans and that my loves is an entirely different blog post, but back to the topic at hand….
If Daphne had agency and sovereignty over her own body she would NEVER have bought into the notion that a kiss (and one that she wanted!) was so wrong.
If she or any woman was allowed to embrace her desires, and would have been educated about their bodied and sexual power they would have realized how innate powerful they are, and they would not have gone along with a system or a society that gave them no freedom or opportunity.
The other thing that you and Daphne, and I have in common is learning about sex and OUR pleasure from or through a man. The idea that men “know” how to bring pleasure to the female body, and that we will just learn from them is even more disempowering.
The reality is that men and women’s bodies and different, and every woman’s body is different.
We are constantly fed the narrative that a man will come along and bring us to pleasure - not to mention without a solid or much knowledge about our own bodies we really are at their mercy. Then factor in what we see in movies or on TV and it seems like after about 90 seconds of kissing a woman is turned on enough for penetration and will orgasm within like 2 minutes. WHICH IS NOT TRUE (well not most of the time - the ever delightful quickie may give you that!). This leads countless women to experience pain during sex, lack desire, feel like sex is just an obligation, fake orgasms, and be completely and utterly UNSATISFIED sexually.
The male body gets turned on, ejaculates, and enters a refractory period where they will not experience another erection for a bit (or a long time).
But the female body, can experience multiple orgasms can experience unending pleasure! Our clitoris has 8000 nerve endings and NO other anatomical purpose other than experiencing pleasure. It also takes longer to become turned on and aroused - the average is 20 minutes! Not 2, thank you very much Hollywood.
The shame of our bodies, and our desires is one that has kept us in bondage (and no not the kinky kind) for far too long!
So here we are after thousands of years of conditioning, decades upon decades where it was shameful, wrong, dirty and even forbidden to intimately know OUR OWN BODIES. Mothers were uneducated themselves and therefore could not educate their daughters on basic reproduction let alone THEIR RIGHT TO PLEASURE. All the while keeping us in the glass cage of Patriarchal ideals of what a woman should and more importantly should NOT be - aka sensual, sexually alive, knowing her desires, having a voice or opinion of her own - and we wonder why we feel shut down, disconnected, out of touch with our own bodies.
We are surprised when we hear statistics like 90% of women couldn’t pass an anatomy test about their OWN genitals and reproductive organs.
We make ourselves wrong when we freeze, hold back, shut down our desires, our truth, and our fullness - because it was NOT safe for women to be this way before.
The disconnection and under to no education about our bodies and our sexuality has kept us in a glass cage of disempowerment.
To me sexual empowerment, sovereignty over our bodies and agency in our pleasure IS the new Feminism, it is the new evolution of Women’s Empowerment.
The new Feminine Leader is one who is embodied, and the ONLY way to truly be fully in your body is to heal, embrace and celebrate your sexual power as a woman.
If you are ready to step into your Embodied Feminine Leader then you want to be one of the elite women who is in my Inner Circle: Embodied Feminine Leadership for the Modern Woman. click here, doors are closing soon!
And if nothing else give yourself permission to explore your body, to learn about it, to self pleasure regularly. We are so often obsessed with a sense of freedom in our lives, but the way to create TRUE and lasting freedom in your life is to create sexual sovereignty - remember your sexual power IS your personal power.
xx
Lauren