Intimacy, for me as a person coded female, who mainly thinks of herself by a female perspective.
One thing that's been useful to me, having worked from home for the last almost ten years, is the ability to treat myself as a PERSON and to think of myself as a PERSON. it's also been a gift that Spouse has never tried to enforce performative femininity on me; nor has my extended family.
That's been part of how I've been able to develop trust with MYSELF.
Sometimes I feel like I'm yelling into the void when I think and talk about deprogramming myself of tons of stuff that my family and the wider culture(s) tried to train me into believing was true. Every statement that begins "everyone knows that" is part of that programming.
Most of the programming isn't even as straightforward as to *say* it like that. Mostly we're meant to infer meaning and context in a very subtle way. And when you're a kid, constructing meaning just to understand what's expected of you, it can get pretty poisonous and self-blaming. And we swallow the message hook line and sinker.
Intimacy wasn't anything I felt or received growing up. I didn't have friends. Books were the closest thing. Siblings were ... our relationships were fraught. My sister and I were too close in age, and my brother and I too far apart. My parents weren't trustworthy to where I could share any part of my emotional life, or be anything but guarded with them.
It's taken me so long. Decades. To heal from family. To learn how to feed myself emotionally, to learn who's trustworthy and who's not. To allow others to love me and feed me emotionally.
To allow the *luxury* of trust.
and I cannot permit intimacy without trust.
I read a post on Tumblr not long ago, it goes around pretty often, that says something like,
"whenever I feel myself hating how I look, or wishing I was different or easier to be around, I ask myself, "who benefits from me thinking or believing this?" and then I feel a lot better."I'm starting to examine some of my thoughts through this lens.
When I say to myself as I have often done, "I wish I could be a little sluttier, if I wasn't so picky, maybe I'd be having more good sex!" and then if I look at that thought through the lens above? who benefits from me thinking this?
well. People who'd like to have sex without building the trust first. They'd benefit. People who'd use me selfishly, they'd benefit.
But the thing is, I deserve to feel safe when giving the gift of my body and my attention and my sensuality.
I was just reading an article called
the female price of male pleasure, and it just made so much sense, put into clean words on a page the assumptions that are made about women and men and sex, and who gives what and how much and WHY.
Intimacy is HARD WORK. If all you want is to get off and get out, then you don't see the point in building intimacy. If all you want is a quick fuck, ... but the problem is, the consequences of a quick fuck are always, almost always, worse for women.
If we fuck with out intimacy, without trust building and some kind of bond, if shit goes south (for instance if we get pregnant unexpectedly and unwantedly), then our health and our lives are changed. Dudes can book it, and often have.
Some dudes stay. Some dudes stay, but make everything WORSE. You can't even tell me I'm wrong about that.
So sex with penis having people, without intimacy, can be a bad gamble for women and other uterus having people.
Intimacy and trust make us less-consumable.
God. I just have so many feelings about all of this, and I can't quite organize my feelings-thoughts-words.
Here's my notes from when I started thinking about the topic:
Intimacy blog post part 2: trust and intimacy, intimacy and expectations, fear of betrayal, fear of trust breaking. Cultural expectations, ignorance, patterns of verbal abuse , being physically pressured into doing something you're not ready for …
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