Rage Not Against Yourself

 

Lately I've been reading a lot about sexual psychology, not just to deepen my understanding of this animal, but to figure more of my shit out. It was honestly a class I always wanted to take in college, but it was always full... strangely enough. One of those things that we are instinctually obsessed with, but are, by society's demand, unhealthily repressing to the point of disfunction. I happened to find Emily Nagoski's Come As You Are, which I quickly discovered was a book that should be given to every twelve year old.

Nothing I am doing here is remotely sexual, so there is no need to mention any of that bit until my girls are old enough to need this wealth of information, but the psychology aspect alone was incredibly informative in regard to dealing with stress, emotion, and trauma. The only reason I'm even mentioning the book is because I got a quote near the end that surprisingly lines up beautifully with what I've been trying to get people to understand. Maybe just glaze over the sexual bit.

"The day you were born, the world had a choice about what to teach you about your body. It could have taught you to live with confidence and joy inside your body. It could have taught you that your body and your sexuality are beautiful gifts. But instead, the world taught you to feel critical of and dissatisfied with your sexuality and your body.

You were taught to value and expect something from your sexuality that does not match what your sexuality actually is. You were told a story about what would happen in your sexual life, and that story was false. You were lied to. I am pissed, on your behalf, at the world for that lie. And I’m working to create a world that doesn’t lie to women about their bodies anymore.

I can’t change the injury that the world inflicted upon you, and neither can you.

What you can do is heal.

….. You are normal. Beautiful. And as long as you’re not experiencing pain, you’re healthy. So when you notice yourself feeling dissatisfied with your sexuality, when you notice shame or frustration or grief, allow yourself to direct those feelings away from yourself and instead focus the emotions toward the culture that told you the wrong story. Rage not against yourself but against the culture that lied to you. Grieve not for your discrepancy from a fictitious 'ideal' that is at best arbitrary and at worst an act of oppression and violence; grieve for the compassionate world you were born deserving… and did not get."

This naturally got me thinking about where the root of all of this is. It is easy to blame Emily's M's (moral, medical, and media), but the true blame lies in ourselves in relation to all of our problems being "man" made, which is gleaming with a double meaning here. It is the things that we spend a lifetime trying to change or hide that make us unique. Those things are judged as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, by a society that makes money off our self hatred, not to mention keeping us all distracted by stupid shit and under their control.

Society itself is not to blame; we are to blame; because society doesn’t have the power to judge us. It is we who judge ourselves based on society’s suggestion. If you can roll your eyes or become annoyed when someone knocks on your door trying to save your perfectly-fine-soul, then you can roll your eyes, become annoyed, and even angry, when society tells you that you weren’t born beautiful. The uniquities that force us to banish ourselves from society’s aesthetic ideal, a hamster wheel all its own, are the very things that make us beautiful. We all have the same parts arranged in different ways (thank you, Emily). Those parts are exactly where they’re supposed to be.

If they weren’t supposed to be like that, we wouldn’t have been born like that, and any anomaly that resulted by life after birth should be worn with the pride of a survivor. We weren’t born with empty slots and bays for upgraded hardware. Rearranging your parts to fit into society’s ideal does NOT make you more beautiful, it makes you a successful victim of society's bullshit, and this includes make-up and fashion. Dress up because it’s fun to play different characters, not because it makes you better; it doesn’t, and thinking it does makes you silly. Everyone’s true beauty already exists within them, and that beauty can only be found by loving yourself, exactly as you are, because you are who you're supposed to be already. Don't give anyone the power to tell you any differently, because they're wrong.

All of those voices echoing around your head are destructive lies, and only you have the power to silence them. Fight for your nature. Fight for the beauty that has always been there, underneath the layers of society's illegible graffiti. Stop flailing around in the misinformation that you were force fed before you could rationally defend yourself. You can defend yourself and your beauty now, so start doing it. Rip your power out of the grasp of those who don't deserve it, and define your own reality, one where you are exactly who you are supposed to be, and if anyone doesn't like that, they can respectfully fuck off.