Friday 4 May 2012

S h a m e l e s s S e x

I'm a pretty ordinary, family-loving, housework-avoiding, diet-flunking woman.

by Pamela Madsen in Shameless Woman


I've been told that embracing my sexuality is to dance with danger. To talk about it openly is to fall into a bottomless pit where everything I hold dear will go down with me- family, home, my flourishing career. Well, we'll see. Going public with what polite society says is best left under the covers has its risks. Truth to tell, I'm a little scared. But that's a small price to pay for becoming shameless.

Does that make me a sex radical? Nah. Not even close. All it makes me is a whole, natural woman. A pretty ordinary, ambitious, family-loving, housework-avoiding, diet-flunking everyday woman. In other words, an over-amped, chubby Better Crocker in stilettos.

Becoming shameless has been my personal evolutionary process, one that got jump started in midlife. At the time, I wasn't all that interested in having sex with my husband of many, many years (the only man I'd ever slept with, by the way). I enjoyed it when we did make love, but I didn't actively seek it out. Did that mean I had low libido? Was I physically or psychologically deficient or dysfunctional? Was there something wrong with me? Was I like millions of other women who successfully boxed off their sexuality from everything else we are?
I was determined to find the answers. No more sublimating, overeating, over-exercising or overworking. I needed to know what was going on. My pursuit of the "truth" turned me into a sexual sleuth launched on an unofficial, unexpected investigation into a subterranean world of sexuality that I never knew existed. Neither had any other person I'd met until that moment. Which is a lot of people.

The first thing I discovered is that I had a robust, juicy, and full sexual self that lives inside. The second thing is that I wasn't alone in my desire to unearth that part of me. It was before the time when the true nature of female sexuality and desire had become the near obsession it is these days. I felt like I was wandering in a vast, uncharted wilderness even if everyone secretly wanted to go there, too.

Admittedly, there's more information out there now. Academics and medical experts compile statistics on female sexual dysfuction apparently a plague of epic proportions- and how to fix it. Social media sexpot sexperts blog, Twitter and FaceBook their horn-dog diaries, flooding the web with virtual instruction manuals on self-pleasuring, high-tech gadgetry, threesomes, and becoming the ultimate pleasure machine. There are crusaders against the medicalization of female sexuality, including libido pumping drugs and plastic surgery to "rejuvenate" the vagina.

It's all good, part of a society-wide discussion that should be happening. But in the meantime what's a middle-aged mother, housewife and careerist to do? Where do real people find good role models who help us hang on to the lives and loves we cherish even as we open up our sexual sides? Who's out shouting that we don't have to suffer for being sexually alive?

Me. I'm willing to stand up and say, "Screw suffering, it's highly overrated and completely unnecessary." I'm willing - and happy -to make my personal, admittedly wonky voyage to self-discovery into a tool everyday women and men can use to pry off the lid of their desires. Because that's the first, and no doubt the hardest step to becoming whole.

But I'm good at stepping up and speaking out. I'm a bred-in-the-bone advocate. It's what I do. It's what I've done for decades as a leading advocate for the infertile starting at a time when infertility was as taboo as, oh, say, female sexual desire. I'm used to people looking at me sideways and calling me unpleasant things. I don't like it, but I can take it because I believe in what I'm doing.

And I believe in every person's right to acknowledge and have their desire when consenting adults are on the same page. The sticky part is when it comes to actually reckoning with the true nature of female desire.

The recently published pioneering work of Dr. Meredith Chivers, a noted psychology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario who specializes in female sexuality, indicates just how complex desire can be. In her own words, Dr. Chivers found that, "Women are apparently disassociated from their bodies and have greater difficulty than men in connecting their own erotic responses to what they are actually feeling or desiring."

In other words, women's genitals and brains operate on different tracks when it comes to sexuality.

University of Nevada Las Vegas psychologist, Dr. Marta Meana rocked Oprah Winfrey's national television audience when she reported that the evidence is mounting that, "Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring."

Aha! Without knowing it, I was a human guinea pig outside the lab, trying to reconnect my brain and my sexuality. I didn't have current science to support me. All I had was the deep hunger for integration. Who knew? I mean, what articulate, savvy, working woman could comfortably admit to that desire? Or any.

Shameless is my memoir about coming to terms with desire. At first I worried that maybe people were right, that opening up about sexuality would be to dance with danger. I don't think so any more. If it is, that's a risk that I'm willing to take. With my beautiful husband, family and circle of friends at my back, how dangerous can it be? Besides I'm really good about things below the waist, those basic human things that affect the heart and mind in ways we never expect. After infertility, sex was a logical segue. By looking at me you'd never suspect my own long overdue sexual revolution had turned me from a tremulous explorer into a courageous sex goddess. And most of you - I think that you can do it too....

Pamela Madsen

Pamela Madsen is an Integrative Life Coach Specializing In Women's Issues: Sexuality, Fertility, Body Image, Wellness and Rejuvenation. Pamela is also author of the best selling memoir, Shameless (Rodale, Jan 2011), and founder of The American Fertility Association.Her websites http://www.BeingShameless.com and her daily blog, thefertilityadvocate.com, is a breakfast essential for reporters, writers and policymakers.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shameless-woman/201012/shameless-sex

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